Ghostbusters (1984)
The Containment Unit was built in 1984 inside the Firehouse. It took up most of the basement, which was walled off to create a sealed space for the captured ghosts, leaving only a small portion of the floor accessible. The most prominent feature was the red airlock through which ghosts were transferred from the Traps. A few weeks after the company was founded, the newly hired Winston Zeddemore was taken down to the basement and taught the proper procedure for emptying a Trap into the unit. Egon worried the unit was getting crowded amid unusually high P.K.E. levels across New York.
EPA inspector Walter Peck visited the Firehouse over concerns about the waste chemicals the storage facility might be producing. After Peter Venkman refused to show him the facility, Peck returned with a search warrant and a police escort. Egon warned that shutting everything off in the basement would be extremely hazardous, comparing the high-voltage laser containment system to a bomb dropped on the city. Peck ordered a Con Edison electrician to pull the gray power lever anyway. The lights dimmed, alarms sounded, and the D.C. microamperes gauge dropped from 100 to 0. The unit rumbled, cracks spread across the retaining wall, and entire blocks of brick blew out. The psychokinetic energy released punched through all three floors and the roof of the Firehouse, freeing the captured ghosts.
When the unit is shut down on screen, the effect was done practically: lights, dust, and wind, with technicians standing behind the wall shaking individual bricks by hand.
Description and procedure
Loaded Traps are emptied into the Containment Unit through a large red apparatus, mounted on the retaining wall, whose operation resembles an airlock. Ray demonstrates the procedure as "quite simple":
- Unlock and open the system. The locking handle is rotated 90 degrees and a large access panel folds down to horizontal, exposing a dock for a loaded Trap.
- Insert Trap. A loaded Trap is set into the dock and the outer case and carry-handle are released and set aside, leaving the Trap in place. A red warning light comes on above the airlock to show a live Trap is in the system.
- Close and lock the system. The access panel is closed and locked again.
- Set entry grid. A single button press primes the grid to receive the trapped ghosts.
- Neutronize field. Another single button press, the exact effect of which is not made clear.
- Empty the Trap. Pulling down a mechanical lever flushes the Trap's contents into the unit. The red status light goes out and the green one comes on to show the system is secure and the Trap can be removed for reuse.
As Ray puts it, "Light is green, Trap is clean." A red access panel or door is also built into the wall to the left of the Trap-emptying machinery, but it is never seen used or referred to.
Capacity and operation
There is a limit to how many ghosts the original unit can hold, suggested by Egon's remark that the facility was "getting crowded," though the actual capacity is never stated on screen. The storage facility works much like a Ghost Trap, using an energy field or grid as a barrier that prevents escape. In Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, the design is described directly: the Containment Unit is essentially a large Ghost Trap, which was Egon's grand vision, using articulated streams of protons to stabilize the particles of a deposited ghost.
After the Gozer incident
Details of the pre-production and cut designs for the Containment Unit in this section are drawn from Don Shay's Making Ghostbusters.1
At some point after Gozer was defeated, the Containment Unit was rebuilt. Earlier drafts of the films treated the storage facility differently: in Dan Aykroyd's first script the unit was not at the Firehouse but in a deserted Sunoco gas station in northern New Jersey, converted by the Ghostbusters into a holding cell for spirits. The August and October 1983 drafts included a camera inside the unit that let the team watch incarcerated spirits over closed-circuit television, described as "a bleak repository for souls of many species," with Venkman finding it too depressing to watch.2 The video monitor was cut from the finished film: there was no time left for another major effects sequence, and the filmmakers worried the audience would feel sorry for the ghosts. Compositing large numbers of white, transparent entities over one another would also have washed out the image.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife
In summer 2021, shortly after Winston purchased the Firehouse, the Containment Unit's button for setting the entry grid suddenly lit up red and began blinking, a warning sign of the trouble to come.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
By the summer of 2024, the original unit had been compiling spiritual waste for 40 years and was running out of space. After Gary Grooberson and Callie Spengler struggled to pull the lever and deposit the Sewer Dragon, the unit illuminated green, but a Death Chill from the Orb of Garraka shook the basement, leaving large cracks in the wall and frost spreading over the unit. Janine Melnitz photographed the damage and reported it to Winston's engineers, and Lars Pinfield took readings with a Narda electromagnetic radiation monitor.
