h POKe
The name carries the game's own POKe glyph inside it, the little baked-in symbol from the words POKeMON and POKe BALL, wedged between a lowercase h and open space. The game reached for a stored abbreviation and spent it on a name. Index 195 is where it lives, and of all the hybrids that borrow a real body, this one borrowed the eeriest.
It wears Gengar. Not by accident of resemblance but exactly: its shown species is 94, so it inherits Gengar's sprite, Gengar's Ghost and Poison typing, and Gengar's precise stat line, 130 special and 110 speed and a fragile everything else. Meet it in the grass and you are looking at the grinning shadow itself. There is a quiet joke buried here, a glitch that disguises itself as the one Pokemon in Kanto that is already, canonically, a ghost. It hides as the thing that hides.
Its starting moves keep the illusion airtight, Lick and Confuse Ray and Night Shade, the exact haunting toolkit a Gengar would carry. The seams only show deeper in: Comet Punch it somehow knows at level 1, a scatter of unprintable glitch moves, and evolution paths that abandon the ghost story entirely for Shellder, Onix, and Growlithe. A shadow that wants to grow up into a clam. The disguise is perfect right until it isn't.
GHOST POISON
The bytes
| What | Where in the ROM | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Index number | slot 195 of the species table | 0xC3 (195) |
| Pokedex byte | 0x410E6 | 94 (borrowed from a real species) |
| Stats entry | 0x38E0A | 5E 3C 41 3C 6E 82 08 03 2D BE... |
| Size byte | entry byte 10 | 0x66 = 6 wide, 6 tall (the buffer holds 7x7) |
| Name bytes | 0x1C9B2 | A7 CA 54 1F 06 1C 21 6A 7B CD |
| Catch rate | entry byte 8 | 45 |
Front sprite pointer 0x5B76 resolves into ROM bank 0x0D (deterministic) at file offset 0x35B76. The decode is deterministic: it looks the same on every cartridge, every time.
Byte for byte identical in Blue.
Base stats
Its stat spread, straight from the entry bytes. Glitch specimens love extremes, a wall with zero attack, or a paper-thin speedster.
Moves
Knows from the start: LICK, CONFUSE RAY, NIGHT SHADE.
Learnset (read straight from its pointer)
| Level | Move |
|---|---|
| L205 | SLAM |
| L33 | GLITCH MOVE 0xBF |
| L195 | WING ATTACK |
| L74 | GLITCH MOVE 0xCD |
| L1 | COMET PUNCH |
| L130 | GLITCH MOVE 0xC3 |
| L95 | PSYBEAM |
| L62 | POUND |
| L234 | KARATE CHOP |
| L192 | GLITCH MOVE 0xCD |
| L72 | WATER GUN |
| L33 | STRENGTH |
| L205 | GLITCH MOVE 0xAF |
| L34 | PSYBEAM |
| L119 | AURORA BEAM |
| L5 | GLITCH MOVE 0xEA |
| L139 | GLITCH MOVE 0xD0 |
| L250 | RAZOR LEAF |
| L205 | DEFENSE CURL |
| L250 | GROWTH |
| L205 | SCREECH |
| L181 | GLITCH MOVE 0xC8 |
| L17 | GLITCH MOVE 0xFF |
| L255 | MEGA KICK |
TM and HM compatibility (flag bits, entry bytes 20 to 26)
| Machine | Move |
|---|---|
| TM01 | MEGA PUNCH |
| TM05 | MEGA KICK |
| TM06 | TOXIC |
| TM08 | BODY SLAM |
| TM09 | TAKE DOWN |
| TM10 | DOUBLE-EDGE |
| TM15 | HYPER BEAM |
| TM17 | SUBMISSION |
| TM18 | COUNTER |
| TM19 | SEISMIC TOSS |
| TM20 | RAGE |
| TM21 | MEGA DRAIN |
| TM24 | THUNDERBOLT |
| TM25 | THUNDER |
| TM29 | PSYCHIC |
| TM31 | MIMIC |
| TM32 | DOUBLE TEAM |
| TM34 | BIDE |
| TM35 | METRONOME |
| TM36 | SELFDESTRUCT |
| TM40 | SKULL BASH |
| TM42 | DREAM EATER |
| TM44 | REST |
| TM46 | PSYWAVE |
| TM47 | EXPLOSION |
| TM50 | SUBSTITUTE |
| HM04 | STRENGTH |
Evolutions
| Trigger | Becomes |
|---|---|
| LEVEL 201 | SHELLDER (0x17) |
| LEVEL 66 (glitch method 0x36) | ONIX (0x22) |
| LEVEL 80 (glitch method 0x0A) | GROWLITHE (0x21) |
| LEVEL 196 (glitch method 0xBA) | \x47\xd7\xcb\xc6\x21\x4b\xd7\xcb\xc6\x3e (0xFA) |
| LEVEL 205 (glitch method 0x41) | \xeaL\xcf\x7c\xeaM\xcf4\x36\xcc (0xC6) |
| LEVEL 34 (glitch method 0x25) | TAUROS (0x3C) |
| LEVEL 60 (glitch method 0x32) | CUBONE (0x11) |
| LEVEL 255 (glitch method 0xEC) | GASTLY (0x19) |
Hear its cry
A cry is three bytes the game looks up by index number: a base sound, a pitch, and a length. This specimen reads a base that points past the real cries into data that was never a cry, so it comes out broken straight from the table. I rebuild the sound live from the Game Boy's two pulse channels and its noise channel. This is not a recording.
Does it still work?
This is the question people actually ask about a glitch, so here is the honest answer for this one.
| Where | Still works? |
|---|---|
| Original Game Boy cartridge | Yes. The source of every byte on this page. |
| Game Boy Color / Super Game Boy | Yes, with the auto-assigned palette shown above. |
| 3DS Virtual Console (2016 re-release) | Yes. Nintendo shipped the re-release unpatched, so this is the most accessible way to reach it in 2026. |
| Later remakes (FireRed, Let's Go, and newer) | No. Rebuilt engines, the empty-slot overflow that produces this creature is gone. |
Fight it yourself
This is our from-scratch recreation of the Red battle engine. The enemy team is preset to this specimen; pick your own fighter, glitch or otherwise.
Every number on this page was read from a Pokemon Red ROM by reproducing the game's own out-of-bounds memory reads. Nothing is invented. Part of The Glitchhouse.