ANCIENT GHOST STORIES.

Shannon News, 19 August 1924, Page 4

ANCIENT GHOST STORIES.

AND SPIRIT THEORIES. STORIES BADLY AUTHENTICATED. ■ Professor E. Bevan, lecturing at King's College, London, on May 23, on "Ancient Ghost Stories, and Theories -About Ghosts, ” said that though Latin and Greek literature,was packed with stories and legends of visitation, they were badly authenticated. A common ■feature of such ancient and modern: stories was that the apparitions had the same. clothes and bodily charac- , teristics as if they were ,in the flesh, though the ancients often spoke of malignant spirits which dogged the lives of people, and bore no resemblance to any known human. being. Sometimes they took the form of a preternaturally, tall, woman, but nowadays, he supposed, no one would be ■ believed who said he had seen the ghost, of Britannia. (Laughter.)

Th e stories of the angels of Mons, and of the soldiers of Marlborouga, said to have been seen* by some of our tired troops in their retreat of ten years ago, were not unlike the tale. of. the mysterious being at the battle of Marathon, who slew so many barbarians with ,a club, or that of the Spaniards, who thought they saw St. James on a white horse leading them to victory against. the Mexicans. *ln the original, the apparition which came tto Brutus’ tent with the warning, "I am thy. evil spirit, and thou shalt meet me at.Philippi,” was not . reqoided as having actually reappeared; on. that fields but Shakespeare .made it.,do so in the. guise of Julius Caesar. Pliny the younger told ,a tale of a haunted house at Athens which smacked ;of the modern ghost story. It:was a pestilential house, in which tenant after tenant; had died of fright, if he had not fled in * time, and the philosophic Athenodorus got it. cheap. To him, also, appeared the ghost, a squalid old man with bristling hair and a long beard with gyves on wrists and ankles. With a great clanking of irons the ghost beckoned the philosopher to follow him. He :did so and ' came to a spot where was unearthed a skeleton in iron fetters. After a decent burial the house was haunted no more.

In:.the olden days the present idea of; seances and table-rapping was unknown* The idea of necromancers then was to get into touch with the spirits of the past, with a view to some practical advantage in the present, and not to commune with those they had loved.