I’ve been particularly fascinated by ghosts of late. They’ve always intrigued me to some extent—as an avid horror fan, I’ve enjoyed plenty a ghost story over my lifetime, though I haven’t played with hauntings in my fiction until the last few years. I mostly avoided them because of how widespread they already are. It’s just like dragons, vampires, or zombies—the world already has so many stories about them that they can quickly veer into tired cliches if a writer isn’t bringing something new to the trope.

One thing that sets ghosts apart from other fantastic creatures is that they’re one of the supernatural elements most likely to feature in literary fiction. From Hamlet’s father to Sethe’s daughter in Beloved, there are ample examples of hauntings across the literary canon. I see two potential reasons for this: 

1. A lot of people don’t think of ghosts as speculative. In a 2021 survey, 41% of respondents said they believe ghosts exist, a similar percentage to those who believe in demons. That’s lower than the percentage who believe aliens exist (57%) but much higher than belief in bigfoot (13%), vampires (8%), or werewolves (9%).

2. Ghosts and haunting are easy ready-made metaphors for emotions like grief, regret, loss, and nostalgia. This is reflected in our euphemistic language for these feelings—you might say someone is “haunted by the past” or that a place is “a ghost of what it once was.” Ghosts are reminders of what used to be, unchanging intrusions of the past on the present.

3. Their ephemeral nature makes it easier to insert them into a narrative. The “suspension of disbelief” factor is lower with a ghost than something corporeal because the reader has less of an expectation that it would leave physical signs and evidence. This also allows for more play between what’s real and what’s imagined by the narrator, especially in first-person narratives.

Honestly, it makes sense that ghosts cross genre borders because crossing borders is kind of their whole deal. They exist in the liminal space between life and death, and this charges them with a lot of energy at the same time it makes them very versatile tools for storytellers. 

This liminality and versatility can also make them tricky to define. The line between ghosts and other spirits varies from culture to culture, as do the ways they interact with the living and the extent to which they can influence and engage with the living world.

What exactly is a ghost?

Modern American lingo tends to frame ghosts and spirits and synonyms, but that isn’t universally the case. In most traditions, this is more of a square/rectangle situation—ghosts are a type of spirit, but not all spirits are ghosts. 

The term “spirit” can be broadly applied to any intangible being, typically one viewed as having intelligence and agency. Spirits can be connected to a place or object, though this isn’t a required defining trait. Similarly, while they can be linked to a now-deceased person, they don’t have to be—many cultures believe in nature spirits or similar forces that were never embodied in a living individual.

While the exact traits that define a ghost from other spirits vary depending on who you’re talking to, a good rough definition is a spirit that:

• Was once a living being and retains at least some memories of their life
• Is frozen in its appearance or mannerisms to the time period in which it lived
• Is unable to move between planes voluntarily, and is normally bound to a location or object that is either connected to their death or was of great importance to them in life

There are several other similar types of spectral being that overlap with spirits and ghosts in a wishy-washy and convoluted way that, again, depends greatly on who you’re talking to and what tradition they come from (which, to be fair, is fitting considering we’re talking about something that is, by definition, nebulous and formless). These include terms like: 

• Ghoul – A specifically evil spirit, often one that consumes human flesh. Ghouls may be intanigble or corporeal, and overlap as much with demons and similar creatures like goblins as they do with ghosts.
• Phantasm – An apparition that is explicitly a creation of the imagination or a hallucination of a form that isn’t there.
• Poltergeist – Roughly translating as “noisy ghosts”, these are spirits that make noise, move objects, or otherwise make themselves known to the living.
• Revenant – Any being that returns after death, either in spirit or corporeal form. This can include ghosts but also reanimated corpses like zombies.
• Shade – The spirit of a dead person that lives in the underworld.
• Wraith – A likeness of a living person seen as a faint, pale, or transparent image, often just before or after their death. Their main distinction from ghosts is that they’re sometimes not seen as entities with their own identity, but may simply be apparitions or projections of the individual’s spirit. Their appearance is also tied more to timing (around the time of a death) than to location.

…and there are other synonyms like wight, specter, and spook that generally mean the same thing as ghost, but can also have different definitions depending on the context. And this is just in English. Just about every culture in the world has some kind of ghost variant in its myths or folklore, often with its own accompanying set of lingo to refer to them. Which does lead to another question… 

Why are ghost stories so common?

If you believe in ghosts, the answer to this likely seems obvious: because they’re real and people tell stories about times they’ve encountered them. But, then again, there are a lot of real things that don’t get talked about very often. Whether they’re made up or factual, there’s no denying that ghosts capture the collective imagination more than other ideas. 

I mentioned the variety of metaphoric uses of ghosts earlier, and that definitely also contributes to their popularity in a storytelling context. Beyond this, though, a ghost can function as the physical embodiment of something from the past, allowing for characters in the story’s present to interact directly with history. Often, that history is a violent and tragic one—after all, if there’s a ghost that means somebody died, and usually not peacefully in their sleep. Ghosts give a voice to victims of violence who otherwise can’t share their story. Sometimes this is their primary purpose for existing; it’s a common trope for a ghost to haunt the place of their murder until their killer is caught, at which point they can move on to the other side.

I also see ghosts as representing a kind of community memory. In this sense, ghosts in local legends can serve a few different functions:

• To memorialize real people. Often these are people who were tragically killed, but in some cases they’re important figures from the place’s past who are now said to protect the land or the people who live there.
• To warn of danger. Ghost stories that take place on highways are often examples of this. Dangerous curves or intersections are frequently haunted by drivers who lost their life there, serving as a warning to others that they should take caution. The warning could also be more about the behavior than the place—a ghost story about a teen driving drunk, for instance.
• To acknowledge dark periods of a place’s past. An example of this would be ghosts of slaves said to haunt plantations in the South, or prisons and mental hospitals haunted by inmates. The actual people said to haunt the place may or may not have existed, but serve to keep the memory of whatever horrible treatment people endured there in the collective consciousness.

…which ties into another potential function of ghosts for fiction writers, which is that they can serve as a kind of avatar for the place they haunt. There are other ways to make a place feel like a character, too, but by giving it a ghost or two a place can gain a voice, a representative that can speak about its history and what it used to be. 

One last reason I’ll highlight for why humans find ghosts so appealing has more to do with our desire to go on after death. We want to think that we’ll continue to influence the world even after we’ve passed on. Becoming a ghost is a kind of immortality—not the one most people would choose, probably, but maybe better than nothing.

 

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#Horror #Mythology #Folklore