[Ellie's P.O.V]
I felt goosebumps all over my skin immediately, and the details that were previously ignored surfaced. The desert has a significant temperature difference between day and night, and even we are wearing three layers of clothing, while the people we just saw were wearing short sleeves.
"But how can we see their spirits?" This is the biggest mystery; typically, normal people cannot see such things.
"Perhaps certain people want us to see them," Anton said calmly, lowering his voice. "It seems like we've been under surveillance all along. This place isn't on any maps, so it appeared out of thin air. Since they aren't living humans, they are probably souls being controlled."
We all thought of the invisibility potion that Christian and Orky had used earlier, indicating that the witches those people encountered were more powerful than the ones we'd seen.