“Paranormal vibrations hummed through her bones. She felt like a tuning fork, one resonating with worry.”

From the story's start, Little Badger highlights the power of Ellie’s supernatural powers. Ellie is very sensitive to the world of ghosts, and although this makes her a gifted ghost trainer, it also allows her to pick up on feelings and sensations that other humans might not notice. Because of her close bond with Kirby, Ellie absorbs his anxiety and nervousness on the night of Trevor’s accident, and this is what propels her into action.

“All humans…all of us. […] human ghosts are terrible things.”

In the opening pages of Elatsoe, Ellie plays with her ghost dog without a care in the world. Animal ghosts are friendly and easy to train, while human ghosts are described as terrible and evil, highly destructive, and to be avoided at all costs. Chapter 1 ends with this firm admonishment: Ellie must not wake up any human, not even her cousin.

“Ellie’s elders often cautioned: when somebody dies young, it was dangerous to speak his name, see his face, or risk calling him back another way.”

In Ellie’s culture, certain practices must be maintained to minimize the chance of summoning a human ghost. The fear of human ghosts is so intense that Ellie and her family members stop saying Trevor’s name, remove all of his personal items from his house, and put away pictures of him. There is a level of erasure in these practices that some of his loved ones, especially Lenore, find difficult to accept.