Ancient Ghosts of the Fertile Crescent
What is the oldest ghost story you've ever heard of, not the first one you've ever heard, but the most ancient?
Before researching this article the oldest example of ghosts I knew about were the shades from Greek Mythology. The major story that comes to mind is the adventure of Orpheus and Eurydice. The earliest account comes from the Greek poet Ibycus (circa 530 BCE) though hundreds of years after the shades appear in the Odyssey, this is an early example of a spirit trying to get back to the realm of the living.
If you haven't heard it before, long story short:
Eurydice and Orpheus were completely in love. One day Eurdydice is bitten by a venomnous snake and dies. Orpheus, the son of the god Apollo and the muse of music Calliope, was so sad that when he played his lyre he was majorly bumming everyone out, even the gods. Eventually the gods were so sick of feeling depressed that they told him to go to the Underworld to plead with Hades to bring Eurydice back to life. Orpheus took on the task and met with Hades and Persephone. Orpheus played his lyre with such passion, and Persophone was so moved that she told Hades to release Eurydice, and Hades agreed. The next challenge for Orpheus was to lead Eurydice back past the mouth of the cave he entered from without turning around to look at her. Skipping to the end of the walk, Orpheus was steps away from crossing the cave's threshold when he got so paranoid about not hearing Eurydice's steps that he turned around and saw his love for just a moment before she was pulled back into the depths of the Underworld. Finishing the overall tale; with this failing the gods would not let him try again. Eventually Orpheus dies after being literally torn apart by a group of his followers and in death his spirit is finally renunited with Eurydice.
*For one of the many fuller versions*
Of course, after thousands of years, we may have expected that ending to the story. But, I wonder why he didn't hear Eurydice's footsteps behind him as he walked. Was she incorporeal, like some ghosts we know today? Or was she just very light on her feet? Chances are if you've watched horror movies in the past three decades or told certain ghost stories you've experienced the scene when the main character hears the footfalls coming up the stairs, down the hall, or leaving the wet squishy prints by the door. So, if Eurydice was a ghost and not a corporeal "zombie" couldn't she have made the conscious choice to make her presence known? Though, if she had, Orpheus would not have had to trust the gods that Eurydice was truly behind him. That, maybe, Eurydice could've returned with him after all.
But, of course, the ancient Greek city-states are not the oldest collection of cultural groups in the world, usually dated to beginning in 1200 BCE. Even the Mycenaean traditions who the ancient Greeks considered their cultural predecessors were around in c. 1700 BCE and the nearby city-states of Sumer were first developed in c. 4000 BCE.
Where can this tale intersect with folklore from other ancient cultures, or with the continuing folklore of the hungry ghost, which is represented in many East and Southeast Asian countries? Of course, not all life or death experiences are the same, so are some trapped here while others are "trapped" beyond the veil? Are the ones left here full souls that refuse or cannot move on, or are they the energy recordings of the actions of the living replaying the same message over and over? When did these ideas appear in ancient stories? That is if they were brought up at all. There is no way for me to answer the vast majority of these questions, but by looking at a few of the oldest cultures maybe I can start to grasp where the idea of the ghost came from. Was it hope? Wish fulfilment that we'd reunite with loved ones after death? That death isn't the end? We'll never really know and I won't try to answer why humans came up with the concept of ghosts. By looking at humanity's horror stories and comforts taken, we may be able to understand how the first ghosts are explained in the oldest mythologies and their importance to the living today.
Word Origins
In English, 'ghost' seems to have stemmed from the same etymological root that led to the Old German word geist, which is part of the common phrase zeitgeist meaning "spirit of the time", or more literally "time of a spirit". But the old cognates (even in other languages) aren't usually used in the context of 'the dead'. As evidence of zeitgeist, it's more a sense of a living cultural spirit or the aspects seen through popular and, typically, lasting trends. According to Orel (2023: 262) and Kroonen (2013: 163), tracking the pronunciation and symbolic meaning instead, the word "ghost" is conjectured by Allyn (2015) to connect more to the words in Pre-Germanic ghoizdoz (cognates: Old Saxon gest, Old Frisian jest, Middle Dutch gheest, Dutch geestand Proto-Indo-European root 'gheis-'), which may have been used in forming words involving the notions of excitement, amazement, but also mean fury, anger, rage, and fear. The Gothic usgaisjan has a dual meaning of "to frighten" and "an unreliable mental state" (as it appears in biblical text) (Carlson 2012: 301-2). The former would seem to have been the earlier connection to the Old English version, gæstan, which is thought to have been the usual West Germanic word for "supernatural being".
