As the name suggests, vengeful spirits are ghosts whose only goal is to avenge the wrongs done against them in life. Most often, there is one specific thing they want to avenge, namely their murder. Over time, this is the only thing they can think of. They become obsessed with revenge, but oftentimes this obsession will drive them to hurt innocent people.

Occasionally, said obsession can even rub off on other people, in the sense that the vengeful spirit’s target shifts to someone other than whoever killed them/greatly wronged them. In this case, a person who had nothing to do with a particular spirit’s death can become the target if they have done or are doing something similar to what got the spirit killed. F.ex. Vengeful spirit originally died when someone tried stealing their car and they were killed. Spirit’s attention shifts from original killer/thief to person also attempting to steal a car.

It is possible for a vengeful spirit to exact its revenge and in doing so pass on to the afterlife, but this does not often happen. To exorcise a vengeful spirit, you must find its body, salt and burn it. If the body has already been burned and the spirit did not die, this means it is connected to an object. In this case, one must find the relevant object, and salt and burn it to release the vengeful spirit. There are also other ways to exorcise a spirit, but these are generally the easiest ways that are most often employed.

When a vengeful spirit has possessed a person, they can be forcefully removed by feeding the person salt. This causes the spirit great pain to the point where they flee whoever they are possessing. Salt water only depowers the spirit in the case of possession.

Though they are almost a subdivision to vengeful spirits, there is one main characteristic that sets the two ghost types apart. While a vengeful spirit wants revenge for their death, specters possess humans to make them act out vengeance for any grievances they may have.

Specters are created when an act of betrayal leads to their deaths, f.ex. a husband killing his wife, a brother killing a brother, one friend killing the other.

Specters awaken in the case of a grave desecration. They then possess someone and force them to act on any grudges this person may hold, regardless of how small this grudge may be or how long ago the cause of it happened. A specter can possess anyone with large amounts of ‘negative’ emotions like anger, betrayal, and so on.

Dissimilar to other types of possession, the person being possessed is still themselves, only with the specter influencing their actions and amplifying their feelings of anger and betrayal. As soon as the specter leaves the host, the person’s feelings of extreme anger will subside, and some may even recall what happened during the possession.

Additionally, the victim is also aware of the specter and knows that they are being possessed, but they don’t do anything to resist this possession. This is likely due to the specter’s effect and influence on them. In the body of a person with no ‘negative’ emotions, a specter is powerless. Also worth mentioning is that specters do not have a physical form of their own, so they need to possess a vessel to influence the world of the living.

A specter’s true image can be revealed by using a mirror, and it resembles the rotting corpse of the specter. When someone is possessed by a specter, they do not physically appear to change even though they are remarkably more angry. The main things that give away the possession by a specter is the presence of green ectoplasm and the smell of ozone.

Their abilities are ghost possession, super strength and super durability, emotion detection, anger fueling, empathy, ectoplasm secretion and electronic manipulation.

To exorcise a specter, one must sprinkle salt on the corpse and burn it. However, if an object that is closely connected to the specter is not burned, the specter will not be exorcised so long as said object is in the possession of a human. Through this object, the specter remains able to possess the human.

Ghost banshees (not to be confused with the ghost of a banshee) are ghosts that can come into being specifically when someone is killed by a spurned lover, and they refused to move on to the afterlife when their reaper came. They mainly manifest through incredibly loud laughter and repeated demands to ‘love me’.

To bring peace to a ghost banshee, one would have to solve their murder and bring them justice. However, it’s important to note that this does not mean they’ll move on to the afterlife by themselves. For them to pass on, you would have to salt and burn their remains, or their reaper would need to return to take them away.

Ghost banshees typically possess powers such as invisibility, telekinesis, and terrakinesis. They can be dissipated with salt like any ghost, but they are more vulnerable to it than most ghosts are. Other specific weaknesses are unknown.

Typically, a lot soul is a type of harmless ghost that is unable to move on to the afterlife for whatever reason. They are neither vengeful nor violent. Some lost souls are victims of violent crimes, trapped in the place of their death. This happens most often because the culprit is a powerful ghost, powerful enough to trap them.

Example: Whitman Van Ness (see C3) was a human who killed many people, including his fiancée. They lingered as ghosts, and upon his death, he became a violent spirit as well, powerful enough to bind all the lost souls to the Van Ness house. Even as a ghost, he would kill people who entered the house and bind them to it so he could torment the lost souls.

It is very common for a lost soul to degrade over time, developing what Bobby Singer called “Ghost Alzheimer’s”. The ghosts would lose their memory and sense of self.

Some lost souls can move on on their own, and some are released because someone has salted and burned their remains. Others were able to move on when the entity that was trapping them (e.g. Whitman Van Ness) was destroyed.

Like any ghost type, lost souls have abilities, though these are mostly side-effects of their existence:

• Electromagnetic interference: the presence of ghosts can cause lights to flicker and even shatter
• Thermokinesis: the presence of ghosts can cause the temperature in a house/room to drop
• Invisibility: typically, lost souls are invisible
• EVP: lost souls can be too weak to manifest and can only communicate through EVP
• Telekinesis: lost souls can develop the power to move things with their minds.

Their weaknesses are all pretty standard, and include salt (salting and burning their bones), stronger ghosts, soul eaters, among a few others.

