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Red Dead Redemption 2 mods let you view vanishing ghost up close

Inspectre.

Every Halloween at university, my friends and I would make it our mission to find GTA 5's ghost. It was an Easter egg hidden on Mount Gordo which could be viewed from a distance with a sniper scope or phone - and much like any ghost story, we were fascinated (and thoroughly spooked) by the sad backstory of Jolene Cranley-Evans.

As in GTA, Red Dead Redemption 2 also has a resident ghost: but rather than using a 2D image, the cowboy sim uses an actual character model to create a roaming NPC. And, thanks to recent modding efforts on PC, it's now possible to get a proper look at the ghost of Agnes Dowd.

In Red Dead Redemption 2 lore, Agnes was a 19-year old woman who died in 1883, 16 years before the game's events take place. Her tombstone behind Shady Belle says she "tragically took her own life and others" - a story which is partly explained through her lines of dialogue, which are slowly revealed to the player through several ghostly encounters in Bluewater Marsh. According to the wiki, Agnes fell in love with a man of whom her parents did not approve, and who had previously been involved with another woman. While Agnes was successful in persuading the suitor to abandon the other woman, she did not sway her parents, and her father drew a weapon on her lover. Exactly what happened in this confrontation is never detailed - but you can work out the ending from the tombstone description.

Cover image for YouTube videoRed Dead Redemption 2 Easter Egg #5 - The Ghost of Agnes Dowd

While you can approach the ghost in the marsh, walking near Agnes in-game will prompt her to disappear, meaning players have previously been unable to see her up close. Yet by using the mod Lenny's Simple Trainer (the same mod used to discover missing Princess Isabeau) it's actually possible to walk around as Agnes in her ghostly form.

Reddit user p1x1ee yesterday posted this discovery on the Red Dead Mysteries subreddit, explaining they'd used the mod to view the Agnes model found in the game files. Previously, it was possible to view Agnes in her living form by pasting "CS_AgnesDowd" into the mod's Ist.ini file, but an add-on mod called RDR2 Outfit Changer lets players cycle through various skins for each character (players also found a cave man using this method). Models one and two give you standard Agnes, model three makes her look slightly peaky, and model four... well.

Worth noting is that Agnes' necklace disappears between models three and four, although there's currently no explanation as to why this happens. Given the player at one point finds her ghost in a tree, it could be a morbid reference to her cause of death.

Meanwhile, the same mod has been used to produce some decidedly more cheerful results - including turning your cowboy into Gulliver or a teeny tiny lil' Woody.