GHOSTLY EVOLUTION

Pliny the Younger took the story about Athenodorus and the haunted house seriously because he heard it from people he respected. But as modern skeptical investigator Joe Nickell points out, “this hearsay story…was already a century old” before Pliny shared the tale:

It had probably been retold many times, like so many folktales. It is what folklorists call a “legend”—that is, a narrative reflecting a folk belief, in this case belief in the reality of ghosts.

In her book Haunted Greece and Rome, classical folklorist Debbie Felton describes this tale as “probably the single most famous ghost story from antiquity.” Pliny’s telling is not the only Romanera version. A century later, skeptical satire writer Lucian of Samosata had one of his characters tell an almost identical story. (See JUNIOR SKEPTIC #45 inside Skeptic Vol. 17, No. 4 for more on Lucian’s skeptical career.) Lucian’s version shared many details with Pliny’s tale: a brave philosopher in an abandoned haunted house; a calm confrontation with a terrifying ghost; and, marking the spot where the ghost disappeared and digging up bones the next morning. As in Pliny’s tale, Lucian wrote that once the skeleton was properly reburied, “from that day to this the house has never been troubled with apparitions.”

The two versions of the story are clearly related. It may be that Lucian’s tale was inspired by Pliny’s writing. Or, it may be that they both just heard the same legend. Either way, Lucian did not believe a word of it. Through his narrator character, Lucian scoffed openly at this and other “windy imaginings” of the supernatural.

Few other people shared Lucian’s skeptical views. Ghost lore swirled through Roman society, just as it haunts our own. “The Greeks and Romans had many folk-beliefs concerning ghosts,” observes Felton—enough spooky folklore to “fill an encyclopedia.” Many of those ideas “still exist in some form today, but others have disappeared from society.” For example, modern tales echo ancient stories when they say dogs can sense spirits, or feature ghosts that appear at midnight or vanish at daybreak with the crowing of a rooster. But modern ghost folklore no longer includes the idea (mentioned by Pliny’s uncle) that “spirits would not obey people with freckles, and also could not be seen by such people.”