Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016)
Abby grew up in Rochester, Michigan, a small town outside Detroit, a relentlessly curious child her parents nicknamed "Curious Georgina." Her mother, Dr. Cynthia Yates, was a chemical physicist, the first woman to earn a doctorate in chemical physics from Iowa State University. When Cynthia was fired from Schorning Chemical for taking her findings about an endocrine-disrupting compound to the FDA, she found new work in Battle Creek and the family moved there partway through Abby's junior year. Abby transferred to Hoover High School and noticed that the bullies were busy picking on one existing student, a girl they called "Ghost Girl." That was Erin Gilbert, the only other student who bothered to raise her hand in chemistry. Abby believed Erin's account of seeing a ghost, the two bonded over ghost stories, and they founded a two-member high school club, the Metaphysical Examination Society. Shunned by classmates, they stuck together.
Both were accepted to the University of Michigan. In their sophomore year they signed up for an advanced course taught by Professor Alderman, an eccentric old man who turned out to be the only professor on campus who believed in the paranormal and who had dual degrees in physics and parapsychology. Alderman privately encouraged them, and that December he took the two of them on a ghost hunt at a haunted ranch house, only to die of a heart attack mid-investigation. On their recorders afterward they caught a voice saying "The truth is out there." They spent more than two years chasing leads and logged thousands of hours without a single confirmed sighting. After graduating with bachelor's degrees in physics in 1996, with Erin headed for Princeton and Abby staying in Michigan for graduate school, the pair spent a summer writing Ghosts from Our Past, a 460-page paranormal text built around their own "Spectral Field Theory," which posited a new gauge field they called the spectral ether. The book sold nothing, the embarrassment ended their friendship, and Abby promised never to sell the remaining copies. She went on to a dual degree in astronomy and physics, captained the university's curling team, and earned her doctorate from Yale.
Years later, Abby is a professor of paranormal studies at the Kenneth P. Higgins Institute, working alongside the brilliant engineer Jillian Holtzmann to build technology from the theories in the book. When Abby quietly re-lists the old print run online, using the proceeds to buy the lab a new mini fridge, Erin, now up for tenure at Columbia University and desperate to bury the book, confronts her. The two are pulled back together by Ed Mulgrave Jr.'s report of a haunting at the Aldridge Mansion Museum, where they record genuine footage of the ghost of Gertrude Aldridge. Abby posts the viral video, which gets Erin fired from Columbia, and the trio, soon joined by MTA worker Patty Tolan, strike out on their own after Dean Shanks throws them out of the Institute. They name themselves the Conductors of the Metaphysical Examination and, unable to afford a Tribeca firehouse, set up above Abby's favorite Chinese restaurant, Zhu's Authentic Hong Kong Food, with a hopeless but handsome receptionist, Kevin Beckman.
Refining a Proton Pack, a Ghost Trap, and a PKE Meter, the team captures its first ghost, Mayhem, at the Stonebrook Theatre, and traces a wave of escalating hauntings to Rowan North, an embittered loner using a network of "hyper-ionization devices" to charge the city's ley lines and tear open a barrier between worlds. Rowan kills himself to cross over and then possesses Abby, walking her body to attack the team before Patty's slap drives him out; he next takes Kevin and opens a portal in Times Square. Abby and the others reverse it by dropping the nuclear-charged Ecto-1 into the vortex and turning it into an enormous trap. When Rowan drags Abby into the breach, Erin dives in after her, refusing to lose her a second time; the two emerge with their hair streaked white, the city saved, and the team granted the firehouse and full funding. Afterward they update Ghosts from Our Past, and a stray recording of the word "Zuul" hints at what is coming next.1
IDW comics
In IDW's Ghostbusters: Answer the Call line, which continues the 2016 film's continuity, Abby leads the team through new cases while chafing at never having captured a ghost intact for study, repeatedly insisting she needs a live specimen and an observation tank. A running gag holds that her love of soup is the result of a memory Holtzmann once tried to implant during an experiment at Higgins.2
