Specters - The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Database

Blood and Wine

Shun sin! Renounce foul deeds! And if evil threatens to overwhelm your will, ponder the fate of the Outskirts of Vizima! Remember the hideous barghests which scourged them and repent!
– “Sermons for Feasts and Funerals,” by the Reverend Yomen of Tretogor

Folk of simple or superstitious minds claim committing particularly rotten acts will bring down the wrath of the gods in the form of “barghests,” phantom dogs which stalk the roads at night. Even if this were their origin, barghests saints and sinners alike would need fear barghests, for they attack both with equal ferocity. Witchers rarely believe in the gods, but they do accept that barghests exist and are always connected with some sequence of tragic events that happened in the past. Their explanation, however, holds that barghests result from a curse or a concentration of ill will.

Blood and Wine

Beann’shies howl and shriek, and if you hear their cry, you can know you’ll join the ranks of the dead that night.
– beggar from Dun Dâre

Old gossips claim beann’shies are the spirits of women stuck between life and death due to traumatic experiences. Their wails and howls are considered ill omens of imminent, inevitable death, though they are said not to attack the living themselves. Most often they appear in the form of pale, tear-streaked women with shriveled faces and wrinkled, corpse-like bodies.

Blood and Wine

During his stay in Toussaint, Geralt became involved with a curious case of gynodendromorphy – that is to say, a woman who had been turned into a tree. When one cut into this tree’s bark, it bled, and when the wind blew through its leaves, one could hear muffled sobs. Geralt investigated the matter and learned magic (or possibly a curse) was responsible for the transformation, and it surely had something to do with a certain sad episode from the woman’s past. The love of Daphne’s life, a knight errant, had gone to the witch of Lynx Crag and never returned, leaving her to wait for him forever, filled with sadness and longing.

Wears a dirty dress, all rags, its skin flakin’ off of its bones. And it howls… like it’s sufferin’.
–Odolan of White Orchard

Hearts of Stone

The human mind is as wild and unexplored a place as any land far beyond the seas. It is inhabited by manifold dangers – fears, painful memories, traumas. These lurk on the edge of our consciousness, like predators waiting for a moment of weakness in which to reveal themselves… and destroy us.
– Arturius Vigo, “The Essence of Spells and Illusions.”

The painted world created in the mind of Iris von Everec was mainly populated by figures from her memories, but was also home to dangerous, predatory creatures: the embodiments of her fears. The most dangerous of these, the Ethereal, invoked her greatest fear – and wore the face of her husband.

The Ethereal resembled Olgierd in appearance and also fought using a technique similar to his. A group of six such creatures lay in wait for Geralt, yet at first only one engaged him in battle. This one’s death awoke the next, which was more powerful than the first, and so it went to the end, with a stronger ethereal replacing a fallen weaker brother until all were defeated. Yet Geralt had to be careful, for the slightest amount of damage dealt to a being awaiting his turn would cause him to come alive and join his still-living comrade in the fight.

In the end, the best tactic against these nightmarish beings proved to be a well-timed counterattack.

Some men have got good reason to fear their own shadows.
– Svargmitt, An Skellig druid

Monsters most commonly claim innocents as their victims: tardy merchants, reckless children and travelers who wander into dark woodlands out of misplaced curiosity. None of the above need fear hyms, however. These wraiths only latch onto particularly despicable individuals who have committed some unspeakable crime. To all others, they remain completely invisible. When they do show themselves to the one they torment, they appear as a tall, shadow-clad, humanoid silhouette with long, sharp claws.

So… That’s to mean… our Zula’s the wraith?
– Bolko, ealdorman of Midcopse

Blood and Wine

Well, since it seems this hair won’t be pulling up any knights in shining armor, might as well put it to some use.
– the last words of Longlocks.

Everyone knows love stories can have tragic endings, but few would think this also applies to princesses from fairy tales created to relive a set happy ending over and over again. Longlocks had the misfortune of becoming just such an unlikely tragic heroine. After the duke’s daughters grew up and the Land of a Thousand Fables went feral, Longlocks, whose prince never came and who suffered greatly from her loneliness, decided to hang herself by her own braid. After she died, her ghost stayed to haunt the castle in which she had awaited her suitor.

Nightwraiths exude this immense sadness, this helpless wrath… I fear them, same as anyone. But most of all I feel sorry for them.
– Aelline Altsparr, elven trobairitz.

