"A supernatural creature that, thankfully, requires no food. Ghosts can pass through doors and see creatures that are using the Conceal Creature spell. Their primary job is researching in the Library although they will also go to the Temple and wail occasionally."
— Dungeon Keeper Manual
The Ghost is an unresigned spirit that emerges from a torture victim. When the victim dies, the Ghost will pop up at the same level of the victim. Ghosts have some magic abilities; however, they are very weak creatures with low health that are easily defeated. Their natural ability to fly can make them useful as scouts when passing over lava, but they can't pass through locked doors, even though the manual states that they can. Ghosts do not take damage when being slapped, but it still lowers their happiness. If a Ghost is killed, it does not leave a corpse.
Ghosts enjoy moaning in the Temple. If you have many Ghosts, this can become problematic, as they will fill the Temple and make it inaccessible for other creatures.
Ghosts have poor training skill. Should you have a specific desire to field Ghosts, consider training a skilled creature and torturing it to death, rather than training the Ghost.
Ghosts have good research skill and do not annoy Warlocks and Wizards while in the Library. Since they prefer to worship, this task has to be assigned if there's a Temple present in the dungeon.
Like the other undead creatures, the Skeleton and Vampire, Ghosts are immune to the effect of gas.
Like the Vampire, they are able to see invisible creatures.
While the manualclaims they can pass through doors, and are flagged in the creature data file, this mechanic was apparently cut for 'gameplay reasons'.[1] However, there is evidence that this may have been at least partially implemented; creature.txt has a 'Can Go Through Locked Doors' property, which can be assigned to creatures (and it is indeed assigned to the Ghost). This mechanic is fully implemented in Dungeon Keeper FX.
Trivia[]
The high-res and low-res version of the Ghost icon. Notice they look different.
The high-res and low-res icons for the Ghost look entirely different.
There are conditions for inviting Ghosts into your dungeon via a Portal, but Ghosts are never part of the Creature Pool in Dungeon Keeper.
If a Ghost is tortured to death, a new Ghost is created.
When Ghosts gain Invisibility at level 3, it is assigned to the '2' key and Rebound (a level 1 spell) gets reassigned to the '3' key.
This would seem to be an early portrait of the Ghost.
Dungeon Keeper Mobile[]
Progression
Overview[]
The Ghost was the earliest available flying unit, and were unlocked through building an Unholy Temple. They dealt extra damage to enemy minions, were very weak against lightning, and were able to fly over walls. Ghosts were untargetable by most enemy ground units, and were able to take out an entire Guild Lair without difficulty. Notable exceptions to this were Warlocks and Vampires, who can target Ghosts.
Strategy[]
Ghosts were good at bypassing a dungeon's defensive mazes and reinforced walls allowing raiders to enter the dungeon behind the defensive structures. This was best used with disable trap spells to remove Anti-Air and bug zappers, which could be deadly to the Ghost. The damage boost against minions and Immortals could be used to great effect if deployed properly against a target unit, as most units could not harm flying creatures.
Ghost AI could be unpredictable at times where the Ghost would target a trap or door beyond the target room, and would often ignore the damage coming from the room's defending minion in favour of continuing to attack the room. In particular, the Ghost AI behaves very stangely upon encountering an anti-air trap, frequently making a U-turn to a completely different area of the dungeon, especially when sending multiple Ghosts at once. One good strategy to overcome this was to send one Ghost at a time to poke a hole in a Keeper's defence.
Defending Ghosts did not spawn during PvP raids; however, they could be spawned manually by the player during PvE defence raids.
