Don’t freak out. My name’s Johnny; most people call me Johnny Sparks. You heard of me? No? That’s cool, I’m something of an urban legend. Judging by the khakis you died in, you didn’t spend a lot of time in any place that could be called ‘urban.’ I ain’t judging, I’m a child of the suburbs, too. Yeah, you’re dead. I know that’s not the most convincing thing you’ve ever heard, but it’s true. I’m dead, too. We’re ghosts.

Yeah, I’m serious. You’re dead. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, unless you wound up that way by doing something stupid. Even then, most folks don’t judge. You can’t blame a man for the way he was born, I suppose you can’t really blame him for how he died. Listen, talking to you with your ass on the floor is cool and all, but I’d rather deliver my spiel in some place where we don’t gotta worry about people driving an SUV through us. Can you walk? Fabulous, come with me, we’ll see the sights.

So yeah, you’re dead. Any idea how that happened? Hmm. That’s a little bit of a setback, but nothing too big. Often as not, this is the sort of thing you can find out in the obituaries. Especially if you died here, and most ghosts stick around the places where they died. So we’ll chase down a paper later. For now, it’s time for you to learn.

First, the obvious stuff, yes you really, really are a ghost. You’re dead. You have died. You are no more. You have gone on. You’ve joined the choir invisible. Well, maybe you have. We’ll find out in a minute if you’ve got the pipes. A lot of the stuff you’d think is true is true, there’s walking through walls, haunting people, all that business. But the good news is that just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you have to be a dick. Usually ghosts who get press are the dicks. Ever seen the Ring? It’s probably better that you haven’t. Lots of people get a skewed perception from that sort of thing. To make matters worse, it’s hard to talk to the living in a meaningful manner, so we get screwed in the minds of the public.

Most people are like you, and don’t believe in ghosts. Those that do have a tendency to resemble the classically insane or wise up and stop talking about it. While I’m no expert on the matter, that was how it worked and always has, as far as I know. At least until Orpheus Group turned up. A lot of people don’t buy it…and a year ago, I wouldn’t’ve blamed them…but Orpheus Group has actually been a help. Some people would argue with me, but I like the projector firms. They’re softening the blow, so to speak. Convincing people that ghosts are real is still a task because of people like Miss Cleo and John Edwards, but every so often someone puts two and two together and realizes it doesn’t have to be four. That and proof tends to go a long way to convincing some people. For them, that’s meeting one of us in person, for others it’s the fact that the firms haven’t buckled from lack of paying customers.

Yes, ‘us.’ This is not a temporary condition, Buckwheat. You’re going to be dead for a very long time, so getting a handle on this quickly is important. I’m trying to help, here. It’d be no skin off my nose if the Wündersquid back there had eaten you and then used the laces of your Doc Martens to floss the last bits you out of its teeth. So kindly keep pace, all right? I’m doing you a favor.

As far as John Q. Public is concerned, we fall under the heading of ‘ignore until it’s my problem,’ like terrorism or breathing. People deal with death every day, but most of them consider the undiscovered country as not their problem. People who cry at funerals are thinking about themselves, no lie. Every funeral I’ve been to, and I’ve been to a few, is filled with people who remember the person who died. When they cry, they’re mourning the disappearance of stability. Humans are hard-wired to fear change, it’s part of common sense, but it’s a sentimental lie painted over the surface. Some people argue with me on this point, and that’s their right. Death levels all men. And women.

I’m sorry, am I getting to philosophical on you? Let me back up a step. Fact: people don’t want to think about ghosts, because it’s something they’re not ready for. You’re not ready, but I don’t have the luxury of easing you into this. You’re dead, so it’s off to the School of Hard Knocks. Yeah, I keep saying ‘you’re dead.’ This is going to sound strange, but it’s really helpful to hear that. Shrinks probably have a fancy word for hammering a vital fact into someone’s skull, but I don’t know it. I just know you need to grasp this fast, because you’re double-dead if you don’t get it.

