Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016)
Erin was born in 1973 or 1974 and grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan. On Halloween 1982, when she was eight years old, she and two neighbor children pulled a leaf-dumping prank on the mean old woman next door, Gretta DeMille. Gretta died weeks later after breaking her hip, and her ghost began appearing at the foot of Erin's bed every night at 2:06 am for the next year, whispering threats and dripping blood. Her parents did not believe her and enrolled her in weekly therapy. When other children at school found out, they nicknamed her "Ghost Girl," a taunt that followed her for years and left lasting anxiety and what she later jokingly labeled Post-Paranormal Stress Disorder.
In high school, when Abby Yates transferred to Hoover High School in Battle Creek, she was the first person to take Erin's claims seriously, and the two quickly became best friends. They bonded over ghost stories, formed a lunch-hour club called the Metaphysical Examination Society, and even performed a rap, "Nuthin' But a Ghost Thang," at the school science fair. They enrolled together at the University of Michigan, where they signed up for Professor Alderman's notoriously difficult Particle Physics and Theoretical Cosmology course, pursued paranormal research on the side, and were inspired by the 1993 premiere of "The X-Files." After Alderman died of a heart attack during a ghost hunt he organized as their final exam, they inherited his bag of paratechnological gadgets and redoubled their research. They spent the summer of 1996 writing their 460-page manuscript "Ghosts from Our Past," completed doctoral study separately (Erin transferred to Princeton, then earned her Ph.D. and M.S. from MIT under Professor Han Anschutz, with doctoral work completed at CERN), and eventually lost touch.
By the time the film begins, Erin is a tenured-track associate professor at Columbia University specializing in neutrino physics, deeply invested in academic respectability and on the verge of a favorable tenure review. When she discovers Abby has put their old paranormal book back online, she rushes to the Kenneth P. Higgins Institute to have it taken down. She ends up accompanying Abby and Jillian Holtzmann on a paranormal investigation of the Aldridge Mansion Museum, where she is ecto-projected on by the ghost of Gertrude Aldridge. A video of the incident goes viral, Dean Harold Filmore fires her from Columbia, and Erin finds herself drawn back into the paranormal research she spent years trying to distance herself from.
After losing their positions at the Higgins Institute as well, the team sets up shop above Zhu's Authentic Hong Kong Food in Chinatown and recruits Patty Tolan, a New York City subway worker with encyclopedic knowledge of the city's history, as a fourth member. They hire Kevin Beckman as their receptionist, mostly over Erin's objections and at least partly because she is immediately smitten with him. Through a series of investigations, the team discovers that a disturbed hotel employee named Rowan North has been placing amplification devices at paranormal hot spots along New York's ley lines, intending to tear open a barrier between the living and the dead. Erin figures out the pattern by mapping ghost sightings onto a street grid and identifying their intersection at the Mercado Hotel.
After the team foils Rowan's plan but he manages to return as a massive supernatural entity, a climactic battle plays out in Times Square. When Rowan pulls Abby into the collapsing portal, Erin ties a winch wire around her waist and dives in after her, firing her proton pack to break Rowan's grip. Both emerge just as the portal closes, their hair turned white from the exposure. The city credits the Ghostbusters privately, stages a fake arrest to manage public perception, and eventually offers them full funding to continue their work, along with the firehouse they wanted from the start. In the post-credits scene, Patty plays a recording that includes the word "Zuul," setting up what might follow.
IDW Comics
In the IDW Comics continuity, Erin's universe merges temporarily with the original Ghostbusters' universe during the Ghostbusters 101 crossover. While Abby Yates struggles with the revelation that they were not the first Ghostbusters, Erin provides the steadier perspective, reminding her that their book was so comprehensive it served as a technical manual for Rowan North himself. She also develops a strong, ribbing dynamic with Jillian Holtzmann that runs through the Answer the Call and Crossing Over series, including a long-running dispute over who gets to fire the Proton Bazooka first.
