Mad scientists and travelers are the favorite characters of the films of the legendary director Werner Herzog. Dr. Steve Boyes obsessively tracks giant ghost elephants, whose distant relative is displayed as a trophy in a museum in Washington. We observe Bouyes' expedition to Angola, an uninhabited area the size of England, which the natives call the end of the world. Herzog documents his hero's obsessions, dreams and extraordinary imagination, asking the question: Wouldn't it be better for elephants to remain beyond human reach and function as the titular ghosts? And dreams of contact with wildness remain only in our dreams?