Where was I? Oh yes, the living. A lot of us have an unhealthy tendency to cling to things, like our former lives, for instance. A lot of ghosts are barely even there at all, they just repeat their deaths over and over again, like an instant replay unto eternity. I see it a lot, and by that I mean most ghosts I meet are doing the Dance of Death. You’re the exception. For some reason, you were aware enough to run when Wündersquid turned up. That’s good, that’s healthy. If you had a little more gumption and self-awareness, you might’ve realized you didn’t need to open doors to get away from him. Most ghosts don’t, though. They go on repeating what they do until the jaws close around them and carry them off. I’ve seen that, too, and I try to prevent it. It’s my hobby.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Clinging is what we need to talk about. Fact: you’re dead, and chances are your family knows that. The smartest thing you can do is act dead. That is to say, don’t bother the living too much. I won’t lie and say to you that you shouldn’t step over and mess with people…I’d be the world’s biggest hypocrite if I did…but it is my very strong recommendation that you don’t step in on your family. You got a family?

Jesus, I don’t need to know their names. I just want to know if you do. Because, once again, you should stay away from them. It’s the hardest thing to do, I know, but it’s healthier in the long run. Why? I’ll tell you, chief. Think about this for a moment: you got a daughter, right? She’s eight? Okay. Picture this. You follow her around all the time, since you don’t have a job to go to and don’t need money anyway since you’re never changing clothes, driving a car, or eating any food. You follow her around and make sure her life’s perfect even though Daddy’s no longer a breadwinner. Suppose she gets in a fight on the playground and you step over to her side and pull the other kid off of her. Maybe you do it right, maybe you do it wrong, and chuck the other kid back a few too many feet, since you’ve forgotten your strength, trudging around as a ghost that can‘t move anything. Said other kid hits the concrete of the playground a little too hard. By the time the principal’s out there, all she sees is your daughter and the other kid bleeding on the ground. Are you going to jail? Heck no, no one can find you. Your daughter gets one hell of a time-out because she’s the one who ‘did it.’ After some discussion, her court-appointed shrink decides she needs to go to a special school.

Not graphic enough for you? How about this: you’re dead. You think your wife’s never going to look at men again? The average mourning period for widows and widowers in this country is one year. One fucking year. You’re going to be around a lot longer that. It’s one thing to pray that she’s strong for you, but when she starts seeing someone, how’re you going to take that? Most guys don’t take it well. So whatcha going to do? Haunt your house and step over to hug and kiss your wife goodbye when she leaves for work? Pretty soon, people will start wondering about your sweetheart. It’ll take a while, but they will. And this is all assuming she doesn’t have a mental breakdown and deny your existence and start medicating herself into oblivion, or God help us, calls Orpheus Group to evict your ass.

You got the look of someone that doesn’t believe me. All I can do is tell you, if you want to find this all out the hard way, then go to it. I sound like your dad? Technically, I am right now. I know more about death than you. Keep up, this train is leaving.

So, as I said, it’s healthy to get yourself a new hobby. Not to sound like a pompous, self-righteous prick or anything…great set-up, huh? But my hobby is helping people. Sometimes I’m a little passive about it, and I help the lost souls like you. Sometimes I’m more aggressive, like setting pigment dealers’ houses on fire and welding all the locks shut. Yeah, I got a problem with drugs. It’s because of drugs we’re having this discussion right now. Pigment, if you die with it in your system, makes you a ghost, no chance for moving on without any baggage. That’s me. I’m the ghostly equivalent of a cripple. That’s why you look like you’re almost alive, but I look like the ghost of a ghost. It’s the curse foisted on me by pigment: I’m less than I could be. But we’ll talk about pigment in a minute. I was talking about you and the living.

Look, if this is too taxing, I can leave and you can wait for Wündersquid’s brother to show up. You’d rather not? Good. The sad fact of the world is that most ghosts don’t get my advice, or ignore it when they get it. There’s a lot of us who start meddling. We have to be awake, which is rare, but it does happen. Most meddlers are poorly informed, like you ten minutes ago, and only realize that they’re ghosts and can only affect the living in limited ways. You may have even heard about it…some cop talks about how he swears he can hear his dead partner giving him advice on the job, or a newly single girl will take all of her dead boyfriend’s stuff out of her apartment, then come home and find some things back where they were. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that’s someone’s overactive imagination. One time, it’s one of us.

