Ghost Ghosts were a phenomenon of mythology and popular culture regarded throughout the universe . Though they were a source of scepticism , those who believed in ghosts sometimes held them to be soul s that could not find rest after death , and so lingered on in the world of the living . This inability to find rest was often explained as unfinished business . Ghosts could also be referred to as phantom s ( AUDIO : " The Genocide Machine " ) , spirits ( AUDIO : " The Spirit Trap " ) or wraiths . ( TV : " Hell Bent " ) In the area around Fetchborough , a ghost was sometimes referred to as a fetch . ( TV : " Image of the Fendahl " ) A location which was known for ghost sightings was referred to as haunted . ( AUDIO : " The House of the Dead " ) Common attributes . In the mythological sense , ghosts were understood to be see - through beings , which only came out at night and had the ability to walk through walls . ( TV : " Under the Lake " ) When removed from a living individual , soul s could manifest as ghosts . ( TV : " From Out of the Rain " ) In some cases , if ghosts completed their unfinished business , they were able to move on . ( TV : " Random Shoes " ) Types of ghost . In folklore , there were various types , the names of which could be synonymous with the term ghost . Poltergeist s , of German origin , were able to move objects . ( AUDIO : " Winter for the Adept " ) Banshee s , of Irish origin , were omen s of death . ( PROSE : " Screamager " ) Manifestations of spirits . Unexplained manifestations . In 1903 , after receiving a wealth of information from the future , Grigori Rasputin saw ghosts . ( AUDIO : " The Wanderer " ) Sergeant Benton once confronted spectres , the tortured souls of his military father and child brother , who had both tragically lost their lives , holding him in contempt , to the grave and beyond . Now facing up to his traumatic past , Benton was lost in a psychotic fantasy world , a sadistic game devised by his forebearer and sibling to teach him a lesson . Finally set free , he was at last able to get back to his post where he was desperately needed . ( HOMEVID : " Wartime " ) Graham Stevens claimed that the ghost of a headless woman in white with a black dog used to walk through his bedroom at midnight . ( PROSE : " " ) A Cardiff building was haunted by three cowled men with scythes . It was unknown what these things actually were , but they were considered ghosts . Toshiko Sato and Ianto Jones were sent by Torchwood Three to kill them . They appeared in front of them , and were shot dead , revealed as just " shadows " cast by the Rift . ( TV : " Exit Wounds " ) Individual ghosts . Allan Ramsay . Allan Ramsay was a member of an expedition to Antarctica in 1903 . After his death , his ghost took other members of the expedition . ( PROSE : " Mirth , or Walking Spirits " ) Eugene Jones . Eugene Jones could interact with Gwen Cooper of Torchwood Three for a time after his death as a de facto ghost . He briefly became visible to not only Cooper , but to everyone , before " crossing over " and ceasing to be a ghost . This was due to his consumption of a Dogon Sixth Eye beforehand , granting him a new perspective on life . He would eventually unlock the secret to true peace and happiness , allowing him to let go . ( TV : " Random Shoes " ) Cloister Wraiths . The Cloister Wraiths were creatures found in the Cloisters , a crypt beneath the Capitol of Gallifrey which provided access to the Matrix . They were apparitions of dead Time Lord s . ( TV : " Hell Bent " ) Ghosts of Buildworth . In 2040 , ghosts of people having conflicts manifested in Manda ' s rooms in a Buildworth domicile block . These included a man and his wife arguing , a mother abusing her son , and two male lovers fighting . She believed them to be the result of stress and fatigue affecting her mind until she received a note from the Seventh Doctor telling her that the ghosts were real . She eventually learned that the ghosts were being caused by a creature reliving the conflicts it had fed upon . ( PROSE : " Separation " ) Ghosts of the Drum . In the underwater base the Drum in 2119 , a Tivolian ghost named Albar Prentis converted people into ghosts on the occasion of their death . ( TV : " Under the Lake " ) It was actually started by the Fisher King , who had originally killed Prentis in 1980 . The Fisher King , an alien warlord would create the ghosts in an attempt to transmit Earth ' s coordinates to his race . Following the arrival of his race , the Fisher King would invade and destroy Earth . His plan was foiled by the Twelfth Doctor , who used a