Death? Ghosts? Some thoughts...

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

Original Yahoo! HPFG Header:
No: HPFGUIDX C2896
From: catlady_de_los_angeles
Subject: Re: Death? Ghosts? Some thoughts...
Reply To: [Yahoo! #2876] Death? Ghosts? Some thoughts...
Date: 6/26/00 10:53 pm  (ET)

> Are any of the present ghosts fairly recently
> deceased? Peeves or Moaning Myrtle perhaps?
> Were any of them contemporaries of Lily & James,
> Snape, Dumbledore et al?

Moaning Myrtle was killed by the basalisk 50 years before she played a
role in this story. 50 years seems fairly recent as ghosts go, but it
was long before Lily, Snape, and the Marauders were first-years. At
the time Myrtle died, Dumbledore was a young professor at Hogwarts,
not yet headmaster.

> Is The Sorting Hat possessed by a spirit?

"Never trusts anything that thinks for itself unless you can tell where it
keeps its brain." The examples of Tom Riddle's diary and the Marauders'
Map indicate that it is not obvious whether a thing that thinks for
itself has a mind, is a person/spirt, or merely is enspelled with a
sophisticated program -- the program doesn't have to be AI, the chess
playing computers aren't AI.

BTW, Fred and George must be very skilled and talented wizards to have
figured out, without any instructions, how the Map worked.