How to be a Ghost

Alright, so you didn't take my advice on becoming a knight, and now you're going to kill your emo ass. Hold your horses, Hemingway! Perhaps I could interest you in a fulfilling career in haunting. Just follow this easy to use guide and in no time at all you could be the talk of the (ghost) town!

Step 1: Find a location

It's a generally accepted fact that, as a ghost, you're going to have to stay in the same place for a long time. Sure, you could just pick the cemetery, but that's like going to New York to be an artist; you're not exactly going to stand out. Conversely, doing the old "haunted house" will leave you sitting around some dilapidated old house that no one will ever enter.

Why does no one ever demolish these things?

Instead, you should pick a nice public place. Somewhere that is going to be around for a long time and will get reasonable traffic. Long corridors and bad lighting are always a plus.

Step 2: Death

Now's your chance to shine, Brutus! Finally, a chance to show all those conformist sheeple plebes what you're made of. But wait! You can't just kill yourself. Any Adolf can blow out his brains, overdose, or jump off of something, but they just die. As we all know, ghosts must have unfinished business. Now, we all know you're a huge waste of space and therefore have no business, so you're going to have to make people think you have unfinished business. Therefore, you've gotta leave a mark.  Making it seem like an accident generally helps because it adds to the tragedy, as if you didn't want to die at all (ridiculous!). I suggest jumping into some machinery. Who knows, you might even get cool ghost powers based on that machine (as such, jumping into the garbage compactor is not recommended).*

Step 3: Haunting some bitches

Alright, this is it. This is what your entire (end of your) life has been building up to. You are now ready to be a ghost. The first thing you're going to have to do is lay low. People get skeptical when others see "ghosts" immediately after a death. Use this time to practice scary faces in the mirror.** After maybe a couple months you should be ready to spook some drunk janitors and trespassing teens. Good strategies include:

-Showing up in blurry photos
-Making household objects make kinda spooky noises
-Causing minor fluctuations in magnetics (so spooky!)
-"Oh man did you just feel that breeze???"
-Wearing bedsheets and scaring away those meddling kids

This is some straight up science right here. So spooky.

Step 4: Retirement

Alright, so you've stopped a lot of meddling kids, and man is your blurry photo album extensive. Maybe now's a good time to consider retiring? You pretty much have three options.

First off, you can befriend a human and somehow convince them to finish what ever the hell your unfinished business was supposed to be. I'm guessing you really wanted to be a mime? Ya, make them become a mime. This is a first class ticket to heaven. (good deal!)

Alternatively, you can go out in a blaze of glory. No more magnetic fluctuations for you, it's possessin' time! This, of course, always leads to that one priest (who apparently majored in ectobiology back in the day) to show up. I'm gonna be honest here, you're pretty much screwed. When has a ghost ever not been fully excorcised? So you better have as much fun as you can while you can. The cost? You're going to hell, buddy. (If you can get someone to crap their pants, it's worth it.)

Maybe, just maybe, you don't want an afterlife. Don't worry, I've got this covered. Rather than possessing someone, just start wrecking up the place. Smash chandeliers, make the walls leak ooze, maybe some polka music. Sooner or later they're gonna call the ghost busters. Because, when there's something strange in the neighbourhood, that's who you gonna call. This is a pretty cushy retirement option. None of this "afterlife" nonsense. Just centuries of containment within a big ass machine, like God intended.

This is pretty much the greatest retirement plan ever.

Now, go forth, be the best ghost you can be! Baffle some scientists or something! I'm serious, you have more important things to do than read this nonsense now! Oh man, you aren't going to take my advice at all, are you? You know what? You're an asshole. No, it's too late now. I need to be alone. Maybe I'll write some poetry... Oh dear god I've become what I hate most.

 

*It was at this point that I realized my enter key stopped working. After 10 minutes of freaking out I remembered that I had set it as a hotkey in my chat client (as part of an experiment). It would seem that disables all other functionality to the key. Lesson learned.

**Do ghosts even show up in mirrors? Or do they only show up in mirrors? Ghost mythos is dumb.