10 Myths and Legends in Videogames

5. The Ghosts of Halo

Halo has been around for over a decade now. In the countless matches that have been played, there are bound to have been a few glitches here and there. I look for a lot of glitched out gaming moments so, one night when I had a pretty nasty fever, I found this page and was pretty creeped out. 

So, the story goes that a variety of different glitches need to happen in some sort of order for “ghosts” to appear. There are reports of these ghosts appearing in Halo 2, 3, and Halo: Reach and have been reported to display some of the following behaviors: 

• They do not show up on the scoreboard.

• Their kills are often credited to The Guardians.

• They always stay facing in the direction they were when they spawned. When they fire or melee at players, they "snap" to aim at the victim, rather than turning smoothly like normal players; they sometimes "snap" when throwing grenades. 

• They tend to only face the cardinal directions.

• They have omnidirectional vision, and do not need to look up or down. 

• They can throw unlimited grenades at any angle—including backwards, allowing them to stick a player standing behind them. 

• On some locations, they can jump up very high.

• Sometimes they can make very loud, piercing sounds. 

And other creepy things. Really, bots were already creepy in games like Unreal Tournament or Halo but unwelcome, unexpected bots just take the cake.

One explanation for the appearance of ghost-like behavior may be found in this video but this doesn’t account for computer controlled bots, just invisible players due to a loss of vram to draw character models: