Ghost

• 1. Introduction

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  A ghost is the soul or spirit of a dead person or non-human animal that some people believe can appear to the living. In a 2009 study by the Pew Research Center, 18% of Americans said they had seen one. A separate Gallup poll in 2005 found that about 32% of Americans believed in ghosts at all. These are not figures from the distant past. They describe a belief that has outlasted science, religion, and reason in the present day. The overwhelming consensus of science is that there is no proof ghosts exist. Their existence cannot even be falsified, and ghost hunting has been classified as pseudoscience. So why does the figure of the wispy, chained, shrouded revenant keep returning to the living? What did the ancient Greeks fear in their cemeteries that office workers in modern China still fear at their desks? And why does the same story keep surfacing across thousands of years and dozens of cultures: the improperly buried dead who cannot rest until their bones are found?

• 2. The Anatomy Of A Spirit

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  Descriptions of ghosts vary widely, from an invisible presence to translucent or barely visible wispy shapes to realistic, lifelike forms. They may resemble humans or animals. One widespread belief holds that ghosts are composed of a misty, airy, or subtle material. Anthropologists trace this idea to early notions that the ghost was the person within the person, most noticeable as a person's breath, which in colder climates appears as a white mist when exhaled.

  The soul, in many ancient cultures, was thought to be an exact reproduction of the body in every feature, down to the clothing the person wore. The Egyptian Book of the Dead depicts deceased people in the afterlife appearing much as they did before death, including their style of dress. This raises a question the skeptic Joe Nickell sharpened centuries later: if ghosts have no body, why would their clothes survive?

  Ghosts are generally described as solitary, human-like essences. Yet stories also tell of ghostly armies and the ghosts of animals other than humans. They are believed to haunt particular locations, objects, or people they were associated with in life. They are often depicted covered in a shroud, dragging chains. The deliberate attempt to contact the spirit of a dead person has its own names: necromancy, or in spiritism, the séance.

• 3. Fury In The Word

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  The English word ghost comes from Old English gāst, meaning breath, spirit, soul, ghost. It traces back to Proto-Germanic gaistaz and has linguistic siblings in Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old Dutch, and Old High German geist. Linguists reconstruct gaistaz from a pre-Germanic root meaning fury or anger. That reconstruction is supported by links to Sanskrit hīḍ, meaning to be angry, and to Avestan zōižda, meaning terrible. The same root appears in words meaning to terrify, fear, and shivering or trembling.

  The now-prevailing sense of ghost, the soul of a dead person appearing in visible form, only emerges in Middle English in the 14th century. Before that, gāst served as a synonym for the Latin spīritus, the breath of God, recorded from the 9th century. It is why English still speaks of the Holy Ghost, from the Old English halgan gaste.

  The other words for ghost carry their own travels. Spook is a Dutch loanword that entered English via American English in the 19th century. Spectre comes from Latin spectrum, phantom from Greek phantasma, and poltergeist is German for a noisy ghost. Wraith is a Scots word of obscure origin. J. R. R. Tolkien favored an association with the verb writhe, and his Ringwraiths shaped how later fantasy literature used the term.

• 4. Feeding And Banishing The Dead

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  Ancestor worship typically involves rites intended to prevent revenants, the vengeful dead imagined as starving and envious of the living. Two strategies recur across the world's cultures. The first is sacrifice: giving the dead food and drink to pacify them. Ritual feeding of the dead appears in the Chinese Ghost Festival and the Western All Souls' Day. The second strategy is magical banishment, forcing the dead not to return.

  The custom of binding the dead before burial shows how literal that banishment could be. Bodies found in many tumuli, the burial mounds known as kurgan, had been ritually bound. The practice has persisted into modern times in rural Anatolia. In many cultures, malignant restless ghosts are kept distinct from the more benign spirits honored in ancestor worship.

  The nineteenth-century anthropologist James Frazer wrote in The Golden Bough that souls were seen as the creature within that animated the body. Belief in an afterlife and in manifestations of the dead is widespread, dating back to animism and ancestor worship in pre-literate cultures. Some people believe a ghost never leaves Earth until no one is left who remembers the person who died.

• 5. The Restless Dead Of Antiquity

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  Ghosts in Homer's Odyssey and Iliad vanished, in the poet's words, as a vapor, gibbering and whining into the earth. Homer's ghosts had little interaction with the living. They might be called upon for advice or prophecy, but they were not particularly feared. By the 5th century BC, that had changed. Classical Greek ghosts became haunting, frightening creatures who could work good or evil. The living avoided cemeteries, and the dead had to be ritually mourned or they might return.

