Dead men walking

All this concern over the afterlife of the dead and the existence of festivals for the dead encouraged a belief in ghosts and sightings of ghosts.   So the ghost of Darius appears on stage in the Persae of Aeschylus (line 681ff), and Plautus’ play Mostellaria takes its name from a supposedly haunted house.

In the Phaedo, Plato suggests that on death the soul is not immediately freed from its body parts and remains visible as a ghost:

We must imagine that the body parts are heavy, earthly and visible and that, as the soul still has some part of these, it is weighed down and dragged back to the visible world, flitting around monuments and tombs, where such shadowy phantoms of souls are seen.

[Phaedo, 81CD]

Horace casts a curse at witches:

When my time has come and I die, I shall come on you in the night as a Fury.   My ghost shall attack your face with crooked talons – such is the power of the ghosts of the dead.   I shall sit firmly in your restless heart and banish sleep through fear.

[Horace, Epodes, 5.91-96]

Pliny tells of a ghost which haunted a house in Athens and drove its tenants to death, such was their terror.   The philosopher Athenodorus eventually met the ghost and laid it to rest by giving it proper burial:

In the silence of the night, a noise of metal was heard and if you listened more carefully there came the rattling of chains, first at a distance and then nearby.   Soon there appeared the ghost of an old man in a terrible state of decay and dirt, with flowing beard and rough  hair.   On his legs he had shackles, on his hands chains and these he shook about.

Athenodorus followed the ghost and marked the spot where it had disappeared.   The place was dug next day and bones were found.

The bones were collected and given public burial.   From then on the house was freed of its ghost which had received proper burial.

[Pliny, Letters, 7.27]

In the Twelve Caesars, Suetonius tells a similar tale:

After his murder, the Emperor Gaius Caligula was secretly taken to the Lamian Gardens and given incomplete burial.   From that time the gardens were haunted by his ghost until his sisters at last exhumed his body and put it in a tomb.

[Suetonius, Gaius, 59]

Ovid’s Fasti has reports on the discontinuation of the celebration of the Parentalia at a time of extended warfare:

This act did not go without punishment.   It is said that the spirits of the dead left their tombs and moaned through the silent night.   Through city streets and countryside, insubstantial ghosts flocked, howling and shrieking.   As a result of this, the former rites were resumed at the tombs of the dead.