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              The Phantom of the Headquarters              
                     -by Queen Dimmy-                      
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                         Prologue                          
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Prologue
The Shadow ghost really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the flyers, the superstition of the managers, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the Wonderbolt recruits, their family, or the body guards. Yes, he existed in fur and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say of a spectral shade.
When I began to ransack The Wonderbolts of the Academy of Flights I was once struck by the surprising coincidences between phenomena ascribed to the " ghost " and the most extraordinary and fantastic tragedy that ever excited the Paris upper classes; and I soon conceived the idea that this tragedy might reasonably be explained by the phenomena in question. The events do not date more than thirty years back; and it would not be difficult to find at the present day, in the foyer of the Headquarters, old stallions of the highest respectability, men upon whose word one could absolutely rely, who would remember as though they happened yesterday the mysterious and dramatic conditions that attended the kidnapping of Rainbow Dash, the disappearance of the Princess of the Night and the death of her elder sister, Princess Celestia, whose body was found on the floor of her beloved window room. But none of those witnesses had until that day thought that there was any reason for connecting the more or less legendary figure of the Shadow ghost with that terrible story.
The truth was slow to enter my mind, puzzled by an inquiry that at every moment was complicated by events which, at first sight, might be looked upon as superpony; and more than once I was within an ace of abandoning a task in which I was exhausting myself in the hopeless pursuit of a vain image. At last, I received the proof that my presentiments had not deceived me, and I was rewarded for all my efforts on the day when I acquired the certainty that the shadow ghost was more than a mere shade.
On that day, I had spent long hours over THE MEMOIRS OF A MANAGER, the light and frivolous work of the too-skeptical Spitfire, who, during his term at the Headquarters, understood nothing of the mysterious behavior of the ghost and who was making all the fun of it that she could at the very moment when she became the first victim of the curious financial operation that went on inside the "magic envelope".