  The ancient Greeks held annual feasts to honor and placate the spirits of the dead. Family ghosts were invited, and afterward, in the source's phrase, they were firmly invited to leave until the same time next year. The 5th-century BC play Oresteia includes the ghost of Clytemnestra, one of the first ghosts to appear in a work of fiction.

  Pliny the Younger, writing around 50 AD, recorded the most celebrated haunted house of the classical world. A house in Athens stood empty because of a ghost bound in chains. The Stoic philosopher Athenodorus bought it, set up his writing desk in the haunted room, and worked late until the chained apparition appeared. He followed it outside, where it pointed to a spot on the ground. Excavation there uncovered a shackled skeleton, and the haunting ceased once the bones were given a proper reburial. Lucian of Samosata, in the 2nd century AD, became one of the first people to express disbelief in ghosts, mocking the spirits of the departed in his satire The Lover of Lies.

• 6. Penance And Purgatory

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  Ghosts reported in medieval Europe fell into two categories: the souls of the dead, or demons. The living could tell them apart by demanding their purpose in the name of Jesus Christ. A returning soul would divulge its mission. A demonic ghost would be banished at the sound of the Holy Name.

  Most ghosts were souls assigned to Purgatory, condemned for a set period to atone for their sins, with penances suited to their transgressions. The ghost of a man who had abused his servants was condemned to tear off and swallow bits of his own tongue. The ghost of a man who had refused to leave his cloak to the poor was condemned to wear that cloak, now heavy as a church tower. These ghosts came to the living to beg for prayers that would end their suffering.

  Medieval ghosts were more substantial than the faint spirits of the Victorian age. There are accounts of ghosts being wrestled with and physically restrained until a priest arrived to hear a confession. The vast majority of reported sightings were male. There were even ghostly armies, fighting battles at night, as at Wandlebury near Cambridge, England. In 1211, during the Albigensian Crusade, Gervase of Tilbury recorded the apparition of Guilhem, a boy recently murdered in the forest, whose visits to a cousin's home near Avignon lasted all summer.

• 7. The Age Of Mediums

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  Spiritualism is a monotheistic belief system that holds the spirits of the dead can be contacted by mediums, who then relay information about the afterlife. It developed in the United States and reached its peak from the 1840s to the 1920s, especially in English-language countries. By 1897, it was said to have more than eight million followers in the United States and Europe, drawn mostly from the middle and upper classes.

  The religion flourished for half a century without canonical texts or formal organization. It held together through periodicals, tours by trance lecturers, camp meetings, and the work of skilled mediums. Many prominent Spiritualists were women, and most followers supported the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage. By the late 1880s, accusations of fraud among mediums weakened the movement's credibility, and formal organizations began to appear.

  Spiritism, the French counterpart, rests on five books written by the French educator Hypolite Léon Denizard Rivail under the pseudonym Allan Kardec. He reported séances in which he observed phenomena he attributed to incorporeal intelligence. His work was extended by writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Camille Flammarion, and Chico Xavier. Spiritism has adherents in many countries, but the largest number and greatest proportion of followers are in Brazil.

• 8. The Brain That Sees Ghosts

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  John Ferriar, a physician, argued in 1813 that sightings of ghosts were the result of optical illusions. The French physician Alexandre Jacques François Brière de Boismont went further in 1845, claiming such sightings were hallucinations. Despite centuries of investigation, there remains no scientific evidence that any location is inhabited by the spirits of the dead.

  Joe Nickell of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry lists ordinary explanations that account for hauntings: air pressure changes that slam doors, humidity that makes boards creak, condensation in electrical connections, and the lights of a passing car reflected through a window at night. Pareidolia, the innate tendency to find patterns in random perceptions, may explain why people believe they have seen ghosts. Reports of ghosts seen out of the corner of the eye may reflect the unreliability of human peripheral vision, especially late at night when a tired brain misreads sights and sounds. Ghosts, Nickell writes, behave like dreams, memories, and imaginings, because they too are mental creations.

  Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Canada speculated that changes in geomagnetic fields could stimulate the brain's temporal lobes and produce experiences associated with hauntings. Richard Lord and Richard Wiseman concluded that infrasound can make people feel anxiety, sorrow, a sense of being watched, or chills. There are biological links too. Certain toxic plants such as datura and hyoscyamus niger contain anticholinergic compounds tied to dementia, and recent research suggests ghost sightings may be related to degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer's. Common drugs including zolpidem and diphenhydramine can, in rare cases, cause ghost-like hallucinations, and people in sleep paralysis often report seeing ghosts, a phenomenon the neuroscientists Baland Jalal and V. S. Ramachandran have tied to the parietal lobe and mirror neurons.