Also, a good method is eating a blinking ball. That will make the ghosts blink for a time you can use to eat them.
No, that’s trolls, not ghosts.
In Ellen Glasgow’s story The Past, a ghost is dispatched when the woman being haunted takes the high road and refuses to divulge a shameful secret about the ghost (her husband’s first wife). I think she should have told the secret but then I’m vengeful that way.
In another Glasgow story, The Shadowy Third, a ghost leaves after extracting vengeance. That story was a lot more satisfying.
Cripes people (some of you). Read the OP, not just the thread title:
I bet Chuck Norris or bacon could do it.
Just bury him above head height. They say ghosts stay at the previous ground level (that’s why they’re often in cellars.)
I’ll fumble it down the line a bit…
Ghosts (from memory here) are in a class of beings that are formed from “ectoplasm” which is defined as matter from the “nevernever” which is another spiritual plane of existence co-existing with ours and intersecting at set points.
Any spiritual being (ghosts included) can be damaged enough to destroy them physically in this plane of existence. Ghosts, being more like projections or memories, just spatter into goo and are then gone. It is difficult to reason with them (being projections, not aware that they are dead and the world has moved on, often crazed, and generally suffering from some need to continue to act out violent or painful memories tying them to the world), and most often they simply need to be destroyed.
Ghosts are especially susceptible to graveyard dirt and/or consecrated ground, as well as by various holy or spiritual weapons created for that purpose (purpose is a powerful influence in the Dresdenverse).
Cites:
Harry and Michael vs Agatha in Grave Peril
Harry’s “out of body experience” at the end of Grave Peril
Mortimer the ectomancer
the entirety of Ghost Story
Pretty much this. I certainly didn’t expect the topic to take off the way it did.
If I recall correctly the ancient Egyptian way to kill a ghost was to erase all mention of the deceased from history. Names, images and statues can be destroyed, making the dead an unperson; this method has been tried by various regimes ever since to remove the memory of undesirables.
Without any memory of the dead to go with it, a ghost is just a draughty room or the wind in the trees…
a. Get a wizard to do it.
b. Depends on which version of D&D you’re playing, although direct application of many hit points of damage, preferably with magic weapons, does the trick in most versions (if not all–don’t have access to resource materials at work).
c. In The Matrix Reloaded, detonating the gas tank of the car they were in seemed to kill them.
In most versions of D&D, you need a special spell or potion to apply to the weapon to deal that damage - it’s called “ghost touch” in most versions. Otherwise, you’re either slicing totally ineffectively through space, or else you’ve got some ridiculously low percentage chance to actually hit them.
Is there any connection in Japanese mythology to the ghost in The Grudge? Is there a way that bitch could have been killed and stopped, or was that all just screenwriter’s imagination?
In order of increasing stupidness.
Take its picture. If a photograph can capture a soul it should work against a ghost.
Capture it in a painting even.
Perhaps killing a ghost is tantamount to breaking a spirit. Try putting it on the phone with customer support.
You can kill a ghost the same way you can make antifreeze.
I believe that was an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon.
Eat a power pill, they turn blue and then you can eat them.
Reported.