Numerous words work as synonyms for the word ghost. Some of these are spirits or souls of the dead (human or other animals), apparitions, bogies, spectors/spectres, shades, haunts, wraiths, revenants, spooks, phantoms, phanastoms, poltergeists, demons, and ghouls ("bogey". Merriam-Webster; "spook". Oxford English Dictionary; Mencken 1936, repr. 1980; Cohen 1984; "wraith". Oxford English Dictionary). Some of these names are or have been more generally used as a returning person who had died, though several of these have more meanings that cross-define other entities, depending on the situation. To keep it specific this article will focus on examples from folklore that deal with what "popular culture" classifies as "ghosts", only using other terms when quoting specific sources.
Where are the Oldest Traditions?
There isn't room in an entire book to fully discuss all of the oldest ghost stories and their connections to both ancient and/or continuing mythologies. Therefore, this series is a short list of cultural traditions and legends representing some of the oldest ghosts and showing why they existed in their respective forms.
When the northern hemisphere goes through the liminal period of space-time of the Winter solstice, when ancient tales tell us that the vale between worlds is thin, spirits can fade through to greet us, giving more and more stories to frighten us.
Figure 5. Marley's ghost appears to Scrooge. Illustration for Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol", 19th century. Universal Images Group / Getty Images
[While writing the original article I got to dive down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of ancient ghostly encounters from all over the world, from both written sources and oral traditions. I had a general list of cultural areas that I wanted to make sure to discuss and through my research spelunking and talking to friends I got caught in a tidal wave of stories. The original version of the article got longer and longer and could have, in all likelihood, taken over an hour to read even keeping each section to the barest bones. So in keeping with the old versions of Saturnalia, Yuletide, and Christmas, I've decided to extend this into a series over the next 4 weeks or so for bite-sized reading. We will explore stories of ancient ghosts from around the world, learning about how people are honored and approached in discussions after death. And maybe we can learn a little something about how we can continue to approach the rest of our lives.]
Mesopotamia (Sumeria, Babylon, and Assyria)
Moving through time and space to the Ancient Near East in the Fertile Cresent. In the "Cradle of Civilization", [really, only one of them] death is, importantly, the great equalizer. One of the Babylonian tablets tells a 5000-year-old ghost story, dating to roughly 1500 BCE. Although about half of the clay tablet is missing (the top half), the researchers who worked on it read that it was calling upon the solar god Shamash with an offering of beer to transform a ghost into a figurine (Gershen 2021). And, wonderfully, as a ghost story should, the tablet ends with the perfect ghost-story ending, the reader is told 'to not look behind you' (Gershen 2021). [Perfectly primed for a jump scare.]
Figure 6. Sun god Utu-Shamash accepts a libation. Babylonian stela, on display in the Louvre, Paris. (Claude Valette: CC BY-ND).
Gidim (gidim𒄇) in Sumerian, which was borrowed from eṭemmu in Akkadian, was the word given to the beings that were created at the time of death, with the memories and personality of the dead person (Spar, 2021). Before continuing, these beings beg the question, are they the actual peoples' spirits/souls or are they new beings that are copies? The wording is a bit ambiguous to me, and if they are just a memory or an energy recording are the original spirits in Irkalla (the Underworld), where they should have remained forever, or are they trapped "reliving" particular moments [like we can see in the Netflix series Bly Manor]. Like with the Aborigines in Australia and, as we'll see, the vast majority of human cultural traditions one of the three main reasons ghosts return to blight the living is because burial customs are not being followed or completed.
