| Ghost | |
|---|---|
| Type | Ghosts & Spirits |
| Lore Origin | Universal Folklore Traditions |
| Seasons | S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S6, S7, S8, S9, S10, S11, S12, S13, S14, S15 |
| Kill Method | Salt, Iron, Salt & Burn |
Ghosts are the most commonly encountered supernatural threat. They are the spirits of deceased humans who, for various reasons, have not moved on to whatever awaits after death. The cause of their lingering varies — unresolved trauma, a violent death, attachment to a person or place, or a deliberate refusal to leave. Over time, most ghosts deteriorate psychologically, becoming increasingly confused, angry, and dangerous regardless of who they were in life.
Types & Abilities
Ghost abilities exist on a spectrum. Newly formed or weak ghosts may only be able to manifest as cold spots, cause flickering lights, or move small objects. More powerful spirits can fully materialize, manipulate physical objects with great force, teleport within their haunt location, and directly interact with (and harm) living people. The most dangerous ghosts can kill — through direct physical violence, inducing fear-based heart attacks, or manipulating the environment (locking doors, starting fires, causing structural collapses).
Specific ghost subtypes include: death echoes (spirits trapped in a loop reliving their death), poltergeists (ghosts focused on destructive telekinetic activity), Woman in White / La Llorona variants (spirits of women who died in connection with their children), Buruburu (ghosts that spread a fear-sickness to the living), and vengeful spirits (ghosts actively hunting specific targets or anyone who enters their territory).
In Supernatural
Ghosts are the bread and butter of hunting. The show's pilot episode featured a Woman in White — Constance Welch, a spirit who killed unfaithful men on a stretch of highway. Ghost hunts remained a staple throughout all fifteen seasons, serving as both standalone episodes and emotional character pieces. Notable ghost episodes include "Asylum" (Season 1), where the ghost of a deranged psychiatrist turned Sam against Dean; "Roadkill" (Season 2), with its twist that the woman the brothers were helping was herself a ghost; and "Death Takes a Holiday" (Season 4), where Sam and Dean became incorporeal to interact with the ghost world directly.
Real-World Folklore
Ghost beliefs are effectively universal across human cultures and have been documented for thousands of years. Ancient Mesopotamian texts reference the etemmu (spirits of the dead who could torment the living). Roman writers including Pliny the Younger described classic haunted house scenarios. Chinese tradition has elaborate ghost mythology tied to ancestor veneration. Japanese yūrei are among the most fully developed ghost traditions in world folklore.
Supernatural draws primarily from Western ghost traditions, particularly the concept that ghosts are anchored to the physical world through remains or meaningful objects, and that destroying these anchors releases the spirit. This aligns with widespread folk practices of salting and burning corpses found across European, African, and Asian traditions.
Weaknesses
Salt repels and temporarily disperses ghosts. Iron (in any form — fireplace poker, crowbar, iron chain) disrupts their manifestation on contact, causing them to vanish momentarily. These are defensive measures only. The permanent solution is the salt-and-burn: locating the ghost's physical remains (the corpse) and burning them with salt. If the remains have already been cremated, the ghost may be anchored to a specific object — a possession, a lock of hair, a piece of the building where they died — which must be found and destroyed. Some ghosts are bound by curses or external forces and require additional measures to release.