Ghosts

Ghosts
A ghost is a semi-sentient spirit of someone or something once living. Most ghosts were people or animals- both meta and mundane. Not everyone who dies becomes a ghost. Ghosts are caught in the Parapet and cannot reach the underworlds typically through violent death or a supernatural event including the intervention of other types of ephemera or magic.

Ghost Abilities
Psychic Researchers and Mediums have their own complicated system for classifying ghosts. Most often, they are relying upon what a ghost can do or how it appears when it manifests in terrestrial reality. Most ghosts lack the ability to manifest. Only powerful ghosts who have distinct tethers to terrestrial reality can escape back across the Parapet unless aided by a medium or spell. Like other ephemera, ghosts feed on mana which they acquire through living things. Ghosts, having been actual living things unlike other spirits, are able to harvest mana empathically as well as through contact or offerings. To do this they send their victim into a heightened state of emotion (usually fear) that provides a psychic conduit for them to draw forth a person's or animal's life force.

Ghost Society
Ghosts are predatorial towards each other. They need essence to sustain themselves in the Parapet and acquire it through attacking and feeding upon other ephemera including other ghosts. As such, they tend to be solitary. When people with a tight bond (family, lovers, friends, enemies) die together or in the same location at different times, their ghosts may feel tethered to each other and create a small band or pack that works together cooperatively instead. Very powerful ghosts might also enslave weaker ghosts and terrorize them to harvest essence that way.

Haunts
Powerful ghosts are able, over time, to weaken the Parapet in a location they are tethered to. Typically they do this by ensuring that other people die there. They consume the fledgling ghosts and then expend essence to perform a execration, drawing upon ephemera from the closest underworld to create a haunt, a zone where the necropic energy is drawn in and begins to warp the terrestrial world, blighting trees, making humans and animal sicken and giving the ghost easy access to the physical world. Not all "haunted houses" are actual haunts. Once a location becomes a haunt, it is very difficult to repair the Parpet and restore it, even if the original ghost is destroyed or hallowed. It is possible to hallow an entire haunt, but that typically requires a powerful fae or knowledgeable spellcrafter.