In some areas feeding the dead is a hugely important tradition. As an act that will also be followed in Egypt, if the family can't personally give food to their deceased relatives they'll pay for someone else (typically a priest) to enact the ritual for them. In the context of Mesopotamia, the implications of the ritual take on additional importance. Once a gidim is created they aren't seen as good or evil and they are meant to travel to Irkalla to have a position (job) assigned to them (Black et al 1992). If the family doesn't make regular offerings of food and drink, the ghosts could turn restless and vengeful, returning to spread illness (physical and/or mental) and misfortunes upon their living relatives which could be fixed with necromancy (Black et al. 1992; Scrurlock 2006). [The extreme case of sending care packages to children at summer camp or students who moved away for college.]
Gidim could also return because they must settle unfinished business or if they died a violent death. For whatever reason, gidim would have to sneak out of Irkalla to harass the living. Connecting to the Babylonian tablet, these were the ones that were punished by Shamash. In the underworld, they would have any of their funerary offerings taken away and given to the well-behaved gidim who didn't receive offerings from their own relations. In the mythology of the afterlife, people believed that the soul could travel in and out of Irkalla, even though souls should be there forever, and infiltrate the mortal world. Any gidim who returned for personal reasons was believed to have not found peace because they didn't receive all the proper burial rites.
[If any of this is true, I'm surprised we don't experience billions of ancient ghosts because none of them are receiving offerings, and haven't for thousands of years.]
Figure 7. Sumerian god Dumuzid is tortured by demons in the afterlife. (Public domain)
And the Akkadian tale, The Epic of Gilgamesh dates to between c. 2100-1200 BCE.
In Tablets 11-12, Gilgamesh is overcome by the death of his best friend/possible lover Enkidu so he sets out on a series of journeys to search for his ancestor Utnapishtim. Gilgamesh finds him living at the mouth of the rivers as he had been given eternal life because he survived the Noah’s Ark-like flood. Utnapishtim counseled Gilgamesh to abandon his search for immortality but tells him about a plant that can make him young again. After an extensive search and some adventure, Gilgamesh obtains the plant from the bottom of the sea in Dilmun (current day Bahrain) but a serpent steals it. Once Gilgamesh returned to his home city of Urukhaving he abandoned hope of either immortality or renewed youth. Then he finds out that all he has to do is to stay awake for six days and seven nights, but he fails and falls asleep. Out of this, the ghost of Enkidu rose “like a wind” and the two friends embraced. Gilgamish immediately questions the ghost about the condition of the dead, but Enkidu does not answer because Enkidu knew what he would reveal would only cause his friend Gilgamesh sorrow. But the last lines of the Tablet tell the lot of those who have died in various circumstances; ‘though some who have been duly buried are in better case, the fate of others who have none to pay them honour is miserable, for they are reduced to feeding upon dregs and scraps of food thrown into the street’ (Budge 1920).
This shows an early example of the dead returning to the dreams of the living, and it's a good thing. In some translations of the story, Enkidu does return fully to the land of the living, to walk with Gilgamesh, but that doesn't typically come up for us normal humans. We aren't powerful enough by ourselves or brought back by gods to talk to kings. In either case, the realm of dreams seems to be an area between the dead and the living and is often used in ancient to modern urban legends in which the dead have to relay some information about their death or to comfort their loved ones. In this way, we are shown the most important point of having ghost stories in the first place, giving hope to people who want to see their deceased loved ones again. Also, leaving out the horror aspect of being trapped in a world that we can't change.
Figure 8. Pazuzu; the king of the demons of the wind. Driving away other bad spirits and protects humans, although he is an evil spirit. Neo-Assyrian period, 911-612 BCE. (The British Museum, London).
