Vance Collins
- Appeared in: 8.06 Southern Comfort
- Played by:
- Dispatched: When Dean salts and burns his bones and Garth melts his Indian Head Penny down
- See also Ghost Spectre
Vance Collins was a soldier in the Confederate War who was killed by his brother, Union Corporal Jim Collins in battle. Jim buried him on the battlefield, but eventually out of guilt, he dug Vance up and buried him under the title The Unknown Soldier in their home town of Kearny, Missouri. Vance is trapped in his coffin for nearly 150 years, but is released when a bunch of kids break into his mausoleum and steal his Indian Head Penny which his ghost attaches itself to.
Vance becomes a spectre, or an "avenging ghost," possessing people who take possession of the penny and have a grudge against other people and killing those people. Possessing Kate Lew, he kills her husband after she gets the penny at the grocery store when one of the kids used it as change, then possesses her son Scott when he finds the penny in her purse and kills his former business partner, then a deputy who hates the sheriff, then another deputy who takes him down after he kills the sheriff and tries to kill a doctor who was an umpire in a baseball game that the deputy hated.
He runs out of bullets before he can kill the man and when Dean tries to stop him, possesses Dean. After salting and burning Vance's bones and failing to put him to rest, Sam and Garth learn of what is keeping him tied to the earth, but when they go to tell Dean, they find him possessed. Drawing on Dean's anger at Sam abandoning him in Purgatory, the possessed Dean nearly kills Sam until Garth manages to knock the penny from his hand. As Garth has no grudges, Vance is unable to posses him and Garth melts down the penny, putting Vance to rest.
