Thir13en Ghosts

i was putting my little ones to sleep when thirteen ghosts suddenly came into my head... weird, huh? so, i rummage the internet again for the gist of the movie and the characters that make up the 12 ghosts, and this is what i find... thanks wikipedia :)

***The twelve ghosts which make up the Black Zodiac all have their own unique back story. Although these stories were not described in the film, on the DVD the production and make-up teams explain their guidelines. All the ghosts were contained in glass prisons. Dennis' psychic abillities and Cyrus' resources are used to catch them. Cyrus narrates each ghost's back story.

1. The First Born Son -- is the ghost of Billy Michaels, a boy who was a fan of cowboy films. One day, a neighbor found a real steel arrow in his parents' closet. He challenged Billy to a duel, with Billy using a toy gun. However, his plaything was no match for the arrow, which the neighbor used to kill Billy by shooting it through the back of his head. In death, Billy is in his cowboy suit with an arrow impaled in his head. He is holding a tomahawk axe.

2. The Torso -- is the ghost of a gambler called Jimmy "The Gambler" Gambino. Losing everything in a boxing match to Larry "The Finger" Vatello, he tried to welch on his bet and escape. The mob and Larry, to whom he owed money, caught up with Gambino and cut him into several pieces, wrapping them in cellophane and dumping the corpse into the ocean. His ghost is just his torso, trying to walk around on its hands, while his head lies nearby screaming within the cellophane.

3. The Bound Woman -- was a cheerleader named Susan LeGrow, who was born privileged and had a penchant for seducing men and tossing them away. This left a long trail of broken hearts. A pre-prom affair leads to her current boyfriend strangling her (and killing the other man). He buries her body at the fifty yard line of the local football field. The boyfriend was convicted and sentenced to death; before his execution, he was quoted as saying, "The bitch broke my heart, so I broke her neck." Her ghost is in her prom dress, hanging suspended by the strangling implements with her arms tied behind her back.

4. The Withered Lover -- is Jean Kriticos, Arthur's wife. She was burned severely saving her family from a devastating house fire. She later dies of her wounds in the hospital. Her ghost is still in a hospital gown, carting an IV and showing severe burns on her face. Unlike the other ghosts, she is not a vengeful spirit, electing to help her family rather than show malevolence.

5. The Torn Prince -- is the ghost of Royce Clayton, who was a gifted baseball star in High School, albeit with attitude issues and a superiority complex. He challenged a greaser, named Johnny, to a drag race but was killed as his car spun out of control and flipped over. His brakes had been cut. His body was buried in a plot of earth that overlooked the baseball diamond. His ghost carries a baseball bat and in the background in his cube his wrecked car can be seen. Half of his body is torn to shreds from when he was dragged under the car.

6. The Angry Princess -- is Dana Newman, who did not believe in her own natural beauty. Abusive boyfriends fueled her low self-esteem, which led to much unneeded plastic surgery for imagined defects. Eventually she got a job working for a plastic surgeon, getting paid in treatments rather than cash. Alone at the clinic one night, she tries to perform surgery on herself. She fails, blinding herself in one eye and permanently mutilating herself beyond saving. She commits suicide in the bathtub via multiple self-inflicted butcher knife slashes. When she was found, they said that she was as beautiful in death as she was in life. Her ghost is naked, still carrying the butcher knife she killed herself with and showing all the wounds. In the edited version shown on T.V., her breasts are shown clear, with the nipples edited out.

In her bathroom scene. the phrase "I'm sorry" is visible on the floor in blood; subtitles also reveal that the blurred, hissing speech that announces her arrival is her whispering "I'm sorry." This was written on her suicide note.

7. The Pilgrimess -- is the ghost of Isabella Smith, an English woman who traveled across the Atlantic and settled in New England. She was an outsider to the town she moved into, and this isolated her from the other townsfolk. She was found guilty of witchcraft after livestock began to die mysteriously, and when she emerged from a burned down barn completely unharmed, and sentenced to the stocks (pillory) with no food or drink until she died. As a ghost, she is still locked into her stocks.

8. & 9. The Great Child and The Dire Mother -- is the ghost of Margaret Shelburne, who was an attraction in a carnival due to her being only three feet tall. She was raped by the "Tall Man," another carnival freak. She bore a child, Harold, who eventually weighed over 300 pounds (136 kg).

Harold, spoiled, was raised as his mother's protector. He kept a child-like mindset. One day some of the carnival freaks decided to play a little practical joke on Harold, and kidnapped his mother. Enraged, he set out to look for her but when he caught up with the culprits he found that his mother had accidentally suffocated to death in the bag that she was kept in. Harold takes an axe and slays the other tormenters. For a time he displays what was left of them for paying customers. Later, when the owner of the carnival found out what Harold had done he ordered a mob of people to tear Harold apart. Their ghosts are always together, and Harold still wields the axe.

An alternate version of the story is told in the DVD commentary. It was said that his death was caused by him rolling over on her in sleep and him suffocating her, then him starving to death.

10. The Hammer -- is the ghost of a blacksmith, George Markley, who lived in a small town in the 1890s. He was threatened to be driven out of town after wrongfully being accused of stealing by a man named Nathan. Knowing he was innocent, he refused to leave and stayed in town. A gang led by Nathan, hangs and burns the bodies of his wife and kids. In return, George uses his sledgehammer to beat the culprits to death. George is then chained to a tree and is executed by having railroad spikes hammered into his body with his own sledgehammer. His hand is cut off and replaced with the murder weapon. The ghost is seen with the railroad spikes protruding from his body and a sledgehammer for a right hand.

11. The Jackal -- Ryan Kuhn was born in 1887 to a prostitute. Ryan had an insatiable lust for women, rape, and murdering prostitutes. Wanting to be cured he commits himself to Borehamwood Asylum but after attacking a nurse he is put in a straight jacket and thrown in a padded room. After years of imprisonment in a padded room he went completely insane, scratching at the walls so violently that his fingernails were torn completely off. The doctors kept him permanently bound in a straight jacket, tying it tighter when he acted out, causing his limbs to contort horribly. Still fighting to free himself, Ryan gnawed through his straight jacket until the doctors finally locked his head in a metal cage and sealed him away in the dark basement cell. There, he grew to hate any kind of human contact, screaming madly and cowering whenever approached. When a fire broke out in the asylum, everyone but Ryan escaped. He chose to stay behind and face the fire. As a ghost, his arms are free from his jacket, and the bars of his cage are ripped outwards, showing that he may have escaped his bindings again sometime before the fire started.

12. The Juggernaut -- was a serial killer named Horace "Breaker" Mahoney. Standing seven feet tall, his grotesque height led to his ostracization as a child. After his father died, Horace was left on his own, soon going mad. He would pick up female hitchhikers and drive them back to his junkyard, before tearing them apart with his bare hands and feeding them to his dogs. One day he picked up an under-cover female cop. The female cop called assistance and soon Horace was surrounded. Since close combat was impossible, the police instead struck the junkyard in force and brought him down in a hail of bullets. When he finally went down, they shot an extra magazine into him, just to be safe. His ghost still shows bullet holes all over his clothing, and the wound that finished him. This is the ghost that Cyrus and his team capture in the opening scene.

13. Willing Sacrifice -- The 13th ghost is not actually a ghost but a willing human sacrifice (the sacrifice of the broken heart), the only ghost to be created out of an act of pure love. The thirteenth ghost is the key to the device powered by the thirteen souls. Once this thirteenth sacrifice has been made, the eye of hell can be opened.