Figure 9. Ba bird (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Even by the Predynastic period (c. 6000 - c. 3150 BCE) getting into the afterlife, called Sekhet-A'Aru or the field of reeds/rushes, and making sure that it was set up perfectly (at least for the wealthiest portion of the population) was a high priority, the idea of a ghost returning would have been seen as extremely serious (Mark 2014). This isn't a side-effect of being deemed unworthy and having your soul devoured by Amut. In that case, someone would cease to exist, this other development is much more involved. Laid out in more detail here or listen HERE, there were extensive plans and a multitude of contingency plans in case families couldn't make offerings to their dead relatives, so they wouldn't starve or go thirsty in the afterlife.
Figure 10. A wall painting from the tomb of Sennedjem depicted the deceased and his wife Iyneferti blissfully harvesting their fields in the afterlife in Deir el-Medina, near Thebes, c. 1200 BCE. ( Uploaded by Mark Cartwright 2016).
Depending on the period one looks at, there were either 5 or 9 parts of the soul (khu - in later periods). Two of these components are the Ka and Ba, the spirit's vital essence and the personality, which were combined to be the Akh or Ikhu - the immortal self, the ꜣḫ "(magically) effective one" (Allen 2000). It could have been believed that the combining process was only possible if the proper funerary rites were performed. It was causing problems for the deceased when those rites were not followed.
Ahk
This concept of the dead has varied throughout the long history of ancient Egyptian beliefs. Still, relative to the afterlife, the akh (ꜣḫ) generally represented the deceased, who had been transfigured and was often identified with light (Bolshakov 2002: 7). It was associated with thought, not as an action of the mind, but as the intellect as a living entity. The akh also played a role in the afterlife because following the death of the ẖt (physical body), the ba (bꜣ) 𓅽 and ka (kꜣ) 𓂓 were reunited to reanimate the akh. (Andrews, C., & Wasserman, J. 2008). The reanimation of the ꜣḫ was only possible if the proper funeral rites were executed and followed by constant offerings. The ritual was called s-ꜣḫ "make (a dead person) into a living akh". From this, the akh would become a roaming ghost if the tomb was not in order anymore, starting majorly in the Twentieth Dynasty. An akh could do either harm or good to people who were still alive, depending on the circumstances, such as causing nightmares, feelings of guilt, sickness, etc. and could be invoked using prayers or via written letters left in the tomb's offering chapel. For the good, the akh could help living family members by intervening in disputes and by making appeals to other dead persons or deities with more authority to influence things on earth. And the latter could be for the betterment of an individual or to inflict punishments. To keep a 'ghost' from being trapped between this world and the afterlife there needed to be a major separation of the akh. But, because there was a risk of dying again, the specific unification of the ka and ba needed to be brought about [hopefully right after death] using the proper offerings made and knowing the proper spells. Egyptian funerary literature (such as the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead) was intended to aid the deceased in "not dying a second time" and in aid of becoming an akh. (Andrews, C., & Wasserman, J. 2008).
An Egyptian Ghost Story
The story is in fragments, the beginning and ending are lost but with the continued tropes of stories, researchers fit typical story beats back in. Thus, it's implied that the story begins with an unnamed man who had to spend the night next to a tomb in the Theban Necropolis and was awakened by a ghost. The man then went to the High Priest of Amun, Khonsuemheb, and told him about his adventure.
The surviving text begins with
"Khonsuemheb calling the gods from his rooftop, in order to summon the ghost. When the ghost comes, Khonsuemheb asks his name, and the ghost claims to be Nebusemekh, son of Ankhmen and of the lady Tamshas. Khonsuemheb offers to rebuild a new tomb and provide a gilded ziziphus–wood coffin for the ghost in order to make him peaceful, but the ghost is unpersuaded by the high priest's intentions. Khonsuemheb, sitting next to the ghost, cries and wishes to share his unfortunate fate by depriving himself of food, water, air, and daylight. Then Nebusemekh tells of his past life when he was an overseer of the treasuries and military official under pharaoh Rahotep. When he died in the summer of regnal year 14 of pharaoh Mentuhotep, this ruler provided him with a canopic set, an alabaster sarcophagus, and a ten-cubits shaft tomb. However, over the centuries the tomb partially collapsed, thus allowing the wind to reach the burial chamber. He also revealed that before Khonsuemheb, others offered to rebuild his grave without actually honoring their promise. Khonsuemheb says to the ghost that he will comply with any of his requests and offers to send ten of his servants to make daily offerings at his grave, but the ghost laments that the latter idea is of no use.