Winston revealed that, based on Egon's original design, the Ghostbusters Engineer Corps had built a new Containment Unit with greatly expanded capacity in the Paranormal Research Center. The new unit was built with five access panels of six docks each, 30 in total, and ghosts extracted by an Ionic Separator were deposited into it. Ray remarked it could spin the equivalent of 50 million cubic hectares of plasmic confinement, a psychic jail as big as the American West. Transferring the ghosts from the old unit Trap by Trap on regular shifts was estimated to take three to seven years.
When Garraka arrived, the old Containment Unit was punctured open from the inside by Death Chill ice spikes, and he summoned his ghost army out of it as a column of energy shot up through the Firehouse, mirroring 1984. With the Drone Trap knocked away, Ray realized the unit itself could serve as a giant Trap. He explained that neutralizing the mass-energy density to reduce criticality would force the unit to re-prime itself and reverse the polarity on its entropy field, turning the tank into a powerful subterranean ghost trap. After the team pushed the three buttons in reverse order and forced the handle down together, the unit pulled Garraka in and the tear sealed shut, the light above turning green again.
The new unit was originally designed straight along one wall, but Eve Stewart and director Gil Kenan felt it looked boring and filled too much wall, so they bent it around the corner into an L shape. During filming of Garraka being trapped, the original cast broke into a rendition of "Brick House" led by Bill Murray. The Containment Unit end tag shown after Ghostbusters: Afterlife was filmed on the Sony lot and later became a permanent installation at Ghost Corps.
The Real Ghostbusters
The cartoon series gave the Containment Unit far more detail than the films. After Gozer was defeated, Egon decided to rebuild the unit larger so it would not overflow. The rebuilt system was described as including a transstater, field generator, ionization decay meter, plasmatic refractor, anti-ectoplasm destruct mechanism, and bi-polar adjuster, and held at least one Klein Bottle with room to add more. In the haste of rebuilding, an undetected energy leak sat above a box holding the team's original jumpsuits, still contaminated by their battle with Gozer; the leak charged the suits and produced the Spectral Ghostbusters.
Ray described the unit as running on "220 Volt, 10 Mega Watt" power. After a blackout incident, a backup generator was installed to kick in within three seconds of any power loss so the unit would not breach. The unit was vulnerable in several ways across the series: a stray proton hit on the Firehouse's main electrical system could blow the entire unit, leaving it open too long caused a fatal P.K.E. leakage buildup, and resetting it required running a sequence from Series A through Series J. When only the emergency generator powered the unit, its trap lock drained too much power to deposit new entities.
The unit had a viewer for watching the ghosts inside, a connected computer that could pull a ghost back in if someone tried to open or shut down the grid, and a calibrated P.K.E. Meter for confirming all ghosts were contained. A fail-safe restricted the grid to the four Ghostbusters' fingerprints and voiceprints, though it appears to have been removed after Wat possessed Peter and tried to use his prints to open the unit; if shut down, the grid would explode in 30 seconds. A later time-delay fail-safe kept the unit running for several seconds after the release lever was turned off.
How the unit could hold even powerful entities indefinitely was never fully explained, but the team reasoned it kept entities weakened and unable to reform. On occasion the unit went wrong: a seal failure leaked catalytic paranormal flux that turned Slimer into Big Green, and a leak from a faulty Trap once brought the unit to life so that it spat out its imprisoned ghosts, forcing Egon to build a Proton Rifle modification to exorcise it. Egon also went inside the unit in a special suit to retrieve the three Ghosts of Christmas after rigging a device to open a hairline fracture in the grid. The Containment Unit was designed by Richard Raynis.3 In one episode the unit was voiced by Maurice LaMarche.4
Extreme Ghostbusters
The next-generation team sometimes called the unit the Containment Tank. On one side it had an outer and inner hatch; with the grid realigned, the hatches could be opened from a nearby keypad console. Once a person was inside and the outer hatch resealed, two liquids held between the hatches were agitated to help open the inner hatch, which projected a portal directly into the Containment Universe. Eduardo Rivera is the only known person to enter the unit through these hatches, going in to rescue Slimer after Slimer sealed himself inside to stop escaping ghosts. Surt nearly escaped during the incident, but Kylie Griffin wrangled Fenris and threw him into Surt, and the collision launched both back into the Containment Universe before Egon resealed the hatches by destroying the keypad console.5
The Containment Universe
The inside of the unit, never shown in the films, varied across the animated series. Most often it appeared as a ghostly dimension of floating rubble and disjointed pipes where the imprisoned ghosts drifted, though at times it resembled the inside of a machine or even a sewer. According to Surt, Proton Packs are useless inside the Containment Universe, since a stream merely punches through an entity rather than wrangling it. The IDW comics later explored a similar idea, with Ray speculating the unit had inadvertently tapped into a pocket dimension where captured entities roam free.
