Source: comicvine.gamespot.com

8. Black Pirate

Let's talk Jon Valor. He was a pirate! A white pirate. He just wore black. Very confusing. I mean most dudes with Black in their name are seventies heroes without a sense of subtlety. They stopped doing that in the eighties or so. Good joke about it in Sleeper, though.

Sorry, got distracted. Valor was a privateer who moonlighted as a pirate. He did pirate stuff. At some point in his pirate-ing, he was abducted by the Lord of Time to attack a thing called the Eternity Brain.

The combined might of the Justice League of America and the Justice Society of America saved him and allowed the Pirate to head back home. There, he was framed for his son's murder and hanged.

He cursed the town he was hanged in, proclaiming that no one who died in the town would be able to pass on until his name was cleared. That town would eventually become Opal City, where he would return as a ghost to help Jack Knight, who eventually cleared his name, allowing him and every other ghost of Opal City to pass on to the afterlife.