Who Is the Ghost Watching Claire in Outlander's First Episode?
About 25 minutes into the first episode of Outlander, Frank Randall is seen walking through the rain when he comes across a spectral figure. The man is looking up at a window of the bed and breakfast where Frank and his wife Claire are staying. Claire can be seen there, brushing her hair. When Frank turns to confront the man, he's gone.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," Claire says when her husband returns to their inn.
"I'm not all sure that I haven't," Frank responds.
Indeed, Frank has seen what appears to be the ghost of his wife's other husband, an 18th-century Scotsman named Jamie Fraser, whom Claire meets after she travels back in time.
Frank's supernatural encounter is hardly the only sci-fi element of the series (it's a time travel story after all), but it's one that has yet to be fully explained, and therefore, is much discussed by Outlander's passionate fan base.
Author Diana Gabaldon, who wrote the book series upon which the Starz TV show is based, has confirmed that it is Jamie's ghost that Frank saw, but she's also stated repeatedly that Jamie cannot travel forward in time. He simply does not have that genetic capability, so how Jamie makes his way to 1946 is something of a mystery.
In an interview with the Outlander Podcast in 2014, Gabaldon also clarified the age of Jamie's ghost.
“Sam Heughan [the actor who plays Jamie Fraser on the TV series] asked me and I hadn’t thought about it before but I just answered him immediately. Do you want to know?” she asked the podcast co-hosts. Naturally, they answered yes.
“He’s about 25,” Gabaldon said.
It's an interesting response. If you're up to date on the series, then you know that Jamie is not dead at the age of 25. In fact he lives far beyond it, so Gabaldon's revelation here has, of course, sparked numerous theories in the Outlander community.
Some think Jamie's spirit (but not his body) traveled to through time to guide Claire to him; others suggest Jamie had a near-death experience after the Battle of Culloden, and that's why his ghost is 25 when he appears to Frank. But fans will have to wait until the final book in the series for clarity on their suspicions.
"The ghost is Jamie–but as for how it fits into the story, All Will Be Explained—in the last book," Gabaldon writes in the FAQ section of her website.
She's also revealed that the Outlander series will likely have ten books total, and the ninth, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, debuted in 2021. No word yet on when to expect number ten, but she is already working on it.
For now, Gabaldon has offered an intriguing—if cryptic—explanation of Jamie's ghost and his age. In a tweet from 2015, she simply wrote, “Ghosts don't exist in a place where time has meaning.”
@hunkegirl Ghosts don't exist in a place where time has meaning.
— Diana Gabaldon (@Writer_DG) April 16, 2015
Additionally, one of the trailers for season 7 features Claire and Jamie having a conversation about a dream where Jamie sees Claire bathed in electric light.
"I had another dream," he said. "There was light all around you, but it wasn't a candle light, nor fire light. I thought, 'Now that must be what electric light is like.'"
Claire then asks, "But how can you recognize something you've never seen in real life?"
To which he responds, "I dream of the past; why would I not dream of the future?"
So perhaps, Jamie in the future could have been in a dream—though the particular scene where we see the ghost watching Claire is one where the power has gone out, so she would have been lit by candles.
Watch the teaser below:
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