Compared to other creatures of the night – katakans, nekurats and werewolves, for example – nightwraiths (and their rarer cousins, duskwraiths) might not seem all that dangerous. After all, one might ask, how much harm could a pale, withered woman in a tattered dress do? The answer: quite a bit. Instead of finding this out the hard way, avoid crossing fields and meadows at night at all costs.

Despite what is commonly thought, peasants do not interrupt their labors at midday to get out of the sun – they do so to avoid noonwraiths.
– Vlad Reymond, Peasants and Their Customs

On particularly searing summer days, when the sun reaches its zenith, wraiths will at times appear, resembling sun-scorched women dressed in long, white robes. These are noonwraiths – the spirits of young women and girls who died violent deaths right before their weddings. Driven mad with pain or anger, they wander the fields searching for their unfaithful lovers or backstabbing rivals, though they will kill anyone who does not get out of their way in time. They are often held in this world by some object of intense emotional significance. That is why, if one ever finds a wedding ring or torn veil in the middle of a field, one should not pick it up, but instead back away as quickly as possible.

I run back inside, hasp the doors, and then I hear it – someone whispering my name. Mikkjaaal, Mikkjaaal!
Mikkjal, Eldberg lighthouse keeper

*Patients seem to have hallucinations of a woman covered in scabs and boils, with rats scurrying about all around her. These ravings subsided after an administration of henbane and poppy extract.“ *
– Joachim von Gratz’s notes, Vilmerius Hospital in Novigrad

When plague ravages a region, a spirit will sometimes walk its lands, a ghost resembling an ill woman whose flesh rots off her bones and in whose wake crawls a cavalcade of rats. No one knows whether this spirit brings the pox with her or is merely drawn to it like a moth to a light. Yet it is certain that she delights in dealing pain and suffering, in hearing the howling and moaning of men.

It is often said the darkest recesses of caves play home to the Continent’s most fearsome monsters against which there is little of hope of victory or escape. The lone solution, then, is to seal them off from the world with the hope that they shall forever remain buried.

A certain priest of the Eternal Fire, however, learned that hope and prayer is sometimes not enough. The cavernous mine within Devil’s Pit holds a specter whose very existence is believed to breed pestilence. With the threat of its release now imminent, the cleric seeks a new solution – the aid of a witcher.

The vengeful wraith known as the White Lady had roamed the fields for a long time, murdering anyone she came across. Though the grain hung heavy from the stalks, the frightened peasants were kept from harvesting it and thus faced famine. They gathered their last bit of savings and went in together on a bounty for a witcher. That was coin well-spent.

Hearts of Stone

Quite often a wraith is tied to an object, something it clung to during life, or a location, such as its place of death. In either case, we are dealing with the same causal agent: a strong emotional tie from which the wraith draws strength.
– Inigo Swann, “Beyond the Natural World.”

While wandering the von Everecs’ abandoned estate, Geralt came into contact with a woman’s wraith haunting the house. The restless spirit had mastery over the house’s furnishings and in particular over the paintings hanging from its walls. It moved freely between their canvasses, entering one and exiting through another. At first it tried to scare Geralt into giving up his search, then, when it was clear this strategy would not work, it attacked him directly.

Geralt’s battle against the wraith proved very difficult, for it was fueled by rage and launched its attacks with heated aggression. Geralt was forced to move with lightning speed in order to parry its blows, without time to take a breath or launch an attack of his own. What’s more, the wraith had created a bond with the paintings around it and, until the witcher severed this tie, it would continually regain any lost strength.

The key to victory over the Wraith from the Painting was to focus on parrying its blows and only attack sporadically, at exactly the right moments. Any attempt to attack in a flurry was always punished with a deadly counterattack.

Blood and Wine

An umbra is merely an unclean conscience, one tormented by guilt and unforgiven wrongs. A man wallows in sin with loose women and can’t sleep at night, then invents hokey about some umbra or phantom and blabbers about it at the tavern.
– Sabine of Dal, mystic and priestess of the Prophet Lebioda.

Finish all your business before you die. Bid your loved ones farewell. Write your will. Apologize to those you’ve wronged. Otherwise, you’ll never truly leave this world.
– Paule Vikar, peasant healer, advice to a dying man

Clerics and scholars are forever debating whether spirits do in fact journey to another world after death, one where eternal joy or suffering awaits. Both groups agree, however, on what happens to spirits who, for one reason or another, remain in our world after their body breathes its last: they transform into wraiths. To hear their mournful howls, one can surmise this is not a fate to be envied.