The Ghost of Tom Riddle and Re: Feeble child-thing in train station

[Dracojadon]

No: HPFGUIDX 174011

AnitaKH:
> Yeah, yeah, I know Tom Riddle's not a ghost.... or is he?
<big snip>

J:

Would Tom slink away to death in embarrassment from having failed in  
life and made a pretty big fool of himself to our eyes, though there  
are DEs who appear not to think so? (Did Tom care for dignity?) Or  
might he reconsider the dying thing and make ghosthood his aim? The  
next few hundred years at Hogwarts, popping up through the breakfast  
table and ranting on the suppression of muggle-borns, stalking likely- 
looking Slytherins and trying to give them lessons in Parseltongue or  
coax them into the Chamber of Secrets, squabbling with Myrtle over  
who gets the best cubicle?

Myrtle: Oooh, what are you doing with that innocent first year, Tom?  
Just wait till I tell --
Riddle: It's 'Lord' to you, you nasty little muggle-friendly ghost --
*Myrtle somersaults into loo, flooding Tom's side of the bathroom*
*innocent first year rushes off to find his two best friends to join  
the audience*

Tom couldn't bear to be a ghost. All that opportunity, yes, for  
poisoning young students' minds, but he would be _dependent_ on them  
to carry his works out. The ghosts at Hogwarts don't have power, and  
that's not Tom. Perhaps he's contemptuous of ghosts, as he is of  
house elves. And do ghosts _care_, as the living do? (Their great  
purposes faded, they become comical, shadows of what seemed so  
important years ago...)

A ghost is dead; it wouldn't save Tom from his fear of death, which  
was greater than his Dark Lordly aims in life.

Would Hogwarts allow the ghost of Riddle to walk its halls?

====

*reads transcipt of webchat*:
"Jon: Since voldemort was afraid of death, did he choose to be a  
ghost if so where does he haunt or is this not possible due to his  
horcruxes

J.K. Rowling: No, he is not a ghost. He is forced to exist in the  
stunted form we witnessed in King's Cross."

I'd thought it was made clear in the book that he was _dead_ -- gone,  
not existing in _any_ form. ("Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane  
finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white hands empty, the  
snakelike face vacant and unknowing." [etc.])

Otherwise the horcruxes work even destroyed, don't they, keeping some  
stunted part of Riddle in existence?

BonniDune:

> During the final duel he urged
> Riddle to feel some remorse because Harry had seen what will become
> of him
J:

Oh dear, what a complicated lot of ways of being dead there are.



Jadon