"At this point, the text breaks and the next fragment reports the efforts of three men sent by Khonsuemheb in search of a suitable place to build a new tomb for the ghost. They eventually find the ideal place at Deir el-Bahari, near the causeway of the mortuary temple of pharaoh Mentuhotep II. The men return to Karnak, where Khonsuemheb is officiating, and report to him about the place they found. Then, the joyful Khonsuemheb informs the deputy of the estate of Amun, Menkau, about his plan." (Ritner, et al. 1972)
While the text ends there, Khonsuemheb likely succeeded in his plan of helping and pacifying the ghost and he was able to return to the afterlife.
This story perfectly demonstrates the ghost tropes of a haunting in a particular location, fixing any trouble with burial rites, and dealing with unfinished business. And it's helpful that these ghost tropes are in the surviving fragments. It's a bit unclear when the story was written, but we do know that it has to be after Mentuhotep II died around 2009 BCE during the 11th dynasty since the plan was to build the new tomb near the pharaoh's temple.
Ancient Egyptian ostrakon with the beginning of the Ghost story.
Terracotta from Deir el-Medina, 19-20th Dynasty, New Kingdom. Found by Schiaparelli in 1905. Turin, Museo Egizio, S.6619.
Sometimes ghosts show up to enact specific revenge. In a letter found in a tomb from the New Kingdom, a widower pleads with the spirit of his wife to leave him alone as he is innocent of any wrongdoing after experiencing a stream of bad luck. It was attributed to some "sin" he hid from his wife and now that she was all-knowing in the Field of Reeds, she was punishing him.
“What wicked thing have I done to thee that I should have come to this evil pass? What have I done to thee? But what thou hast done to me is to have laid hands on me although I had nothing wicked to thee. From the time I lived with thee as thy husband down to today, what have I done to thee that I need hide? When thou didst sicken of the illness which thou hadst, I caused a master-physician to be fetched…I spent eight months without eating and drinking like a man. I wept exceedingly together with my household in front of my street-quarter. I gave linen clothes to wrap thee and left no benefit undone that had to be performed for thee. And now, behold, I have spent three years alone without entering into a house, though it is not right that one like me should have to do it. This have I done for thy sake. But, behold, thou dost not know good from bad.” (Nardo, 32)
[The "jealous ex-girlfriend" trope rears its ugly head.]
It's lucky that, in these particular stories, the ghosts were fully formed souls. If the soul combination ritual had not gone through they wouldn't be "full". Instead, the ghosts would have returned as spirits of pure anger or vengeance, with little hope of satiating them.
Greece
The term shade was translated from the Greek σκιά and Latin umbra, both meaning shadow. This is likely alluding to the shadow of death as it was a commonly held belief in the ancient Near East that the dead resided in either the "shadowy underworld" or the divine sphere, a realm saved for the most celebrated of heroes (Plutarch 2nd century CE). The former even appears in Biblical Hebrew in which it was called tsalmaveth (צַלמָוֶת: lit. "death-shadow", "shadow of death") as an alternate term for Sheol (Ra’anan et al. 2005). But, like in Homer's The Iliad, The Odyssey, and its Roman successor, The Aeneid by Virgil, shades are typically encountered when the heroes travel to the underworld, not the other way around. They are not known to have much interaction with the living being described as vanishing forms of vapor or smoke. They, however, could also be described as substantial beings, as they looked at their time of death, complete with the wounds that killed them. (Finucane 1996: 4, 16). Ghosts in the 'classical' world were periodically called upon to provide advice or prophecy. One notable example is by the Witch of Endor in the First Book of Samuel wherein she conjures the ghost (owb) of Samuel. In any case, they do not appear to be particularly feared, just respected. (Finucane 1996).
