MissingNo. (Ghost form)
Climb Pokemon Tower in Lavender Town before you have the Silph Scope and something blocks the stairs: a furious spirit the game simply labels GHOST, unfightable, unnameable, a wall of grief you cannot get past until you can see what it is. That ghost is a real sprite with a real address, and index 184 is the slot that wears it.
This is the most haunting of the three MissingNo. forms, because unlike the two museum fossils it is not an object. It is a character. The ghost has a story in the game, the restless mother whose grave you disturb, and here that exact sprite gets loaded for a wild battle through the same hardcoded exception the tower uses. You are not fighting a scrambled Pokemon. You are fighting the Lavender Tower ghost, pulled out of its scene and dropped into tall grass, still carrying MissingNo.'s zero Pokedex byte, its 136 attack, its 0 defense, its two Water Guns and its Sky Attack.
Meeting it feels like a trespass, which is fitting, because that is exactly what the encounter is: data that belongs to one of the saddest moments in the game, showing up somewhere it was never meant to be. Of all the ways the ROM breaks, this is the one that feels like it means something.
Catch it and it behaves like every MissingNo., duplicating your sixth item and unsettling the Hall of Fame. But you will remember this one, because for a moment you held the ghost.
BIRD NORMAL
The bytes
| What | Where in the ROM | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Index number | slot 184 of the species table | 0xB8 (184) |
| Pokedex byte | 0x410DB | 0 (no real Pokemon is 0, so the game improvises) |
| Stats entry | 0x39FC2 (entry 255: unsigned byte math on dex 0) | 00 21 88 00 1D 06 06 00 1D 8F... |
| Size byte | entry byte 10 | 0x88 = 8 wide, 8 tall (the buffer holds 7x7) |
| Name bytes | 0x1C944 | 8C 88 92 92 88 8D 86 8D 8E E8 |
| Catch rate | entry byte 8 | 29 |
Front sprite pointer 0x1900 resolves into ROM bank 0 (deterministic) at file offset 0x1900. 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: WATER GUN, WATER GUN, SKY ATTACK.
Learnset (read straight from its pointer)
| Level | Move |
|---|---|
| Nothing. Its learnset pointer leads nowhere useful. | |
TM and HM compatibility (flag bits, entry bytes 20 to 26)
| Machine | Move |
|---|---|
| TM01 | MEGA PUNCH |
| TM02 | RAZOR WIND |
| TM03 | SWORDS DANCE |
| TM05 | MEGA KICK |
| TM06 | TOXIC |
| TM09 | TAKE DOWN |
| TM10 | DOUBLE-EDGE |
| TM11 | BUBBLEBEAM |
| TM13 | ICE BEAM |
| TM14 | BLIZZARD |
| TM17 | SUBMISSION |
| TM19 | SEISMIC TOSS |
| TM20 | RAGE |
| TM25 | THUNDER |
| TM26 | EARTHQUAKE |
| TM27 | FISSURE |
| TM29 | PSYCHIC |
| TM30 | TELEPORT |
| TM43 | SKY ATTACK |
| TM44 | REST |
| TM45 | THUNDER WAVE |
| TM49 | TRI ATTACK |
| HM01 | CUT |
| HM02 | FLY |
Evolutions
| Trigger | Becomes |
|---|---|
| None. This creature is final. | |
The glitches with a face
Almost every creature in here wears whatever your Game Boy last drew, a smear of borrowed video memory. These three do not. Their index numbers happen to point at real, finished sprites the game keeps around for other reasons, so alone among the glitches, they have a face somebody actually drew.
That is the whole difference. Not new art, just a glitch whose broken pointer landed on a picture instead of on noise.
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 its three bytes 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.