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Could a ghost possess a zombie created from its own body? Could this ghost-zombie hybrid, hypothetically, continue their career in law?

I like Pratchett's zombies. Where the force of will of the soul of the person is so strong that they refuse to dis-inhabit their body. But since the subconscious did so many things on autopilot, they now are forced to do every function of their body deliberately. That's why they move so stiffly and strangely.

You know what? Go read Reaper Man. It's great. And Windle Poons was never so alive until after he died

Can't remember the author or title.

Young American woman goes to London and gets invited to a wild party a a huge mansion. The first level is music, celebs, drugs, and sex. Slowly she realizes two things; she used to live in this mansion, and that her hostess is a vampire. She's the reincarnation of the soul that used to inhabit the vampire's body.

They definitely could in D&D lore. You die. Your soul goes to whatever plane of existence. Your body gets left behind and a necromancer raises it as a zombie for menial labor. Your soul comes back as a ghost to complain to a party of adventurers about how a necromancer has defiled your body and you wish to put an end to it. The bard says something stupid like "well it doesn't sound like you were using it anymore. You know what they say: one man's trash is another man's treasure."

If we're going by What We Do in the Shadows the show rules, I guess so.

I want an anime of this. haha.

I'm putting this in my next D&D campaign

Kingdom Hearts

Edit: looking at the other comments I'm glad I'm not the only one with that brainrot.

This is literally my experience of ADHD

OG Nier took a slightly different twist on that. Mild spoilers ahead!

Somewhen in our lifetime the plague-like white virus destroyed human bodies turning them into ash, so there was a project of dividing the soul, the Gestalt, from the body, and then joining it with an autonomous Replicant android.

This project failed, and we, as a player, discover a curious consequence: Replicants conserved\built themselves a human-like society, the one we find ourself many replicant generations ago, not even knowing or caring if they are humans.

But at the same time these replicants are utterly afraid of catching a black scrawl - that's when Gestalts-souls, traversing the ground as black spectral beings, sometimes even agressive, consume the replicant as it was designed to, covering them in dark patterns, and slowly turning them under control of these stray souls, some of them even vile and powerful like demons.

You as Nier and the Shadowlord, your arch nemesis, are a Replicant and a Gestalt of one person, fighting to keep your transforming sister on your own side, while two of your worlds inescapably collide and destroy each other.

That's not the most dramatic reveal there, so you'd be fine playing it even after that.

If the zombie retains memory/personality, then I'd say that if a soul exists in the setting, that it is still in the body or has been returned to the body. Therefore no separate ghosts.

If the zombie exists only as a husk to be used as a puppet by some other intelligence or entity, then I'd say ghosts of those people make sense.

Kingdom Hearts kinda had this with the Heartless (from a person’s heart) and the Nobodies (from a person’s body).

The I, Zombie comic was so much weirder than the tv show.

Running out of movie ideas? Just crowdsource from the public!

This is essentially one* of the Kingdom Hearts plot threads. Sora sacrifices himself and becomes a Heartless (ghost) in KH1, but since he has such a strong heart, the husk he leaves behind becomes the Nobody Roxas (zombie).

Does it count if the ghost is bound to a suit of armour and the zombie is animated by some random lab animal's soul..?

Love this idea.

If the zombie's body still has some link to the soul such that it could see and react to the ghost, they could make an extremely awkward yet dangerous team.

"Come over this way, buddy! Brains over here!"

"Brainsh?" Shuffle, shuffle.

"Yup, see?" The ghost points triumphantly at a hamster cage. "Lots of juicy little brains to eat!"

"Awww... Tired of mowsh brainsh! WANT HOOMAN BRAINSH!"

Zombie takes another vicious swipe at the ghost but finds only air.

"Why can no eat you brainsh again?"

"As I've explained all evening, I'm ethereal, not really here, sorry, friend. It's mouse or nothing."

The zombie's shoulders slump in disappointment, but he turns to the hamster cage. The hamsters peer back, vaguely uneasy.

"C'mere cute liddle mowshes..."

Clang, squeak, munch, munch, munch.

One of the characters in the “what we do in the shadows” show is a vampire whose ghost inhabits a doll.

"ooooveerrruuuulllleeeed"

/eats brains

I'm going to say yes. In order to become a zombie a body must be dead, and generally the soul becomes a ghost after death. Zombies aren't related to the person they were, they're just a corpse that's been animated.

Only if the person had multiple-personality disorder. You need at least one consciousness per entity.

I'm going to say yes, they can.