I’ve got no bead on your moral compass, but I personally feel the need to help these ghosts. Dying is enough of a bitch, being only half-awake for it is miserable. I’m in the minority in this mindset. A lot of self-aware ghosts like you and me, they see the loopers and pushers as either scenery or snacks. Yeah, ghosts are not only capable of, but frequently indulge in cannibalism. Often as not, it’s the Wündersquid and other Things That Go Bump In The Night that participate, but there are also more clement individuals like you and me that eat their brethren. It’s a sad fact, but there it is. I’ve got no sympathy for the sons-of-bitches that do this, and this is your fair warning: if I ever catch you sucking the breath out of another ghost that doesn’t deserve it, I’ll save Wündersquid and his buddies the trouble and put an end to you myself. So, here endeth the lesson: to a lot of people, you’re a highly mobile snack, so don’t ever assume anyone who wants a hug just needs support.

I’m getting off-track. I was talking about the living and us again. Like I said earlier, a sure way to heartbreak and injury is sticking around your family after you die. The same goes for work. Death is a permanent vacation, so enjoy it, between the running for your life from people who want to eat you. Lurking around your job, or, worse yet, your life’s work, just causes trouble. Some ghosts possess people and use their bodies to continue on with their work, which is probably one step down the Ladder of Sin from eating other ghosts. If you’ve died, it’s usually best to move on. Some lurk and whisper advice in their coworkers’ ears. Which seems like a cool plan, until someone calls Orpheus Group to clean them out. It’s similar to the ‘ghost marriage’ I was talking about earlier. It eventually leads to trouble one way or the other.

That being said, I don’t think its fair to totally divorce yourself from the living. It’d be suicidal for starters…lots of ghosts go bonkers with nothing to do. This was the hobby I was talking about earlier. It’s generally healthy for one and all if you find something to do with your death that doesn’t involve scaring the bejesus out of people. A couple of ghosts I know, they’ve gotten themselves jobs. If you’re interested, you can hoof it across town to Orpheus Group; they hire ghosts all the time. Just be prepared to be treated like a noisy cog in a big machine quite frequently. Other ghosts can get work elsewhere. In addition to the big three of projecting firms, there’re also little projecting firms popping up like dandelions all over the place. It wouldn’t shock me to see sleeper pods on sale at Wal-Mart next year.

There’re other things to do, too. Some gang members lurk after their deaths and keep to their ‘family’ in the hereafter as well, as guardian spooks of a sort. I’ve seen whole gangs get slammed into the afterlife in crossfire and go on being a gang on the other side. There’s a gang called the Blasphemers like that; steer clear of them. Being white and a wuss, you’re going to get ‘future snack’ stamped on your head if you hang around them.

Some other ghosts with panache can hold down a job without help from fellow ghosts or humans. Some of us have the ability to possess people, and get a kick out of living someone else’s life for a while. While I’d call that unscrupulous, I wouldn’t put it down with eating souls. These same ghosts can get themselves in all kinds of trouble they can’t be punished for, since rooting around in someone’s head provides some very tempting opportunities. While I’m sure they would if they could, banks can’t keep ghosts out of people’s heads, and I’ve heard about some pretty involved fraud schemes that hinge on a bank manager betraying his employer, despite all evidence and character testimony pointing to the fact that he’d never consider such a thing. I’m not saying a ghost did it; I’m saying that a ghost could’ve.

Though what a ghost does with money is usually beyond me. You’d have to step in to even spend it, and most of your petty expenses are gone. I suppose you’d have to keep up on car payments if you bought one to have some wheels even though you’re dead, but most dealerships are leery of a guy who’s legally dead who drops a suitcase full of money on their desk and says "I’d like a Hummer, preferably as black as the Devil’s frying pan." While you may be a totally legitimate buyer, you’re working with the modus operandi of a crook. That trips bells in the minds of the living.

Like I said, being a dead, you’re free of a lot of pointless time-wasters that you had when alive, like eating, shitting, and sleeping. You don’t have to sleep, but I recommend it. Staying awake for too long has a tendency to drive people crazy, and since you don’t have a job to go to anymore, having a worthwhile hobby is important. About the eating and shitting, though…you just can’t. You can step in with the living, get yourself some food and shovel it in your mouth. You can even chew it and swallow. Thing is, once death reaches up and pulls you back, that mashed up food is going to hit the ground where your stomach was a moment ago. And it will never, no matter how much you wish it would, banish any hunger. You’re not hungry? You will be.

Let’s see, I’ve talked about how to be dead, and what you can expect from your condition. What else is there? Ah, yes. Other ghosts.

