Being that its near Halloween and I'm having a hard time finding accurate sources on this, I would like to know if any ancient historians have any information on the oldest mentioning of ghost or spirits.
Thank you.
I've heard before that Pliny the Younger wrote about a haunted house. I believe it was a letter.
That would be about 1900 years ago. I'll see if I can google up a good source.
Edit: You can read the letter here.
It is important to remember that the depictions and descriptions of the dead in literary traditions tend to differ across cultures, and modern understandings of ‘ghosts’ are a unique synthesis of long and varied traditions specific to our own cultural and social context. There is not a single definition of ‘ghost’ or ‘spirit’ that is consistent across time and space. Tales of the dead returning to converse with or haunt the living, however, are near universal in human culture, and as such tend to pre-date literary traditions. So it can be a little difficult to find the absolute earliest mention, as it requires a familiarity with a wide breadth of knowledge. I’m more accustomed to dealing with the dead in medieval society, so I am not nearly as familiar with earlier literary traditions in Mesopotamia and other centers of early writing, but using a fairly broad definition of ghost or spirit (i.e. the returned dead), it is safe to say that we have several early mentions.
Take for example, Tablet XII of the Epic of Gilgamesh, an Akkadian translation of an early Sumerian poem, Bilgamesh and the Netherworld, alternatively known as Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld. The poem is inconsistent with the rest of the cycle, Enkidu is alive at the start despite dying in earlier iterations of the epic. Anyways, Enkidu ends up trapped in the underworld and dying (again). Gilgamesh, upset with the whole state of affairs, prays to the gods, who raise up Enkidu to speak with Gilgamesh and tell him about the things he has seen in the underworld:
He [Nergal] freed Enkidu to speak once to kin and showed Gilgamesh how to descend halfway to Hell through the bowels of earth. Enkidu's shadow rose slowly toward the living and the brothers, tearful and weak, tried to hug, tried to speak, tried and failed to do anything but sob. "Speak to me please, dear brother," whispered Gilgamesh. "Tell me of death and where you are." "Not willingly do I speak of death," said Enkidu in slow reply. "But if you wish to sit for a brief time, I will describe where I do stay." "Yes," his brother said in early grief. "All my skin and all my bones are dead now. All my skin and all my bones are now dead."
Of course there are other early examples of apparitions and spirits in ancient writing. Later than Gilgamesh, though crucial to religious understandings of the dead in the Christian West, is the story of the Witch of Endor in the twenty-eighth chapter of 1 Samuel in which Saul enlists the help of a medium to contact the dead prophet Samuel (who is legitimately perturbed at being disturbed), who rises from the grave to prophecy about Saul’s approaching battle with the Philistines. The appearance of shades throughout the Homeric cycle (such as Patroclus in the dream of Achilles), are other early sources for interactions between the dead and the living.
This thread asks a similar question
Here is my answer from that thread :
The earliest "report" of a house being haunted is from [Pliny the Younger] (http://www.bartleby.com/9/4/1083.html). There is a summary on [wiki] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haunted_house). The Roman playwright Plautus wrote a comedy about three centuries prior titled [Mostellaria] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mostellaria) which translates as "The Haunted House." In the comedy, a tricky slave tries to stop the master from entering the house by saying that the house is haunted. The playfulness and lack of detail concerning the haunting by Plautus suggests that the Roman and Greek audience would have been familiar with the concept of a haunted house.