Random Origins Of 'Thirteen Ghosts': The Spirits Of The Black Zodiac (12 items)

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  (#7) The Pilgrimess

  In The Arcanum , the Pilgrimess is shown only as a dour-looking woman in an old-fashioned hood. Unlike most of the other ghosts, there is no Latin next to her picture, only the symbol that represents her in the Black Zodiac.

  In the film, she is shown only briefly, where she appears as an elderly woman in stocks. The featurette that accompanies the DVD tells us that Miss Isabella Smith was Kriticos's choice for the Pilgrimess ghost. "Her story began in 1675, when the orphaned Isabella journeyed from England in the hope of finding a comfortable home in a quaint New England town." However, the "tight-knit townsfolk didn't trust outsiders," and when their livestock started to waste away, they decided Isabella must be a witch.

  They cornered her in a barn and set it ablaze. When she survived without so much as a scratch, they considered that proof of their suspicions and sentenced her to the stocks. She stayed there for weeks before finally perishing from extreme hunger.
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  (#11) The Juggernaut

  Horace Mahoney, the ghost who becomes the Juggernaut, is the only ghost we actually see Kriticos and his crew capture in the beginning of the film. Nicknamed the "Breaker" because he liked to break his targets "into as many pieces as possible," Mahoney became a serial slayer. He slew nine people while he was alive, and more than 30 after he became a ghost.

  "Oversized and horribly disfigured," Mahoney was abandoned by his mother at an early age, according to the featurette on the DVD, and spent his young life in his father's junkyard, breaking and cutting up old cars. When his father passed, Mahoney turned to more unnatural hobbies. He would break people apart and feed them to his dogs. The police eventually caught up to him and "pumped more than 50 rounds" into his giant form, which is why his ghost appears riddled with holes.

  In the Black Zodiac, only the Juggernaut's angry face and shoulders are depicted. The Latin inscription next to his zodiac sign simply reads Titan, which requires no translation into English.
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  (#3) The Bound Woman

  The third ghost referred to in the Black Zodiac is the Bound Woman, and the illustration in The Arcanum shows a dour-looking woman in an Elizabethan ruff. Kriticos chooses Susan LeGrow to fill this role, a woman he describes as "born with a silver spoon in her mouth." In the featurette describing the ghosts, Kriticos adds, "Her parents were the wealthiest people in town, which made Susan the most popular girl in school."

  However, Susan flirted, toyed with, and rejected men at her whim, leaving "a long trail of broken hearts" until star quarterback Chet Walters found her with another man on the night of the senior prom. Chet clubbed her lover, and Susan disappeared. Two weeks later, she was found "beneath the football field's 50-yard line."

  While Kriticos acknowledges that the "jealous monster" Chet would have made a "nice complement" to his cabal of sinister ghosts, the Bound Woman was what Basileus's Machine required, and Susan's ghost fit the bill. In the film, her ghost appears dangling from a rope, although the illustration in The Arcanum depicts that fate for another ghost, the Angry Princess.
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  (#5) The Torn Prince

  Born in 1940, the boy who would become Kriticos's Torn Prince was named Royce Clayton. Living a "miserable small-town life," Royce's ticket out was his skill as a "slugger" on his high school baseball team - hence the bat, which the ghost carries with him. A "local hero," according to the newspaper that we see in the featurette, Royce perished in a fiery car collision during a drag race, which also explains the upside-down car that's with him inside his cell.

  In The Arcanum, the Torn Prince (in Latin Eques Scissus, which would be more aptly translated as "torn knight"), is depicted as a painter, holding a brush and easel in his left hand while his right arm is missing from the elbow down. All the flesh is also flayed from the right side of his body, just as it is on the ghost of Royce.
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  (#10) The Jackal

  One of the film's "star" ghosts, the Jackal is prominently featured and wears what looks like a ragged straitjacket with a metal cage over his head. One of the characters describes him as "the Charlie Manson of ghosts."

  According to the featurette that accompanies the DVD, the ghost who became the Jackal was once Ryan Kuhn, born in 1887. In life, he went after "stray women with the cunning of a wild animal." He committed himself to an asylum "as a means to cure his insatiable appetite," but, after years of incarceration, he went completely around the bend and began scratching at the walls. Later, he voluntarily perished when the asylum caught fire.

  The Jackal is one of the film's more memorable ghosts, getting several opportunities to maim the inhabitants of the house. He is also the only one whose position in the Black Zodiac is explained at all in the film, when one of the characters says that his is "the sign of Hell's Winter."

  In The Arcanum, only the Jackal's head is depicted, which is shown inside a cage. The Latin inscription below his sign is Canis Aureus, which translates to "golden dog."
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  (#6) The Angry Princess

  The Angry Princess is one of the ghosts featured most prominently in the film. Appearing as a pale, unclothed woman with sopping wet hair whose body is covered in deep cuts, she carries the knife that she used on herself. In life, she was Dana Newman, a "young woman whose beauty became her ruin," as Kriticos tells us in a featurette on the DVD. After a string of foul boyfriends, she sought employment with a plastic surgeon, where her wages were paid in "an endless array of needless procedures."

  After attempting to perform an operation on herself, she finally took her own life in the bathtub - which probably explains why she appears in the bathroom of the house.

  The Latin next to the illustration of the Angry Princess in The Arcanum essentially says that she ended her life, and the illustration depicts a young woman in a cloak and hood, at the end of a noose.

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