Here’s another chewy chunk of facts: not everyone who dies becomes a ghost. Old people, the kind that are kicking around nursing homes, they usually don’t leave a ghost behind. By the time you’re pushing eighty, you’ve pretty much seen and done it all. Those that do are generally the recriminatory and unfulfilled. Of that small percentage, some just fold up and wilt when they get over here. They were expecting death to bring them freedom from their earthly prisons, and when they find they’re just as feeble as ghosts, they give in to despair. They just sort of fall apart and disperse, like Jell-O left out in the middle of the summer. The minority, though, find the experience liberating. Some people blossom after death. More on this later.

The forty to sixty set is the balance between the old fogeys and the young bucks. Some have hit the grandparent hurdle and consider their lives complete and move on, no fuss. Some reach the ‘venerable’ age category and are disappointed that they don’t get to reap the benefits of experience. Here in America, people this age are seeing their children starting to achieve and stick around to see what happens, or, God help us, to assist.

The largest volume of ghosts comes from the teens-twenties-thirties demographic. The thirty-somethings are in that transition point between being young and having all their debts paid, and it’s a sad fact, but some ghosts stick around because of their mortgage. I’ve seen it way too many times. I don’t feel quite bad enough for them to add banks to my list of People To Fuck With, but I’m fence straddling right now. The twenty-somethings are the start of I Never Got A Chance crowd, which happens a lot with the higher-paying professions, like lawyers and doctors. Others are like the thirty clump and want to make sure their families are all right. The teenagers are usually defined by their emotions, since those are the most important things to them. Don’t believe me? Think about every teenager you’ve ever known. Every thing they feel they feel far more intensely than old men like you and I, and sometimes it seems like their feelings are their own personal religion. That kind of passion is hard to come by in the older age groups. What’s important is that emotion can keep a person keeping on, and that’s often the cause with teenagers.

Once you dip below the fourteen mark, ghosts start getting rarer again. Children don’t often develop the firm attachments to life that adults do, due in large part to their age and in smaller part to their emotional development. Most child ghosts I’ve met tend to follow two different paths. Either they have a very tight family and it’s love that keeps little Jimmy around to make sure his family doesn’t miss him, or there’s no family to speak of, and little Janey had no one to approve of her accomplishments.

I’m making some unfair generalizations about ghosts here. This is all assuming a peaceful and nontraumatic death, like a brain aneurysm. There are plenty of shitty ways to die. Murder’s one. You get to see a murder victim traipsing the streets of New Orleans and Detroit without his skin as often as you can turn around. A lot of murder victims are pretty damn angry, and the ones with the will to do something about it are usually the ones that give the rest of us a bad name. If they’re serious enough about it, someone might call Orpheus Group to deal with them. And that never goes well. So follow me on this, spanky: if we check the obits and you’re in there as a murder, you gotta promise me you’re not going to fly off the handle and do something stupid, okay?

Then there’re people who commit suicide. Usually they don’t stick around as ghosts – most them didn’t have the greatest time alive, so there’s no will to – but every so often, one does. Even those generally aren’t long for this world. Typically they find way to finish the job, like slapping a Wündersquid on the backside and then not running away. Some few beyond that truly wake up once they’re dead, and stop moping. Like I said, some people only blossom after their deaths.

Some people are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. People who die in natural disasters, car accidents, you get the idea. These, I think, are the ghosts most likely to leave behind loopers. I’ve seen it a couple of times. A ghost car rolls around a corner, then hits something that crumples it like a beer can, then it disappears and comes around for another pass. These people are usually the easiest to help, since all they usually want is to get home and unload all the groceries.

Either way, you’re stuck in the same leaky tub of a reality as all of the above mentioned people plus Yours Truly. As you can imagine, ghosts are a somewhat maladjusted bunch. You want a good idea for a reality TV show? How about you stick a vengeful murder victim, and completely lost spook who accidentally committed suicide, a cancer victim loosed from the earthly coil, and someone who overdosed on sleeping pills together in a house and don’t let them leave. Chances are you’re going to have some chaos. That’s us right now. Stuck with the other ghosts here in town.

