Ghost Rider Phantom Mount and Awaken Animal

[Pantorts]

What would happen if you cast Awaken Animal on Ghost Rider's Phantom Mount? It is the animal type, but behaves like the Spiritualist's Phantom, which is an Outsider and not a valid target for Awaken Animal.

[Syries]

Wow, after looking over the Ghost Rider, yeah, that's a pretty big issue in my opinion. It looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, and yet.... it's not a duck? I would have thought the archetype would have changed the steed to be outsider (phantom) rather than animal (phantom). Maybe it was an editing mistake? I'd faq this:

The Ghost Rider cavalier archetype lists the class's mount as Type: animal (Phantom). Should the ghost mount gained through this archetype be the animal type or outsider type?

This obviously isn't for PFS since Awaken isn't a legal spell for it, and I can't imagine a GM that would rule the mount as anything other than Outsider (Phantom), at which point, no, you can't Awaken it.

[Dave Justus]

I would expect that upon awakening it would no longer be a valid phantom with someone to manifest it and therefore it would unmanifest immediately.

[Pantorts]

I don't think gaining intelligence would make it leave you, since the regular phantom has a 7 intelligence. I think it works as written, but was not intended. This Archetype suffers from a number of issues that mainly result from the starting stat block printed.

Is it supposed to be an animal, which leads to follow-up questions. Do you have to use handle animal to use it? Does it need to learn animal tricks? If your phantom mount is a wolf, does it have hoof attacks? Can it be Awakened?

The easiest solution is to make it an outsider and give it different starting stats based on what it is.

[Dave Justus]

"An awakened animal can’t serve as an animal companion, familiar, or special mount."

The ghost mount seems pretty special to me.