Here’s a Photo of Ghost’s Papa Emeritus II Un-Masked with Behemoth’s Nergal

It’s been generally assumed for years that the man behind Papa Emeritus’ masked face in Ghost is Tobias Forge, formerly of Repugnant, Crashdiet, Magna Carta Cartel and Subvision, but there’s never been any hard proof. The band’s done a fantastic job at keeping their true identities from the public, no easy task in this day and age of instant everything all the time. But it appears as if the veil’s finally been lifted… by Behemoth vocalist, guitarist, cancer-fighter, bible-burning badass Nergal via a selfie that probably shouldn’t have been made public. Whoops.

Metal Insider dug up an Instagram photo that Nergal posted in May of the two men together with the caption “If you have ghosts… U have everything ;),” a reference to Ghost’s cover of Roky Erickson’s “If You Have Ghosts.” The photo has since been pulled from Nergal’s Instagram account which lends further credence to the theory that this was a fuck-up and Forge is indeed Papa, but here’s a screen cap:

Here are a couple of other photos of Forge alone, for reference:

So, yeah, definitely the same dude, in case there was some speculation that perhaps Nergal was just posing for a photo with one of Roky Erickson’s back-up musicians or something. Further, Ghost and Behemoth both played at the FortaRock festival, which took place on May 31 in Nijmegen, Netherlands. 

It’s worth considering that, since Forge agreed to pose for the selfie with Nergal, maybe this was all a planned stunt to reveal his identity. But perhaps he just assumed Nergal wanted the photo for his own personal collection, not the world’s.

We’d still like to know the identities of the rest of Ghost, the Nameless Ghouls. For all we know there’s an ever-changing cast of characters under those robes. Hit us up at news[at]metalsucks.net if you’ve got any info.