Another type of attention-seeking ghosts, poltergeists demand attention by any means necessary, sometimes including violent and destructive acts. They are a type of invisible ghost with telekinetic powers.

It is assumed that, within the distinction of ‘poltergeist’ there are two different types. One is a ghost, but has no connection to a human soul; this means that salting and burning their remains does nothing to exorcise the ghost. The second type does have this connection, as proven by Sam and Dean Winchester with the help of their father’s journal, when they successfully released a poltergeist through salting and burning its bones.

Regardless, all poltergeists either don’t want to cross the veil or are unable to whatsoever, meaning that they are always invisible to humans, and mostly manifest through growling and screaming sounds. There are some exceptions to this, which results in poltergeists telekinetically causing trouble.

Their powers include biokinesis, telekinesis and invisibility. When they’ve been agitated or are distressed, poltergeists can grow so powerful that they can lift and throw large items, or kinetically throw around grown men when concentrating. Poltergeists can be attracted to places with a large amount of paranormal energy, places where entities of great evil (f.ex. powerful demons) harmed people.

These ghosts have a few weaknesses. As mentioned before, only the kind of spirit that turned into a poltergeist is susceptible to the ritual in which their remains are salted and burned. Throwing or shooting salt at a poltergeist, however, will always weaken them. Other ghosts can also defeat poltergeists if they are strong enough. The house purification ritual affects both types of poltergeists, though it only exorcises the weaker variety. Stronger poltergeists may only be harmed or weakened by this ritual, and further action may be necessary.

They are essentially the zombies among the ghost types, though they differ from both zombies and ghosts in some distinctions. Where zombies have their memories for a short period of time before degrading rapidly, revenants have both their memories and their ‘soul’, so to speak. Though it is true that they can decline over time, but differently from zombies.

In short, revenants are those who come back to life without knowing they have died; some outright refuse to believe it. To distinguish them from other ghosts, there are six main points that are important to know about:

• Ignorance: As mentioned before, revenants don’t know or don’t believe that they are dead. This is the most important distinguishing point that sets them apart from other ghosts. Either a revenant has forgotten that they died, suppressed the memory of their death, believe they never died, or they believe they actually did come back to life.
• Continuous manifestation: Revenants’ shapes never flicker or jerk with motion unlike those of other ghost types. Once they have manifested, they maintain their form.
• Corporeal shape: Ghosts are usually incorporeal and invisible unless they can manifest through great calm or great anger, but revenants are always completely corporeal. They cannot phase through walls, and can always interact with objects and people the way humans can. They are essentially the same as when they are alive (same strength, same weight, they have a shadow, etc.), and can also be wounded and bleed like a regular human does. They can also experience pain.
• Full awareness: Revenants have their consciousness completely intact upon manifesting. Their thoughts and actions are not governed completely by emotions such as fear or anger, and they have complete thoughts as well as linear thinking. You could converse with a revenant the way you do with any human, and they have complex thoughts.
• Remains: Revenants are motivated and tethered by a simple motive to stay on earth, and aren’t bound by their remains. Things such as vengeance or fear of what happens after death keep them attached to this realm and unable to move on.
• Ghostly powers: They have none. Where other ghosts possess abilities such as invisibility, teleportation, or telekinesis, revenants do not have any powers that common ghosts do. They are for all intents and purposes as ‘powerful’ as they were in life.

As said before, like zombies and other ghosts, after some time has passed, revenants can degrade and eventually lose their minds. They will go wild at which point a hunter must step in. The only way to stop a wild revenant from wreaking havoc is to lock them up – since they don’t have remains, salting and burning cannot be used. However, if a hunter can find out what the reason is why they’re still stuck on earth, and this issue can be resolved, the revenant can move on to the afterlife. F.ex. if a revenant is scared of the afterlife, a hunter might soothe them by explaining what the afterlife is like.

Revenants have been known to bite, though this doesn’t have any special consequences. It apparently just hurts. Additionally, Sam Winchester has said that if there is a body, that ‘rules out a revenant’, as they don’t need bodily remains to stay in this realm.

This harmless ghost is stuck perpetually repeating its death. They are an occasional by-product of murder, and as a result of this gruesome death, they are trapped, forced to endlessly relive their murder and the pain of dying. They mostly haunt the locations of their murder or places where they lived.

Death echoes can be made to pass on to the afterlife if they are shocked out of their cycle, or are confronted by a loved one. They remember the people they shared connections with in life, and being confronted by them can soothe a spirit and allow them to pass on. The death echo will often vanish with a flash of white light which signifies that they’ve moved on to the afterlife.

Like humans, animals can linger in death, though much less is known about the psychological aspect of this phenomenon. Speculations have been made that animal ghosts mainly exist because of human interference. F.ex. a fox caught in a bear trap, shark hunting, deer hunting, exotic animal trade, circus deaths, …

Animal ghosts haven’t often been seen, as they don’t haunt humans or human locations, and also do not seem to have the inclination to exact revenge on those responsible for their untimely deaths. Whether that is because they don’t have the concept of revenge, or because of some other reason is unknown.

They are most often seen by hikers, hunters, and others who venture into the woods, though most think their eyes are playing tricks on them, or that they simply saw a real animal.