hologram of his own ghost to trick the Fisher King into thinking he ' d won , only to be destroyed by the flooding of the Drum . The ghosts included Albar Prentis , Jonathan Moran , Richard Pritchard and Alice O ' Donnell , and they all seemingly dissipated after UNIT sent the Faraday cage in the Drum containing the ghosts into space and away from Earth ' s electromagnetic energy . ( TV : " Before the Flood " ) Ghosts of the Northern Line . The Mnemosyne present in the London Underground from 1903 to 2010 turned the psychic engrams of those who died in the Northern Line of the Underground into deadly , ghost - like servants with which to kill others to turn them into more servant engrams . The Mnemosyne ' s ghost - like engrams all perished when the Mnemosyne was destroyed . ( COMIC : " Ghosts of the Northern Line " ) Victims of the Ghostmaker . The Ghostmaker and Pearl collected the last breath of human s , taking a part of their lifeforce that manifested as ghosts . Victims included David and Faith Penn , Nettie Williams , a restaurant owner and couple with their children . All but the boy perished . ( TV : " From Out of the Rain " ) Parapsychology and spiritualism . Parapsychology was the study of psychic powers . ( PROSE : " Psi - ence Fiction " ) Ghost hunter s used technology to try and prove the existence of ghosts . These technologies included the ACR 99821 ( TV : " Hide " ) and EMF reader s . ( PROSE : " The Stone House " ) The Preternatural Research Bureau investigated cases of paranormal activity on Earth in the late 20th and early 21st centuries . ( HOMEVID : " The Zero Imperative " , HOMEVID : " When to Die " ) Some spiritualists and clairvoyants , including Evadne Wintergreen , believed that it was possible to make contact with the dead using methods such as a séance . ( AUDIO : " The House of the Dead " ) Scepticism . Not everybody believed in ghosts . Sceptics included Sarah Jane Smith , ( TV : " Eye of the Gorgon " ) Clara Oswald ( TV : " The Snowmen " ) and - despite having written about them in his fictional works - Charles Dickens . ( TV : " The Unquiet Dead " ) Mistakenly identified as ghosts . Species . The ghost of Harding Wellman haunted Miss Tremayne ' s finishing school , although the Fifth Doctor claimed that it was merely a being of pure energy who had taken on Wellman ' s memories and personality . ( AUDIO : " Winter for the Adept " ) On the Moon , in 2070 , Jamie McCrimmon thought a Mondas ian Cyberman was a " piper phantom " of his own Scottish culture . ( TV : " The Moonbase " ) The Cybermen of Cybus Industries were once mistaken for an army of ghosts when crossing over from a parallel universe . ( TV : " Army of Ghosts " ) The Gelth were mistaken for ghosts , as their gas eous forms could fly and were a translucent blue , their physical forms having been destroyed during the Last Great Time War . ( TV : " The Unquiet Dead " ) In Arcopolis , the Eyeless were mistaken for ghosts . ( PROSE : " The Eyeless " ) The planet Kar - Charrat was rumoured to be haunted by phantoms , which turned out to be the native lifeforms ' attempts to communicate with visitors . ( AUDIO : " The Genocide Machine " ) Technology . In 1890s London , the 51st century Magnus Greel employed the holographic technique to pretend the presence of a ghost guarding his lair under the Palace Theatre . ( TV : " The Talons of Weng - Chiang " ) Space - time anomalies . Sometimes , ghosts and hauntings were simply events of the past or future replaying themselves in the present . Sarah Jane once explained that events get recorded on their surroundings and under certain circumstances can get played back again , in what was known as the Stone Tape theory . ( TV : " Eye of the Gorgon " ) Similarly , the Eleventh Doctor explained that psychic residue was a cause of many ghost sightings . ( TV : " The Pandorica Opens " ) When Sarah Jane was sent back to 1889 collect a fragment of Chronosteel , she encountered a ripple from the future , echoes of a traumatic moment that had yet to happen . Her actions helped to prevent the event from occurring . ( TV : " Lost in Time " ) A nurse in 1918 St Teilo ' s Hospital thought that human s time shift ing from 2008 were ghosts . ( TV : " To the Last Man " ) The quantum transducer was an extradimensional artefact that amplified residual hauntings into empathic visions . These ghosts were explained as psychic residue from powerful emotional events . The transducer was dubbed the " Ghost Machine " . ( TV : " Ghost Machine " ) The planet Arkheon was thought to be inhabited by ghosts after its destruction during the early stages of