Socially, ghosts aren’t terribly good. Most of us are feeding our obsession monkey in one fashion or another, and crazy people make poor guys to play poker with. But ultimately it’s not a bad idea to cultivate some friendships amongst the dearly departed. If you’re tight with some other ghosts, tight like friends, then there are some benefits. I’ve reaped them myself, and take it from me: groups is the way to go. For starters, your life, the juice that keeps you going is kind of in short supply. If you’re running on your own gas, you can get in some tight situations. If you roll with some homies, though, it’s a different story. Your life is theirs and vice versa. When one gets in trouble, all can help, provided they’re close by. Also, your powers – yeah, like the inferno I pulled out of my chest – get much better when backed by your friends. It’s more expensive, since it costs even more breath, but my God can you do amazing things.

Why don’t I have some friends? I mentioned this earlier. Ghosts aren’t terribly good at understanding one another, and most of us that I meet have a little bit of difficulty understanding my particular fancy. That is to say, killing predators. And by predators, I mean people who prey on others. I try to limit myself to people that’re obviously the trash of society, and by trash I mean the spiteful bastards that care nothing for the suffering of others so long as they profit. On an emotional level, it’s enormously satisfying for me. Every drug peddler who’s spine I break or cook in his own filth is a dozen fewer crackheads on the streets. On a practical level, it’s the smartest group of people to pick on. Society considers them dirty laundry, and doesn’t care what happens to them, whether they’re cleaned or burned.

None of this helps me in the friend department, though. A lot of ghosts, particularly women of the thirty-plus bracket, stick around because of love and responsibility, and in their eyes I’m only slightly better or even worse than the bastards I ‘disappear.’ I’m an extremist, so I’m unpopular. But it could be argued that everyone is somewhat extreme when they’re dead. You don’t have a job or social security or a family or a hobby or anything else to keep you busy, so a lot of us can fall to ideological sparring. It’s shitty, but it’s the way of things, so you best get used to it.

Der Wündersquid? What about him? I can’t blame you. Here’s what I know: some ghosts are, uh, broken. They’re insane, not in the ‘I hear voices’ sense, I mean the ‘The voices say I should look for happiness in your intestines’ sense. I’m serious, these guys are like every bad horror movie rolled together and fed a steady diet of anger and rage. The best of them are sadistic homicidal psychopaths. The worst are nightmares made flesh, the kind of thing that makes you curl up in the corner and suck your thumb even if you’re a grown man.

They’re hateful sons-of-bitches that want nothing more than to eat you alive if you’re lucky, or torture you for years if you’re not. Yeah, ‘alive’ is a misnomer, but you follow my meaning. They’re rare, but not rare enough. There’s no acceptable quota of serial killers.

What? I don’t know. I’ve never seen the process that makes them, but I’ll be willing to lay odds that it’s fifty percent the ghost in question, and fifty percent her environment. Some people are just evil – don’t get me in a debate, I’m not in the mood – and the ghosts they leave behind aren’t pleasant. Some people are natural-born psychopaths and continue to be so after they die. There’s not much you can do about them, except fight back. There’s no police here in the afterlife, so if one of these crackpots is loose on your block, you have two choices: eat or get eaten. I’m personally of the ‘eat’ camp, but some of our fellow spirits are of a less martial bent. Fighting them is dangerous at best.

While psychopaths tend to be loners for good reason, der Wündersquid and his ilk run in packs a lot. I don’t know how that social dynamic works out, but somehow they get along. As if it needed to be said, a pack of psycho-killers having a pow-wow and deciding they don’t like you is generally bad. So if you’re going to take up ghost-hunting, make sure you’re hot shit on toast.

The other stripe of undead you’re going to not like are the ones that society made one way or the other. You see a lot of these in the cruddier neighborhoods. A lot of them are children, and that’s a real heartbreaker the first time you see it. They’re the abandoned kids of the world, the unwanted pregnancies and red-headed stepchildren. Being ignored isn’t healthy, and they wind up being the closest ghosts get to piranha. Alone, they’re small fry, but they run in packs. Best you steer clear of them.

Sometimes, when someone dies, it’s traumatic. As in, spiritually traumatic. I heard about a guy who was knocked out and tied up because he crossed the Mafia. They killed him by drowning him in a vat of chemicals in a soap factory, and let the machine finish the job of disappearing his body. The tale goes that his ghost was a walking man-shape of bar soap with hacked-up eye holes that had pennies stuck in them. I’ve only heard that part as rumor, but I know for a fact that three Mafia bosses were found dead in their homes after choking on, get this: bars of soap. Might be bull, might be true. But if it’s so, it’s a type of ghost I’ve heard about a lot.

