Gabriel Romaguera, Ghost Hunter (1944-2016)
Born on December 15th, 1944 to Rose and Mateo Romaguera, Gabriel Romaguera grew up haunted by strange and disturbing voices. Believing him to be possessed, his parents sought council from the Catholic Church, who instead placed Gabriel in the Spanish division of the Death Watch (i.e., Reloj de la Muerte). The organization was created shortly after the infamous Haunting of Rosa Maria Fuentes in 1899, in which a young woman was falsely believed to be a vessel for Abaddon; in actuality, she had been gifted with the Sight, an angelic mark which grants variable powers. Upon inspection, priests at the Catedral BasÃlica Metropolitana de San Juan Bautista determined that Gabriel could hear and speak to the dead; with training, he could even summon them.
For most of his youth, Gabriel trained with the Death Watch and honed his abilities. By age 15, he became infamous within the Church for his ability to summon the spirit of any marked or unmarked grave regardless of its age. In his teen years, he came under fire with the Diocese for his frequent pranks; these usually involved summoning one of six historic priests known for their appreciation of humor and setting them loose in the congregation. Eventually, he was asked not to attend Mass and received private religious council, in part because of fear that he would perform the prank on the Pope.
At 18, Gabriel was assigned to Hamburg, Inc., a front for an America-based Death Watch investigative group. There, he excelled in identifying and, where necessary, neutralizing others with the Sight. These fairly mundane actions occupied the majority of his life until the Angelic Delinquency of 1999, in which nearly two dozen angels betrayed God and descended upon the Earth to wreak havoc with Creation. Stripped of their wings, these angels used their abilities to manipulate numerous circles of power and began the slow destruction of the Earth through pollution, war, pestilence, and logistical terror. Gabriel's Death Watch unit was the first reassigned to Operation Purgatory, an international effort to identify and purge fallen angels from Earth.
For the remainder of his life, Gabriel successfully led his unit on a spree of successful purges. In 2002, his unit identified and purged the archangel Michael, who had taken control of the majority of pesticide manufacturers. The following year, they purged Raguel, Sariel, and Adriel. Daniel, Hashmal, Kushiel, and Samael followed shortly after. In total, Gabriel's unit was responsible for at least 15 purges, the most of any Death Watch unit.
In 2014, Gabriel, now quite elderly and sprouting hair from unusual places, opted to retire from the field and spend his remaining days as an instructor at the Catedral BasÃlica Metropolitana de San Juan Bautista. He served amiably and passed quietly on a cozy September night in 2016. He was beautified by the Church that winter. To this day, students at the cathedral swear they have seen him playing tricks in the hallways and disrupting Mass with pranks and jokes. The Church has denied these occurrences.