the Second Dalek War , earning it the name " Planet of Ghosts " . This was in fact the Arkheon Threshold - a time rift projecting echoes onto the planet from other time periods - as explained by the Tenth Doctor , who claimed there was no such thing as ghosts . He sealed the rift after the war . ( PROSE : " Prisoner of the Daleks " ) The First Doctor himself was once mistaken for a ghost when an error made while he was fine - tuning the TARDIS sent him adrift through time . Between 1816 and 1890 , he appeared a number of times in the restaurant of a hotel in India . The hotel ' s manager , Suresh Parekh , believed the Doctor to be cursing the guests as those the Doctor interacted with while he was present died shortly after . The Doctor was able to explain later , however , that it was moments in time in which a life was about to end that gave him a brief temporal stability , causing him to appear , and that he had nothing to do with the deaths . Susan eventually managed to retrieve the Doctor from the time stream . ( PROSE : " Indian Summer " ) Similarly , both the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith were once mistaken for ghosts . ( PROSE : " The Ghosts of N - Space " ) Projections of events from other space - time locations could also be recorded as ghosts . The Caliburn Ghast , sometimes referred to as the Witch of the Well , was a ghost which haunted Caliburn House . The Eleventh Doctor and Clara Oswald discovered that it was in fact Hila Tacorien , a time traveller trapped within a pocket universe . ( TV : " Hide " ) The woods around Fetch Priory were long believed to be haunted , the result of its being near a Relative Continuum Displacement Zone . This anomaly leaked images and other phenomena from light years away onto Earth . ( TV : " Image of the Fendahl " ) The " ghosts " encountered at Ashen Hill Manor were actually people who had been trapped in - between the dimensions by Erasmus Darkening ' s malfunctioning equipment . ( TV : " The Eternity Trap " ) Professor Alistair Gryffen ' s numerous failed attempts to retrieve his family with the Space - Time Manipulator eventually began to take their toll on the continuum , warping reality into the shapes of his wife and children . They functioned as de facto ghosts , needing to trade places with Jorjie Turner and Darius Pike to take physical form , even going so far as to restore the Professor to his default setting , as he was before he lost them . They were ultimately banished back into nothingness . ( TV : " The Fall of the House of Gryffen " ) In the 2010s , Judy was warned to stay away from the Devil ' s Cairn by her brother because there were " ghosts in the hill " . This was in fact due to the cairn being the location of portal between dimensions which had been buried in the 2nd century . ( TV : " The Eaters of Light " ) Physical individuals . Sir Reginald Styles claimed that a ghost ( actually a time travel ling guerrilla from the future ) tried to kill him . ( TV : " Day of the Daleks " ) When visiting the North Pole in a dream , Shona McCullough on first sight thought that the Twelfth Doctor and Clara Oswald were the ghosts of " a skeleton man " and " a girl in a nightie " . ( TV : " Last Christmas " ) Cultural depictions . On Earth . Charles Dickens wrote about ghosts in his book " A Christmas Carol " and in his short story " The Signal - Man " . ( TV : " The Unquiet Dead " ) On several occasions , the Doctor and his companions referenced the film " Ghostbusters " when visiting locations known for paranormal activity . ( TV : " Hide , " TV : " Army of Ghosts " ) Television shows about ghosts included " Ghostwatch " ( TV : " Army of Ghosts " ) and " Most Haunted " . ( PROSE : " The Stone House " ) References . Clara Oswald once said that didn ’ t believe in ghosts . ( TV : " The Snowmen " ) When visiting the end of the universe , in conversation with the Eleventh Doctor , she commented " we ' re all ghosts to you " , in reference to the fact that she , and the rest of his companion s , would have died billions of years prior . ( TV : " Hide " ) The Eighth Doctor once said he didn ' t believe in ghosts . ( TV : " Doctor Who " ) The Twelfth Doctor likewise shared the sentiment , but when he briefly believed the ghosts at the Drum were a natural phenomenon , he got excited . ( TV : " Before the Flood " ) Grant used the alias " the Ghost " after he gained superpowers , including invincibility and the ability to fly . ( TV : " The Return of Doctor Mysterio " ) Behind the scenes . Several ghosts of the Drum are used as enemies in the " Doctor Who : Legacy " mobile game .