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Picture this: the year is 1892, and you just inherited an old family house. On the day you move in you see a faint shimmer in one of the first floor windows. When you walk inside a shadow floats up the stairs. It reaches the landing and vanishes into thin air. Over the next few weeks you witness many similar events, which you conscientiously report in your correspondence: books fall off their shelves; doors open on their own; small items disappear for days at a time only to suddenly reappear right where you last saw them. At night, strange sounds can be heard all through the house. You live alone. But in the dining hall, a figure can sometimes be seen pacing back and forth, hunched like an old man with his hands behind his back. From your bedroom you’ll hear running footsteps and the laughter of children, but when you open the door you are only met with silence. Downstairs, the newly installed electric lights flicker and shake.
Now, my question is this: are you dealing with a Ghost Pokémon, or a Psychic Pokémon?
If you’re Miss Kernera, a student in medicine coming back to her hometown in Sinnoh after two years abroad, then your answer is that they’re one and the same – don’t forget that the Paranormal super type, which has fallen into obsolescence in the 1990s as the more battle-oriented Oak classification came into widespread use, grouped together most Ghost and Psychic Pokémon, as well as a number of Pokémon that would now be classified as Dark and, yes, even Fairy type. Strange as it may seem to our younger audience, Pokémon as disparate as Gastly, Xatu or Impidimp used to share the same taxonomy. And it’s easy, isn’t it, to see why this would be the case? Outside of battle, the distinction seems almost inconsequential: a pure matter of semantics, except insofar as it allows us to better understand the world around us.
That shadow on the stairs, is it a Gastly’s gaseous form, or the afterimage of a teleporting Abra? The noises you hear at night: a Chingling at play, or a Misdreavus trying to scare you off? Your missing items: a hungry Sableye or a wandering Klefki? Or something even stranger: the dream mist of a Musharna, perhaps, causing your dreams to bleed into reality.
Whatever it was, Miss Kernera was determined to find out. For the rest of her time in Old Chateau – and she lived there for some forty-odd years, until her declining health prompted a move to Verdanturf - she did everything she could think of to corner her elusive guest, every attempt meticulously documented in three notebooks that would eventually be passed on to her nieces and nephews along with the house.
From her own account, as well as the testimonies of visiting relatives and friends, it seems the ghost of Old Chateau was a creature of habit. When it appeared, it always appeared between dusk and dawn, always in the same rooms and in similar forms: a red and blue blur flickering up and down the stairs, fast-moving and impossible to catch; a hunched figure in the dining hall, pacing back and forth until someone called out to it, at which point it would vanish into thin air; a giggling girl in one of the upstairs bedrooms, often heard but never seen.
Traps were laid all over the house, but the ghost would either pass through or over them and continue unhindered. Photographers were hired, often at great expense, but failed to capture anything other than an unidentifiable blur that could just as easily be blamed on a faulty camera. On a neighbor’s advice, Miss Kernera brought in a Chatot who would alert her by singing whenever the ghost was nearby, or possibly whenever it wanted to; as for her Glameow, if it ever noticed anything unusual, it could never be bothered to act on it. The haunting of Old Chateau seemed destined to forever remain a mystery.
One hundred and thirty years later, hindsight, and a better understanding of Pokémon behavior, allows us to give some answers.
Researchers now believe three different Pokémon were haunting Miss Kernera. The one upstairs was almost certainly a Misdreavus, a species endemic to the Eterna forest, a stone’s throw away from the house. The one in the dining hall - a hunched figure with its hands behind its back, now doesn’t that sound familiar? - most likely a Duskull of unusual size. As to how it ended up in Western Sinnoh, the most likely answer is that it was a trained Pokémon who had been abandoned or released by its original Trainer, as it never exhibited any of the behavior observed in wild Duskulls, running away from humans instead of chasing them down relentlessly. The third proved the most elusive, but from eye witnesses' descriptions, it might very well have been a Rotom, one of the species’ first recorded appearances, maybe even one of the first of its species. Remember that electricity was only just starting to see domestic use, and Old Chateau itself had just been equipped with electric lights.
A Pokémon yet unknown, removed from the context that makes it so familiar to us: a ghost in more ways than one.
But if we can now put names to these Ghosts, many questions remain unanswered. While it is certainly true that Ghost Pokémon will sometimes flock together, three individuals from different species sharing the same territory is all but unheard of. Stranger still, they never exhibited any hostility towards Miss Kernera, nor did they seem to particularly seek to avoid her. Despite what ghost stories would have us believe, these ghosts did not seem to mind the living.
We folklorists love our ghost stories. We love them because they give us precious insight into the fears and anxieties that shaped a culture: the ones that mattered enough to be shared by firelight, stranger to stranger, human to human. No other kind of story is as inextricably tied to a time and place; no other kind of Pokémon is as inextricably tied to stories. Could Froslass have emerged anywhere but Sinnoh, with its rigorous winters and unreachable heights? Would Alolan Marowak exist, without Alolan tales of restless souls roaming the countryside? Aegislash, without the bloody succession wars that tore Kalos apart? Lampent, without the oil lanterns doctors in Unova would hang on their front porch to warn against contagion? Whether we believe Ghost Pokémon to be literal spirits of the deceased or mere representations of our darkest fears, there is a connection here that cannot be denied: like all ghosts, Ghost Pokémon seem to be drawn to those places where death weakened the barrier that separates us from whatever afterlife we can conceive of.
And what of Old Chateau, then? Well, that really depends on who you ask. To this day, you’ll find people swearing up and down that the house was build on some ancient burial ground, that it was the scene of a grisly murder or a mass poisoning. In reality the house was build on nothing but forest, and if there was ever a murder here, there’s no record of it anywhere. If we’re to find answers, the folklorist in us must give way to scientific rigor, look at migration patterns and ethological theory.
And who knows what answers we may find? What is certain is that Old Chateau presents a unique opportunity for study: a house that Ghost Pokémon had made theirs, truly and completely, for no other reason, perhaps, than because they happened to like it there.