Character Summary: RENEPEP's

[Aberforth's Goat]

No: HPFGUIDX 1400

Well, I'm back again.  Meant to write up my ghosts yesterday, but I'd
forgotten a bored (sic) meeting.  Talk about spending an evening with a
wardrobe full of boggarts .... Anyway, here we go.  BTW, my English spell
checker is still out to lunch,
and I'm sleepy, too ... be warned!

WHAT WE'RE TALKING ABOUT
In muggle vernacular, ghosts; more specifically, the ghosts living at
Hogwarts.  But enlightened muggles like ourselves know better, since there
are some ghost who aren't ghosts after all.  Peeves the Poltergeist is one:
to quote the Gray Lady: "he's not really even a ghost" (PS, ch. 7--I think
JKR said that was the GL talking).  There are two connected terms in the HP
lexicon: poltergeists (like Peeves) and ghouls (such as the Weasley's have
in their attic).

If I were going to stick to sound (common-sense) linguistics, I'd just grant
"ghost" two semantic domains (the first as a general term for the whole lot,
the seond as a specific designation for one of at least three kinds of
ghosts).  But "resident non-embodied persons" (RENEPs) has a pithiness to it
that makes a word like "ghost" sound boring.  Of course that raises the
question of whether the portaits also evince non-embodied personalities, so
just to keep things clear, I'll ammend that to resident non-embodied
persons, excepting portraits, or RENEPEP's.  Which is a very satisfying term
indeed.  It's not only politically correct; it's peppy.

[Thanks to the Sunday Chat gang for helping me get properly muddled about
this.]

WHO THEY ARE
In PS Ch. 7 we read that "about twenty ghosts had just streamed through the
back wall," so there are quite a few more Hogwarts ghosts than we've had the
pleasure of meeting.

The ghosts representing each of the four houses are Nearly Headless Nick
(Griffyndor), the Fat Friar (Hufflepuf), the Grey Lady (Ravenclaw), and The
Bloody Baron (Slytherin).  We've seen least of the Grey Lady.  In various
interviews (including 60 Minutes), JKR has assured us that the GL showed up
in the PS, only we weren't told her name.  The other three (partciularly
NHN) are introduced in the PS and put in regular appearances thereafter. The
Fat Friar comes across as sweet and dumb (he's the one for forgiving Peeves
at the beginning of the PS), and hence as a caricature of Hufflepuff
students. Why the Blood Baron is bloody, nobody wants to know, but he also
fits the Slytherin image of violent menace.

NHN doesn't embody the Hogwarts bravery as obviously as the FF and the BB,
although he is generous about helping Harry escape Filch in CoS.  As for his
personal history, he was not quite beheaded either 350+ or 499 years before
Harry enrolled at Hogwarts.  He is particularly prominent in CoS, where he
invites Harry, Ron and Hermione to his 500th deathday party and is later
petrified by the basilisk.  He would have died at the sight, if he hadn't
already been dead.

We know three other RENEPEP's who are not connected to any particular house:

Moaning Myrtel is pimple-afflicted and a victim of the basilisk's first
frisk through Hogwarts.  She shows up in CoS, where we learn her story, and
again in GoF, where she visits Harry in the prefects' bathroom and shows
evidence of a marked interest in naked prefects.

Prof. Binns of the Hogwarts history dept. is the only teaching ghost
(although one can question whether his students are actually taught anything
by him).  He's certainly the only soporific ghost.  Despite his own lack of
tangibility, Binns also is a stickler for good, hard facts: he soundly
denies the old stories about the Chamber of Secrets for lack of solid proof.
One curiosity about Binns: JKR has said that ghosts are unhappy people, and
most of them appear to have suffered violent deaths.  All but Binns: he just
died one night and went right on teaching the next day, sans body.  Could
the violence here be that he bored himself to death?

Peeves, as already pointed out, isn't a proper ghost but a poltergeist.  The
word means "mischeivous spirit", which is Peeves to a T.  The only person in
the castle who makes any real impression on him is the Bloody Baron. As
opposed to the other ghosts, he  comes in technicolor, rather than the
standard pearly-gray. He's also funny--Peeves filling in the gaps in the
singing armor's Christmas Carrols is one of GoF's funnier moments.  However,
Peeves has a sub-human personality: he delights in any evil events in the
castle (the petrifyings in CoS, the terror caused by Sirius Black in PoA)
and yet he is not exactly evil.  He's just not human enough to require moral
evaluation.  Hence, my guess is that he isn't a former human and prbably
belongs to an entirely different taxonomy as the proper ghosts.

WHAT WE'D LIKE TO KNOW ABOUT THEM
In one of her interviews, JKR said we'll learn why certain people become
ghosts in HP 7.  Does this mean the definitive answer will have some
particular
significance for the entire series?

There are a couple of ghost-related inconsistencies.  For instance, why does
Nearly Headless Nick have a his 500th deathday party in CoS after telling
Harry he hasn't eaten in nearly 400 years in PS?  (I think it's just a minor
inconsistency, but I've seen theories that range from believable to
hallucinatory.)  Another one: If ghosts can't eat or drink, how did they
administer the Mandrake Potion to Nearly Headless Nick?

Where do Poltergeists come from?

Baaaaaasta!  Any more ghosts and I'll end up one myself.

Aberforth's Goat (a.k.a. Mike Gray)
http://profiles.yahoo.com/aberforths_goat