>>51303447The pokedex at some points should be looked upon as flavor text, Sugimori admitted as much that they're always going to construct Pokémon in certain ways even if it means ignoring their backstory. A lot of them have backstories that involve killing others yet that never really materializes in what we see. Gengar is probably the perfect example of this as their pokedex entry project a lonely entity that murders people but the way the series portrays them is the opposite, you see a cheerful trickster with an appetite for physical food, both people and Pokémon, instead of consuming the souls and life force out of others.
In general ghost Pokémon represent the philosophy Sugimori talked about pretty well. I recently saw the dub of a PokéToon from last year about ghost Pokémon. In it the ghost Pokémon are portrayed as playful tricksters who end up saving the children. Most telling is the divorce between ghost Pokémon and ghosts, even the official Pokémon YouTube channel put the word haunted in scare quotes, indicating the stairwell isn't haunted, it's just inhabited by ghost Pokémon. It divorces Pokémon from the supernatural, actual ghosts exist in Pokémon as a supernatural concept, and instead contextualizes ghost Pokémon to be more in tune with the rest of the Pokémon, that is natural creatures with magical powers rather than supernatural creatures in-context.
At the end of the day it's a series for children and it's constructed to be a certain way. It's not meant to be realistic but it imagines a world of fantastical and magical creatures instead of real world critters. This means that in order to sell the idea the creators of the series want to evoke the idea of a critter, both in the domestic and wild sphere hence why the things mentioned here are done. Pokémon at the end of the day are magical critters.