Ghostbusters: The Video Game
In the realistic version of the game, set during the Thanksgiving holiday in 1991, the unit combines elements of the original film design and the animated series. Egon had recently added a viewer that fascinated Slimer. The Rookie accidentally struck the unit with a Proton Stream, freeing the Sloth Ghost; Egon blamed himself for having been fine-tuning the interspatial gasket earlier that day, and set to repairing the damage while Ray and the Rookie chased the escapee. On Thanksgiving, Walter Peck shut down the containment grid and released everything inside as part of a plan to channel P.K.E. to Ivo Shandor. The unit's viewer also nods to the original shooting script and the film's novelization, where the monitor that was cut from the movie did appear. In the stylized version of the game, the unit is unchanged from its film appearance, and the player can dump a fresh Trap into it after each level by pulling the lever.
IDW comics
In IDW continuity, Egon built the Containment Unit on his own as a fully secured system designed to keep running for a while even if power was lost.6 After the first bust at the Sedgewick Hotel, the team deposited Slimer for the first time, but the unit made an odd noise and the red alert knocked them down; Egon decided the field had not been properly neutronized, and Slimer briefly escaped before being recaptured. The comics gave the shutdown disaster a new explanation: the massive influx of ambient P.K.E. from Gozer's approach, with the unit already at capacity, pulled the ghosts out like iron to a magnet once Peck cut the power.7 Egon already had a fail-safe in mind for the rebuild.7
After the Shandor incident in November 1991, the unit was rebuilt much larger, with parts from the previous version re-purposed as side-mounted controls and safety measures, and its own self-contained power source.8 A biometric security measure restricting access to senior staff was later added; during the Tiamat crisis it refused the possessed Ray access when his palm print read as invalid.9 When Tiamat threatened to physically rupture the unit, Egon warned this would overload it into a chain-reaction explosion releasing every captured entity,9 forcing Ray and Egon to manually vent the unit to prevent catastrophe. The grid's power source later proved strong enough to power a jury-rigged interdimensional transport, and the team eventually built a Containment Observation Monitor to study and locate entities inside.
A new breed of Poltergeists carried an ectoplasmic signature different enough to break out of the grid, prompting a containment breach that also freed the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.1011 To capture entities a Trap alone could not hold, Egon and Donatello of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles devised a Trap-Gate that sent ghosts directly into the unit.
Other appearances
Across tabletop and tie-in media, the Containment Unit recurs with varied designs. In Ghostbusters: The Board Game, Idulnas empties the entire unit of every entity, and Ray finds it completely intact but empty after running a diagnostic; the board game's manual defines the original unit as a facility that safely compressed and neutralized the psychokinetic energy and autonomy of most classes of entity.12 In the Activision Ghostbusters game, a portable containment grid could be purchased for Ecto-1, removing the need to return to headquarters to empty Traps. In Ghostbusters: Legion, set six months after Gozer, the unit resembles the version from The Real Ghostbusters.
See also
References
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Shay, Don (November 1985). Making Ghostbusters. New York Zoetrope, New York NY USA, ISBN 0918432685.
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Aykroyd, Dan & Ramis, Harold (1983). Ghostbusters (First Draft August 5, 1983).
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Benjamin, Troy & Goldberg, Craig (2025). The Real Ghostbusters: A Visual History. Dark Horse Books, Milwaukie, OR USA, ISBN 9781506749273.
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Marsha Goodman (1989). Episode Call Sheet and SAG Report, "Loose Screws" (1989).
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Extreme Ghostbusters, "Slimer's Sacrifice" (1997). Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
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Ghostbusters Year One Issue #1 (2020), Dramatis Personae page. IDW Publishing.
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Ghostbusters Year One Issue #4 (2020). IDW Publishing.
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Ghostbusters Issue #2 (2014). IDW Publishing.
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Ghostbusters Volume 2 Issue #19 (2014). IDW Publishing.
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Ghostbusters: Infestation Issue #1 (2011). IDW Publishing.
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Ghostbusters: Infestation Issue #2 (2011). IDW Publishing.
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Ghostbusters: The Board Game (2015), Operations and Field Manual comic. Cryptozoic Entertainment.
