The entity known as the Frist Wraith, aka "The Gate Between Life and Death", was discovered chained to a pillar beneath the ruins of the Iron City by Agents of Orpheus.
His true age and origin are unverifiable. He claimed to have been the first human being to ever become a ghost — the victim of the first murder in history. His own memory of the event was cloudy; he vaguely remembered an argument with his brother.
The same act of spite that killed the First Wraith also, according to him created the Underworld itself, which he characterized as a great "wound" between the worlds of Life and Death. At the base of this Wound lay Grandmother, the Great Maw, gnawing away at the fabric of reality in an attempt to reduce everything into Nothing. The First Wraith claimed to carry within himself the metaphysical representation of this Wound (or, perhaps, the Underworld was merely a metaphysical representation of the wound inflicted upon the First Wraith), and his fate was bound to its. Feeding himself into the Maw, forcing Grandmother to devour and abolish the essence of her own nihilism, so to speak, was, the First Wraith claimed, the only way to rescue the universe from utter annihilation.
The First Wraith was destroyed during an apocalyptic battle against one of the spectres' centimani war machines. Before he discorporated completely, he passed the Wound on to Agent Holland Lane.