Ghosts and hauntings

The teaching

As the ghost lore of Greece, Rome, China, Japan and the faiths teaches it.

Who walks

The dead who walk, in nearly every tradition, are those whose passage went wrong. They died before their time, or by violence, or far from home; they lie unburied or unmourned; they have no one to feed them; or they left something undone, a debt, a wrong, a secret, a promise. A ghost, in this teaching, is someone who cannot yet go on, and the cure is to give them what they lack.

The Greeks taught that the unburied cannot cross into the house of the dead. In the Iliad the ghost of Patroclus comes to Achilles in his sleep and begs to be buried quickly so that he may pass the gates of Hades, and in the Odyssey the young Elpenor, who fell from a roof and was left unburied, asks Odysseus to burn him and raise a mound with his oar set upon it. The spell books of Roman Egypt name the restless dead plainly: the untimely dead, the violently dead and the unburied.

Rome: the Lemuria

The Romans called the restless dead lemures, and on three nights of May, the ninth, eleventh and thirteenth, the father of each house laid them to rest. Ovid gives the rite. At midnight he rises barefoot and makes a sign with his thumb between his closed fingers, so that no shade may meet him in the silence. He washes his hands in spring water, turns, takes black beans and throws them behind him without looking, saying nine times: with these beans I redeem me and mine. The shade is thought to gather them and to follow unseen.

Then he touches water again, clashes bronze, and asks the shade to leave his house; when he has said nine times “Manes exite paterni,” shades of my fathers, go out, he looks back, and the rite is done. The ghost is not fought. It is paid, gently, and sent on its way.

China: the hungry ghosts

Chinese teaching gives each person two souls: the hun, which rises at death, and the po, which stays with the body. A dead person given burial and offerings by their descendants becomes an ancestor; one who died badly or has no one to feed them becomes a gui, a ghost, and in Buddhist teaching some are reborn as hungry ghosts, whose food turns to fire in their mouths. The Zuo zhuan records the minister Zichan's judgement on a ghost that terrified a city: a ghost that has somewhere to return to does no harm. He gave the dead man an heir to make offerings, and the haunting ended.

In the seventh lunar month the gates of the underworld are said to open and the wandering dead to roam. Families set out food and burn paper offerings at their doors and in the street, the front row of seats is left empty at the open-air operas played for the dead, and lanterns are floated on water for the drowned. On the fifteenth day comes the Ghost Festival, which Buddhists keep as Ullambana, from the story of the monk Mulian, who freed his mother from the realm of hungry ghosts by offering food to the community of monks. Many families avoid moving house, marrying or swimming in that month.

Japan: the yurei

The Japanese ghost, the yurei, wears the white kimono of burial, with long black hair let loose, hands hanging limp, and often no feet. It is held to the world by a strong feeling at death: love, jealousy, grief or rage. The onryo is the vengeful ghost of one who was wronged, as the murdered Oiwa returns to her faithless husband in the Yotsuya tale; the ubume is a mother who died in childbirth, seen carrying her baby; and Okiku, drowned in a well over a broken plate, rises at night to count the plates and cries out at the ninth.

The remedy is memorial and right settlement: a Buddhist service for the dead, the kuyo, a grave set right, a wrong acknowledged. In the old tale of the peony lantern a priest gives a young man paper charms written with sutras to paste over his doors, and the ghost of the woman who loves him cannot pass them until a servant, bribed, takes one down. The ghosts of the drowned who rise around boats and ask for a ladle are given one with no bottom, so that they cannot fill the boat.

Christian Europe: the souls that ask for prayers

Medieval Catholic teaching held that the souls in purgatory may, by God's leave, appear to the living to ask for help: Masses, prayers, alms, or the righting of a wrong they did in life. Gregory the Great tells of a deacon who appeared after his death serving in the hot baths and was freed by a bishop's prayers, and of a monk released after thirty days of Masses offered for him, from which comes the custom of thirty Masses for the dead. In these stories the dead want something, and it is always a debt of prayer, a wrong to put right, or a rite left undone.

The Reformers denied purgatory, and with it the returning dead. An apparition, they taught, is an angel, a devil in disguise or a delusion, and never a soul come back; King James wrote that the spirits that haunt houses are devils. Hamlet stands between the two teachings when he meets his father's ghost: “Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell.”

The Torah and the Qur'an

The Torah forbids seeking out the dead: there shall not be found among the people one who consults with familiar spirits, a wizard or a necromancer. When King Saul, refused every other answer, has the woman at Endor bring up the prophet Samuel, the dead man's only words are a rebuke and a sentence of doom. Later Jewish folk belief knows the dybbuk, a wandering soul that cleaves to a living person, and the ibbur, a righteous soul that joins one to help; a dybbuk is sent on by a rabbi with a quorum of ten, with psalms and the shofar, in a rite that seeks the soul's own repair.

Islam teaches that between the dead and this world stands a barrier, the barzakh, until the Day of Resurrection: the Qur'an tells of the dead man who begs to go back and do the good he left undone, and is refused. In the common teaching the souls of the dead do not wander among the living, and what appears in their likeness is a jinni, perhaps the companion who knew the person's life.

The troubled house

A noisy spirit in one household, the poltergeist, has been explained in turn as a devil, as the work of a witch and as a soul in need. The faiths answer a troubled house with their ordinary rites: a blessing of the house with holy water, prayers and psalms, the reading of scripture, and a steady household, and the careful in every tradition look first for the plain cause. Every answer the traditions give a ghost is remembrance, rest and right dealing; none of them is pursuit.