Eastwood's character not a ghost?

personally I think he was just a stranger passing by who got haunted by the dead sheriff (who was out for revenge, the lady in the hotel said the dead wont rest because he has unfinished business) the night in the hotel. then either out of possession or an urge decides to act on the information the dead sheriff put in his head.

just a thought.

Tarantino is a prat!! and so is bryan singer!!

While watching the movie, I just assumed the Marshall had somehow crawled off and survived, after being whipped half to death. But at the end, I was forced to conclude he really was a ghost.


Been making IMDB board posts since the 90s, yet can't bring up any from before December of 2004.

Eastwood was the ghost of Sheriff Jim Duncan. Reasons:

1) The comment was made at one point that, if the dead don't lie in a properly marked grave, they don't rest. Jim Duncan was not in a marked grave for most of the movie, so we could expect that his ghost wasn't resting. The writer put that line into the script for a reason.

2) At the end of the movie, the short guy is properly marking Jim Duncan's grave, just before Clint rides off into the haze and disappears. Probably not a coincidence.

3) Eastwood seemed to remember things that Jim Duncan would have, such as being whipped to death, and which townspeople were basically decent and which were slime. He dreamt about Jim Duncan's death and got the details right, which meant he must at least have been on the scene, which limits the possible candidates right there.

4) Eastwood took some bullets to the gut sitting in the tub, and survived without a scratch. That could have been just for laughs but I'll take it as a hint.

5) The point that people wanted to know who he was ("Who are you?") means that his identity was significant on some level. In most Man With No Name films, his identity is not important at all. But in this case his identity did matter; that points to Eastwood being someone relevant to the town's history.

Some folks make a big deal about how nobody recognized Eastwood, and wouldn't they have recognized him if he were actually Jim Duncan. Well that would certainly hold if Eastwood were playing a mortal living breathing man, but ghosts don't necessarily play by the same rules. To be sure, the movie couldn't have worked if he rode into town and everyone said "Hey look, it's Sheriff Jim Duncan back from the dead! How's it going, buddy? Sorry about having you killed a couple years back." The movie was about the town paying for its past misdeeds, and who better to collect than the man they killed and buried in an unmarked grave?

Another hint that Eastwood is a ghost is that in the scene when the Sheriff was dying he said "all of you go to hell" and Eastwood wrote HELL on the town sign.

There is another interpretation that you can take, especially since Eastwood liked leaving the ending open to a more supernatural explanation.

The Stranger rapes, kills, and tortures. (Not very sheriff-like behavior.)
He paints the town red, renames it Hell, and sets everything on fire.

The Stranger is Satan.

There's a shot near the end where Eastwood is standing out of focus in the background, in front of one of the burning buildings. The choice to keep him out of focus makes the brim of his hat look like horns.

Think about it.

guys... think of it like The Crow... he came back (slightly different form) as a vengeful spirit in human form... the flashbacks (like Eric Draven's)... the animosity toward certain townspeople... and the most important fact: he disappears along the horizon at the very end (just like a ghost)...

@OP:

There is no evidence in the film itself to support the idea that The Stranger is Duncan's brother or anyone else. He's either a) Jim Duncan's ghost or b) a sort of supernatural manifestation of the town's guilty conscience. It's Eastwood's line to Mortecai ("Yes, you do.") that kind of narrows the field quite a bit. The fact that Eastwood threw that conversation onto the end of the film shows he didn't mean to keep it open-ended. I personally would have preferred if he had skipped that final scene and just had him ride off with zero explanation, literally fading out into the mirage.

"There is no inner peace. There is only nervousness and death." - Fran Lebowitz

Some excellent points made here. I'd like to add my take on it, as the movie really got me thinking and by the end of it I was left with no confusion as to what the intended meaning was.

First off, I watched the movie already having heard the general concensus that 'The Stranger' was a ghost. With that in mind, very soon after the beginning, I couldn't help to the growing idea in my mind that 'The Stranger' was actually behaving more like what can be best described as satan himself, with events being executed pretty much without his initiative, resulting in the wicked characters succumbing to their own evil and perishing as a result.
Some reasons for that are as follows (many have been pointed out by previous posters):

1. Unlimited pure evil and cruelty of the Stranger - from forced sex to blatant disregard of the human life and more. Particularly when the hotel owner's wife tells him that she didn't know the extent of Stranger's cruelty and his reply "You still don't".
I agree that it would be unfitting for the spirit of the marshall, killed for his righteousness, to come back from the dead just to act with such nihilistic attitude.

2. Price for the services - Townspeople agreed to give anything at all to save themselves from the consequences of the past. As it was pointed out, the theme of satan making deals in exchange for souls pops into mind. Not the wealth, not the beauty, not religion can save one from being consumed by evil. Townspeople themselves end up painting, 'staining', the town red;
Priest: "I hope you don't mean the church"
Stranger: "Especially the church"

3. Numerous times throughout the movie the people exclaim that the Stranger is setting them against each other. Looking carefully, characters really do meet their doom on their own accord. The Stranger never goes out of his way to pursue or punish anyone, they all come to him on their own initiative. The Stranger doesn't seem to be set on revenge either: he was passing through and was set on moving on if not for the trouble that he was welcomed with in town.
Sarah Belding: "People are afraid of you"
Stranger: "It's what people know about themselves inside that makes them afraid"

4. Regarding the ending and what most attribute to conclusively identifying the Stranger as a ghost of the killed marshal, i.e. dead don't rest without marker, putting tombstone on Duncan's grave; I personally feel that it's an obvious, albeit very effective screen writing trick utilized to leave the ending as open as possible and hence fathom the discussion and hype that inadvertantly follows. Duncan's murder is what started it all for the townspeople, it's only natural to finish the theme with a symolic closing.
The case for the ghost is certainly a strong one and I can see how the viewers' desire for justice makes it an appealing thought, but considering the aforesaid I feel it would be too literal and too simplistic. As said previously, whatever the Stranger really may have been, he was pure *beep*ing evil.

So after all the carnage and bloodshed, without even a lick of conscience from the Stranger, I had an answer to Mordecai's final question "I never did get your name" before I even had a chance to think. Admittedly, it wasn't Jim Duncan.

Finally, as Eastwood himself pointed out, the main theme of the movie is an allegory of actions and their consequences. What better way to portray this if not through the figure of satan and hell. I'm not religious and still the thought kept buzzing in my head as the story went on. I can only imagine the effect it might have on people that actually believe in such stuff.

To close, a friend of mine, who happens to be a devout Christian once told me a story about once having been pretty drunk and having an "argument with devil" on his deck. Upon naturally receiving no answer from the devil, he finally deciding to call it a night, stumbled to his bedroom and knocked over his alarm clock. He said the time was 11:34, but having picked up the digital alarm clock upside down he told me he stayed up all night praying.
Now if I were writing a screenplay for a movie with the knowledge that substantial number of potential audience were people like my friend, I certainly wouldn't hesitate to use the religious theme to cause a few chills in the audience.