Tom Marvolo Riddle appears in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets not as a living wizard, but as a spectral echo preserved within a magical diary. The figure Harry meets is the preserved memory and fragment of Riddle’s sixteen-year-old self, placed in the diary when he turned it into a Horcrux. Though he resembles a ghostly student, he is actually a manifestation of Riddle’s personality and soul fragment, able to speak, manipulate, and eventually manifest physically by draining life from the diary’s victim. As a person, Riddle was brilliant, charismatic, and deeply manipulative. A Slytherin student and descendant of Salazar Slytherin, he discovered the Chamber of Secrets and unleashed the Basilisk, causing the death of Myrtle Warren and framing Hagrid to avoid suspicion.