Fascinated with Ghosts

Our fascination with ghosts surely go back till the dawn of time. Stories of spirits that have come back from the realms of the dead to haunt the places they have left behind have been told since ancient times. Ghost stories feature prominently in the folklore of most of the world's cultures and communities. Many of those stories involve tales of those who have died violently, or young, or have suffered mysterious deaths. And we just love to exchange these stories: originally around the fire when communities came together to talk at the end of the day, and more recently on film and video games as well as books and online.

What ghosts are and whether they are real or not is open to interpretation. My view is that it really is up to the individual whether to believe in them or not. What I love about "ghosts" is the infinite number of stories that exist, that have been told and that are still waiting to be plucked out of the imagination of story tellers world wide.

Possibly the earliest recorded ghost story was the story of King Saul and the witch of Endor written in the Old Testament (Samuel 28:3 - 25) which was written in approximately 930 BC. With Israel at war with the Philistines, King Saul seeks guidance from God. God, however, sends no message to Saul who, at a loss, sought the help of a medium or "witch" who succeeded in calling up the spirit of Samuel. Samuel's ghost tells Saul that because of his disobedience to God, his kingdom would be torn from his grasp and delivered to David. The calling up of the dead by the living rarely has a good end, or, indeed, a happy ending and is a regular motif of popular ghost stories.

Ancient Rome had its own storytellers, one of the most well-known of which is Pliny the Younger who wrote to a fellow Roman official, Lucius Licinius Sura, that he had heard of an apparition of told man with a long beard rattling chains, haunting a house in Athens. He said that this ghost so terrified those who lived in the house that they left the property and no-one would either buy or rent it. Eventually, a philosopher, Athendorus, took up residence in the house but found himself unable to concentrate on his writing because of the terrifying sounds of rattling chains and the moans from the ghost. Eventually he follows the apparition to where it walked outside the house to the spot where the ghostly figure disappears. Athendorus then ordered the ground to be dug up at that spot and there he discovered the corpse of a man wrapped in chains. He ordered the corpse to be given a proper burial and it is said that the ghost was never again seen at the house. A delightful, early version of the "haunted house" story, and you can read a translation here:

Haunted House in Ancient Athens

 Other Roman writers, such as Plautus and Lucien also were known for writing ghost stories. Since stories have existed in oral form for centuries before they were ever written down, this gives us a pretty good timescale for just how embedded in the human psyche these stories are. 

At Halloween and throughout the winter, we love to tell ghost stories.