The crossover event Ghostbusters 101 brings Abby's team into contact with the prime-universe Ghostbusters. When their firehouse and equipment begin overlapping with another reality's, they meet Egon Spengler, Ray Stantz, Peter Venkman, Winston Zeddemore, and Kylie Griffin, and learn that the original team's habit of crossing the streams seeded the idea of Ghostbusters across the multiverse. The discovery that she is not the first Ghostbuster, nor as singular as she believed, hits Abby hard, until Erin reminds her that their book was original enough for Rowan to build from. Working with both teams, Abby repurposes her own Containment Unit and uses a Giga Meter and positively charged Psychomagnotheric Slime to trap a dimension-tethered ghost and seal the breach between realities.2
The later multiverse event Crossing Over draws Abby into a cross-dimensional field team assembled to recover ghosts that escaped a prime-universe Containment Unit into the wider multiverse. Identified as the Abby of her own reality among many parallel Ghostbusters, she helps trap Tiamat and the spirits of Connla's Army, and survives an encounter with a personified Death that demands a game of chess for a soul. The episode again forces her to accept that she is one of countless Ghostbusters rather than the only one.2
Other cases continue to test her. During the Yorkville brownstone investigation she is twice possessed, this time by the ghost of a Doctor Kruger, who traps the team in a shared "Nightmare-Scape" built from their deepest fears. Abby's, revealed here, is a fear of clowns. The team only defeats Kruger by hiding inside a buried memory the four of them unknowingly share, the night their younger selves all happened to be at St. Paul's Chapel. In a later case the team protects Zara, a toddler born of a cult ritual to summon the demon Sahaq, trapping a ghost dog named Nunu and finally luring Sahaq into a trap during a harbor cruise.2
Personality
Abby is a serious paranormal researcher, single-minded about proving the existence of ghosts and getting a specimen into a controlled environment. She is fiercely loyal, especially to Holtzmann, and prone to playing practical jokes alongside her. She is also temperamental and quick to feel slighted, and tends to grow jealous of anyone she meets who knows as much about the paranormal as she does, a trait the comics' Venkman reads as wanting the world to catch up to her theories while fearing it will cost her the status of ultimate expert. Smaller quirks recur across her appearances: a severe cat allergy, sugar in her coffee, a devotion to The X-Files and mid-to-late-nineties hip-hop and R&B, keys pinned to a bra strap so she will not lose them, an attraction to husky men in hats, and an ongoing feud with her local Chinese restaurant over the ratio of wontons to broth.12
Casting and design
Abby was played by Melissa McCarthy. In early development the character's surname was Bergman, as seen in a previsualization reel by Proof Inc. The antenna-like helmet Abby wears when she and Erin first reunite was added at McCarthy's request for an odd piece of equipment to introduce the character, and it serves as a nod to the headgear worn by the possessed Louis Tully in the 1984 film. McCarthy later said the possessed-Abby scene, including the head twist, used a practical effect built around a stuffed back bra rather than visual effects.3 In the game Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, a later DLC update added an "Abby Bun" hairstyle, based on her look when she tests the proton pack in the alley, and a "Physicist Frame" eyewear option based on her glasses.4
GBFans.com is a hub for builders of the equipment Abby and her team carried, including the Proton Pack, the Ghost Trap, and the PKE Meter. The 2016 film's gear introduced a distinct look from the original-trilogy hardware that most of our prop references document, and it remains a recognized variant within the wider Ghostbusters costuming hobby.
References
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Ghostbusters (2016 film), including details from the extended edition, deleted scenes, and the Tor Books novelization. The novelization differs from the film on some details, for example placing Abby's pre-Battle Creek home in Indiana rather than Michigan.
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IDW Publishing comics in the Answer the Call continuity, including Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, Ghostbusters 101, Ghostbusters: Crossing Over, and the Ghostbusters Annual 2018.
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Melissa McCarthy, interview on Conan, July 14, 2016, regarding the practical approach to Abby's possession scene.
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Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, downloadable cosmetic content adding the "Abby Bun" hairstyle and "Physicist Frame" eyewear based on Abby's 2016 film appearance.