Erin interacts directly with Egon Spengler, Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, and Winston Zeddemore across the crossover arcs. During a field mission in an alternate dimension, she accompanies Ray on the Marine Ecto-8 to improvise an explosive solution using a captured Proton Bazooka and a Megatrap to seal a dimensional tear. She also participates in the Crossing Over storyline involving a multiverse-spanning containment breach, encounters the Headless Horseman in an alternate Central Park, and helps defeat the entity Tiamat.
In the Answer the Call standalone arc, the team confronts Doctor Kruger, a villain who traps victims in a Nightmare-Scape built from their deepest fears. Erin's fears are bees, public speaking, and being dismissed as a fraud by the scientific community. Her willingness to name those fears plainly helps the team find a way out of the nightmare.
The Crossing Over Virtual Trading Card #7 established that Erin holds a Doctor of Science (Sc.D.) degree, which takes precedence over the Ph.D. mentioned in some earlier comic panels.
Personality
Erin's defining tension is between her need for academic legitimacy and her genuine, deeply personal belief in the paranormal. She spent years suppressing the latter to pursue the former, and the film traces her letting go of that trade-off. She is scientifically rigorous and committed to the empirical method, often the first to call for documentation or controlled conditions, but she is also capable of impulsive decisions driven by emotion, particularly the impulse to prove herself to skeptics. When Martin Heiss, a professional debunker, visits their lab, Erin cannot resist releasing their captured ghost to show him, despite Abby's explicit objection.
She is prone to social awkwardness, especially around people she is trying to impress, and the film plays her crush on Kevin Beckman largely for this kind of comedy. At the same time, the moment she dives into the portal after Abby is one of the film's clearest character statements: all of her careful reputation-management dissolves when someone she loves is in danger. Director Paul Feig described her in promotional materials as a "particle physicist, academic firebrand, spectral warrior."
Casting and design
Kristen Wiig was cast early in development and her character's last name was originally "Gabler" in the pre-visualization reel produced by Proof Inc. The final name Gilbert was used throughout production.
The equations Erin writes on the Columbia lecture hall chalkboard at the film's opening were created by MIT physics consultant Lindley Winslow and later transcribed on set. They illustrate the failure of SU(5), a once-promising unified field theory. A paper visible in Erin's office is formatted in the style of the real-world journal Physical Review Letters and lists a co-author named G.F. Siegal, a nod to Winslow's child. Erin's office set itself was modeled on the real office of MIT and Columbia physics professor Janet Conrad.
Two academic awards are visible in Erin's Columbia office: the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award from the American Physical Society, given in recognition of outstanding achievement by a woman physicist in the early years of her career, and the LeRoy Apker Award, the highest honor given to undergraduate physicists in the United States.
Holtzmann gives Erin the initial proton thrower in the subway field test specifically because she has the longest arms of the four, a throwaway practical justification that became a recurring bit of trivia.
The Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016) film opened the GBFans.com community to a new generation of prop builders and cosplayers interested in the distinct visual design of that continuity. The Answer the Call team's tan-and-orange flight suits and the redesigned equipment built by Holtzmann attracted active forum discussion and builds. Members pursuing the 2016-style proton pack have found the community's prop research resources applicable to identifying the base components used in the film's hero props, even where that research originated with the 1984 film versions.
Erin's character has a particular resonance in discussions of the film's tone: the "Ghost Girl" nickname and her arc of reclaiming that identity are often cited in community threads about what the 2016 film was doing thematically and why the Ghostbusters title fit these characters.
References
- Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016 film), primary source for all film-section content
- IDW Comics: Ghostbusters 101 issues 1-6; Ghostbusters: Answer the Call issues 1-5; Ghostbusters Annual 2018; Ghostbusters Crossing Over issues 1-8; Ghostbusters 35th Anniversary: Answer the Call
- Ghosts from Our Past: Both Literally and Figuratively: The Study of the Paranormal, River Press Edition (referenced in-universe)
- Ghostbusters (2016 Movie) Advertising, Fandom Ghostbusters Wiki (Paul Feig character description)
