A Sith Lord can be a frightening adversary, a rancor is a truly fearsome creature and the Sarlacc pit digests an unfortunate morsel over the course of centuries. However, Star Wars outdid itself with a Force phantasm that haunted hyperspace lanes and could rend the mind to tatters as easily as it shredded flesh.
Known as Starweirds, these dreaded apparitions from Legends lore are a thing of nightmares, bearing a maw of rotted sharp teeth, razor-sharp claws and powerful in the Force. Their origins are unknown, but they are believed to be spawn of the Dark Side, whether by the design of some mad Sith mystic or a byproduct of ambient dark energies present throughout the galaxy. They appear as insubstantial humanoids with glowing white eyes, a cloudy mane of drifting albino hair and shriveled faces with wispy tatters of ghost cloth clinging to their tall, skeletal forms.
Starweirds are sentient, incorporeal beings introduced in 2004 in the Ultimate Adversaries sourcebook, a supplemental reference guide for the Star Wars Roleplaying Game. They inhabit deep space and have been sighted outside of stranded ships, attacking repair crews sealed in pressurized suits, and even appearing aboard vessels during hyperspace jumps, prowling corridors and laying waste to entire crews. Immune to almost all physical injury, the only power they seem susceptible to is the Force itself, a power they wield with great precision. A Starweird can discharge lightning from its claws as well, and move objects or lifeforms with brutal efficiency. These creatures will seek to destroy any sensitive they can sense through the Force to the exclusion of all others.
Like the banshee of Irish legend, the Starweird's scream leaves a lifelong mental scar on those that survive an encounter with it. But, unlike the fey of the Emerald Isles, the wail of this spectral demon can carry through the vacuum of space because it is telepathic in nature. Its face can also adopt the likeness of the person it is attacking, although it remains only a corpse-like facsimile that radiates death.
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One such survivor was Jedi Master Wyellett, who served the Order during the Great Galactic War, more than three millennia before the Battle of Yavin. He sacrificed himself to defeat the Starweird Queen, with only the Force as his ally. Her existence implies a hierarchy among the brood that remains as much a mystery as their creation. Only those attuned or redeemed to the light side of the Force have ever demonstrated the ability to linger after death, so Starweirds don't appear to be remnants of living beings.
Whether they are true ghosts, Force wraiths or entities composed purely of Dark Side energies brought to some semblance of half-life, the Starweirds' ability to hunt living beings who are traveling faster than the speed of light in the darkness of space earned them the fear of rogues, nobles and Jedi alike in Legends lore.