High Plains Drifter, I have watched this movie often and I still can't make my mind up if he is a spirit that can't rest untill he is avenged, because he appears at the start of the movie out of a heat haze and leaves the same way at the end of the movie.
As a lifelong fan of supernatural movies, I always went with the "Avenging Spirit"angle.
But Eastwood did say in an interview, that in the original script, The Stranger was the dead marshals brother.
Eastwood himself took that out of the story so that fans could make up their own minds, and like I said earlier, I went with the "spooky" story.