The oldest extant (still existing) play that we know of from Ancient Greece is called Persian. Written by Aeschylus, as the 2nd part of the Dionysia trilogy, it also contains one of the oldest written ghost stories, dated to 472 BCE (Britannica 2021).
It tells the story of Xerxes' defeat at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE from the perspective of the Persians back at the palace at Susa (GreekMythology 2021). In the story, Xerxes' mother gets a premonition back at home and it's proven right when a messanger brings the news that that the Greeks won. The queen summons the ghost of her late husband Darius and he tells her that Xerxes' decision to build a bridge over the Hellespont brought his downfall as he challenged both nature and the gods. While Xerxes didn't actually die, he returns broken and humilated, as a 'shadow of his former self'. This ruining of the Persian leader fulfills Greece's victory in the long term. (Aeschylus 1921, Britannica 2021).
The play takes its plot from the actual historical event, the Battle of Salamis, only eight years before Persians was put on stage (in 472 BCE).
A great comedic and factual podcast: You're Dead to Me (on this particular battle)
It wasn’t even the first tragic play to deal with the subject; Phrynichus’ lost play, Phoenician Women, was written in c. 476 BCE. Greeks prided themselves on their famous victories against the Persian Empire. This is evident throughout the play, which is a tragedy told from the Persians' p.o.v., but contains biases and implicit venerations of Athens and the Greek culture. (GreekMythology 2021). In the play the Persian characters refer to themselves as Barbarians at least eight times. The ghost was just there to provide knowledge about an event that was currently happening, just in a different place. Seems like in some of the oldest writings ghosts were just around, not doing anything incredibly special, just around watching around the living (though generally only after being specifically summoned).
By the 5th century BCE, classical Greek ghosts had been adjusted to being haunting, frightening creatures who could work for either good or evil purposes. The spirit of the dead was believed to hover near the resting place of the corpse, and thus cemeteries were places to be avoided. The dead were to be ritually mourned through public ceremony, sacrifice, and libations, or else they might return to haunt their families. The ancient Greeks held annual feasts to honor and placate the spirits of the dead, to which the family ghosts were invited, and after which they were "firmly invited to leave until the same time next year." (Finucane 1996: 8–11).
These ritual beliefs and their traditions are encompassed within the 5th-century BCE play Oresteia includes the appearance of the ghost of Clytemnestra, one of the first ghosts to appear in a work of fiction from this region. (Trousdell 2008: 5-38).
*The Keres (Ancient Greek: Κῆρες) were female 'death fates', not ghosts. They were daughters of Nyx and were goddesses who personified violent death and were said to be drawn to bloody deaths on battlefields and were present during death and dying. (Hesiod, Theogony 211ff (trans. Evelyn-White) Greek epic C8th or C7th BCE.; Homer, Iliad (trans. Lattimore) Greek epic C8th BCE).*
Rome
The etymology of the English words haunt and haunted can be traced through words in Old English, Old French, Old Norse, and Proto-Germanic, which mean to house, to inhabit, to be familiar with, or to visit a place frequently (Tague 2012; Harper n.d). It wasn't until the 18th century that the word "haunted" was tied to ghostly activities (Tague 2012).
Hauntings and the ghosts tied to their burial location have already come into play in the classical world. One of the first Roman ghost stories that we have written records of is from Plutarch, in the 1st century CE. He described the haunting of the baths at Chaeronea by the ghost of a murdered man. The ghost's groans were so loud and frightful that the people of the town sealed the doors of the building (Finucan 1996: 13).
Another example is part of a letter sent by Pliny the Younger, sometime later in his life between 61-113 CE. It is called Letter 27 within Book 7 and was addressed to the Roman Senator Lucius Licinius Sura. Within this letter, Pliny recounted 3 stories after asking what the Senator thought about ghosts and the supernatural, like if they have forms and some form of divinity, and if they are even real or are "false impressions of a terrified imagination" (translated via VRoma Project).
"There was at Athens a large and spacious, but ill-reputed and pestilential house" (Pliny the Younger. "LXXXIII. To Sura" translated by VRoma Project).