Often as not, these ghosts are looking to make everyone miserable. A lot of them choose murder as their share-time activity. Others get a little more esoteric, like misdirecting the ‘good’ elements of society. I’ve stood in the corner and watched a ghost lead a narcotics cop away from a batch of pigment. He didn’t get away with it, of course, but I only stopped one. There’re others out there doing the same thing, I can only assume.

Do I work for Orpheus Group? Naw, I got a bellyful of them the first and last time we met. They’re not trustworthy, in my opinion. They make a big show about caring and being humane, but there’s a limit to how caring and humane you can be while trying to turn a profit. Given how much I yak to people who listen to me, they expect a longer explanation, but that’s the gist of it. Orpheus Group and its competitors are companies just like any other. At their fundament, a company is about making money, and using other resources towards that goal is how they do it. A lot of noncapitalists will tell you that they’re about exploiting those resources, while capitalists will take the opposite tack and say that exploiting resources exhausts them, so they don’t do anything of the sort. As with everything, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

That said, while the execution turns my stomach, I endorse the idea of the projecting firm. Organizing ghosts and helping them is a noble goal. That’s one of the reasons I don’t mess with Orpheus Group, even when I don’t agree with them. Another reason is the hit squad they’ll send after me if I give them a hard time.

The firms recruit aggressively, so if you make it out of the year with your skin intact, you’ll probably be approached by someone who wants you to join up. I’m not going to bust my ‘just say no’ and tell you what to do or think, but I’d advise against making yourself a cog in the corporate machine. There are benefits, don’t get me wrong. I’ve saved a few lost souls and seen them sign up as soon as someone pushed a clipboard under their nose. Like I said earlier, there’s the strength in numbers factor. Having other ghosts around you can call ‘friend’ is highly beneficial. A paycheck is another help. I know I told you to let your family go, but having a five-figure income to make sure they’re taken care of is pretty sexy.

What you won’t hear about in the brochures are the downsides. There’re the standard problems with having a job – crappy hours, on-site hazards, interoffice politics, et cetera – but there’s more. The firms are a little obsessive-compulsive when it comes to managing their employees, and you can expect to be under a microscope all the time. Orpheus Group not only has shrinks on staff, but in the building and on-call twenty-four/seven. So if you don’t get along with therapists, the firm route my not be the way to go for you.

Of course, not all firms are Microsoftesque giants. A lot of people with the start-up capital will get themselves rolling on a projection business in their own basement. Some of the more decent people I’ve met since I died were these folk. Sometimes a plucky individual will buy a sleeper pod off of E-Bay (the smart ones track down technicians to make sure they’re not getting lemons) and start up their own private investigation agency. Walking through walls takes a lot of guesswork out of some jobs.

Caveat the first, though: not every weekend ghost is a noble man. Some of the do-it-yourself crowd are interested wholly in profit, and start getting involved in some shady dealings, which is to say spying on people, assisting with ‘inside jobs,’ and general lawlessness. For every story of a scrawny kid using his new supapowas to protect his family, there’s three of some sicko getting his jollies by molesting children from the bodies of other men.

This’ll probably occur to you soon, but I feel like skipping ahead. The law has no ability to hold ghosts, and just as much as it has no ability to prosecute a spirit. I suppose a bizarre set of circumstances could lead to the police forming witnesses, motive, and a method for the crime to be performed by a garage-pod projector, but anyone with the gumption to get themselves a sleeper pod and work it correctly is probably smart enough to leave behind evidence that’s totally improbable. So, as I said, if you feel like attaching yourself to any organization, it pays to do the footwork before you sign anything. I’m not saying any of this is not you, I just know it’s not me, and I got burned. So reap the benefits of my experience.

Like I said earlier, most people who die don’t leave behind ghosts. Those of us that do are the minority, so that means a city’s ghostly population is generally way smaller than its normal population. From what I’ve seen, ghosts occur in number directly proportional to the number of people who live in the area. In a big city like this one, there can be hundreds, that’s right, I said hundreds of ghosts. I figure in this city we’re just shy of three hundred. It’s hard to get a bead since people die and transcend death every day, and loopers are sometimes hard to find, but that’s my best guess.

Also like I said, ghosts with the will to pull themselves out of looping have a tendency to drift together and become stronger for it. Typically the definition of politics here in Hell is based on these gangs.