Hogwarts the Hogwarts Express that students take at the start of each school year. Students board the train from the also fictional and hidden Platform 9¾ at King's Cross station in London. The train arrives near Hogwarts, some time after nightfall. From there, first-year students are accompanied by the "Keeper of the Keys, Game and Grounds" (which was Hagrid during the first novel) to small boats, which magically sail across the lake and get them near the entrance of Hogwarts. The older students ride up to the castle in carriages pulled by creatures called Thestrals. When the first-year students initially arrive
Hogwarts staff However, in the American edition of "Half-Blood Prince", it is re-spelled as "Sybill", matching the UK edition. Professor Trelawney is portrayed by Emma Thompson in the "Prisoner of Azkaban", "Order of the Phoenix", and "Deathly Hallows Part 2". Hogwarts houses at least twenty ghosts, but when people in the novels speak of the ghosts at Hogwarts they usually refer to one of the four resident ghosts of the Hogwarts houses: Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington (or, as the students refer to him, Nearly Headless Nick), the almost beheaded ghost of Gryffindor house; the Bloody Baron, who is the ghost of Slytherin