In the dead of night, it is common to hear a noise like the tinkling of iron; at first, it seems far away, but gradually it got closer and soon a ghost appeared in the form of an extremely thin and shabby old man, with a long beard and bristly hair. He shook the shackles on his ankles and wrists. Even during the day, though the phantom did not appear, the memory of it made such a strong impression on their imagination that it still appeared before their eyes, and their terror remained when they saw it. Because of this, the house was eventually abandoned. It was judged by everyone to be completely uninhabitable; so now it was completely left to the ghost. Eventually Athenodorus the philosopher went to Athens and bought the house on the cheap. He was curious about why the price was so low and when he asked for the whole story he got inspired and devoted himself to writing the best he could. The first part of the night passed in the usual silence, then there was the tinkling of iron chains. He didn't look up, nor put down the brush, but he did cover his ears to focus his attention. Once the ghost made it to the room Athenodorus gestured with his hand that he should wait a moment, and bent down to write again, but the ghost rattled the chains over his own head as he wrote, and Athenodorus looked around and saw the ghost beckoning Athenodorus to follow, which he did after getting his lamp. The specter moved slowly as if it were encumbered by its chains, into the courtyard of the house and suddenly disappeared. So Athenodorus was abandoned and marked the spot with a handful of grass and leaves. The next day they dug a hole and found bones mixed and intertwined with chains. because the body was moldy from lying in the ground for so long, leaving them bare and corroded by the iron. The bone fragments were collected and buried at the state's expense, and once the ghost was laid to rest the house is no longer haunted. (VRoma Project).
Two Roman men who wrote about hauntings in their comedic plays were Titus Maccius Plautus and Lucian of Samosata. And Lucian was one of the first writers to express disbelief in ghosts in the 2nd century CE. In his satirical novel The Lover of Lies (c. 150 CE), Lucian relates how Democritus "the learned man from Abdera in Thrace" lived in a tomb outside the city gates to prove that cemeteries were not haunted by the spirits of the departed. Lucian relates how he persisted in his disbelief despite practical jokes perpetrated by "some young men of Abdera" who dressed up in black robes with skull masks to frighten him. (Green 1970: 14–21, Finucane 1996: 26). This account by Lucian notes the popular classical expectation of how a ghost should look, which has also persisted in Charles Dicken's Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and even until the present day.
Much later, in the 5th century CE, the Christian priest Constantius of Lyon also recorded an instance of the recurring theme of the improperly buried dead who come back to haunt the living. Once again, the haunting was only stopped when their bones had been discovered and properly reburied. (Hoare 1954: 294–5).
The lemures were shades or spirits of the restless or malignant dead in the Roman tradition that may represent the wandering and vengeful spirits of those not afforded proper burials and funeral rites by the living. Therefore they are not affected by tomb or votive inscriptions. Ovid interprets them as vagrant, unsatiated, and potentially vengeful di manes (chthonic deities thought to represent loved ones) or di parentes, (the collective ancestral gods or spirits) both of the underworld. According to Ovid, the rites of their familial/domestic cults suggest an incomprehensibly archaic, quasi-magical, and probably very ancient rural tradition. (Ovid 8 CE: 306, 309; Cirlot 1971: 181; Beard, North, & Price 1998; Fowler 2004).
Of course, as Ovid's writings suggest, at least some of these stories had already been passed around orally for decades if not centuries. These acted the same as gossip and the tales we tell around the fireside at night. We are already seeing examples of the repetitive nature of the themes in these stories [and that's not a bad thing]. Also as we've seen in the previous cultural sections, ghosts have already been documented for over a thousand years, just in different mediums. These stories are important to keep sharing because even if they aren't the oldest versions of them. It can show back-and-forth connections and cultural ties because as stories get transferred and altered over the centuries they develop in the ways most important to the people telling them. For another example of that, just look at the flood myth from The Epic of Gilgamesh and its development into the story of Noah's Ark.
*For another longer Roman story about when people thought there was ghost/vampire*
