"...Yes," he says. "Yes it does."

"Do you suppose Sunnydale High has some known problem with people going stag to prom mysteriously dying or otherwise suffering nasty fates that I should fix?"

"I think that is extremely likely."

"Cool. How do we figure out what it is?"

"Some... kind of records... must exist," he says. "What are the odds they're in this library, I wonder?"

"I don't know where records of prom deaths might live. My first idea was to figure out who wrote the flyer and figure out where they got their info."

"Well, then, we each have an avenue of research to pursue."

"Alrighty. Prom's not for a while, so no huge rush." Pause. "Although if I'm going, I have to invite Sherlock - lest I be killed by the Phantom of the Promenade before having a fighting chance - and I have to find a dress and so on. Or I'll just be turned away at the door and the inevitable poor sap who ignores the all-caps warning will die."

"Phantom of the Promenade," he snorts. "What will this place come up with next."

"If it's anything sillier than a prom ghost I fear that will be its actual weapon, it will silly people to death," snorts Juliet.

Giles laughs.

"Does it drown only boys there? For that matter, who does it strangle? The flyer forbids both sexes to go stag, but the prom organizer doesn't have a lot of details, she just knows there's something to be afraid of."

"It seems to strike indiscriminately among single prom-goers," he says. "There was one girl drowned, in the same sink; no one's quite sure how or why she got there in the first place."

"If it only drowned them, I'd wonder if it was some kind of - I dunno, despair spirit, provoking loneliness to the point of oddly specific suicide, but if it strangles people too I think it must have some more physical presence," opines Bella, "am I wrong?"

"No, your logic is sound," he says. "I'd also suspect a literal phantom if the drownings were all we had to go on. Ghosts with the physical fortitude to strangle someone are much rarer."

"You think it's a ghost, then, not a demon? Naively I would guess a ghost would be more likely to be preoccupied with the love lives of high school students."

"There are a few kinds of demon who concern themselves with young lovers in various unpleasant ways, but I've never heard of one haunting a prom," he says. "And 'haunting' does seem to be the word."

"Okay. So the ghost is substantial enough to strangle people, but is it also substantial enough that it will care if I kick it in the head?"

"That's the question, isn't it?" he says.

"If it doesn't care about being kicked in the head, will it care about getting torched? I don't have great wand control yet, but I think I could refrain from burning down the school, and then I'd have a chance of not needing to use squares. Or, I could go straight to the squares, but what do I wish for, what process do I disrupt to rid us of Prom Ghost?"

"If it is a ghost," he says, "its hold on our reality is already tenuous. You might be able to simply... disperse it."

"Mightn't it just recoalesce? It's already making trouble only during prom - once annually - as far as we know. It's pretty low-key, and it wouldn't be immediately obvious if I'd only spooked it into leaving for a relatively meaningless period of time." Pause. "Heh. Spooked."

"The traditional way to deal with a haunting is to find out what the ghost wants and appease it somehow," he says. "But I'm hardly going to suggest you take it on a date."