he belief in the manifestations of the spirits of the dead is widespread throughout the world, dating back to animism or ancestor worship in pre-literary cultures. Certain religious practices - funeral rites, exorcisms - as well as spiritualistic practices and magical rituals, are specifically designed to provide rest for the spirits of the dead. Their ghosts are generally described as solitary entities that haunt certain places, objects or people with whom they were related in life. Stories of ghostly armies, ghost trains and ships, and even ghost animals have also long been known in various cultures.6 7

A widespread belief in relation to ghosts, which the literature also collects, is that they are composed of a misty, aerial or subtle matter. Anthropologists link this idea to the ancient belief that the ghost was "the person within the person" (his spirit); in certain ancient cultures the ghost was identified with the person's breathing, since, especially in cold climates, when air is exhaled, the breath appears visible as a white mist.8


Chart based on researcher Sir William Crookes's description: Medium Florence Cook is on the floor, and Crookes illuminates the ectoplasm of the late Katie King.
More technically, according to American genre writer and critic Darrell Schweitzer, the ghost can appear on its own or be magically summoned. Linked to the ghost is the idea of ​​"enchantment", that is, the belief that a supernatural entity is closely related to a specific place, object or person.1 In colloquial terms, the expression ghost story can refer to any kind of scary story, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world. In a stricter sense, ghost story has developed as a short story format within the fiction of the horror genre (horror tale). It is a form of supernatural fiction and, specifically, what is known in the Anglo-Saxon world as "weird tale" (strange, unusual or scary tale), almost always with terrifying content, although humorous ghost stories are also known , and even allegorical or moralistic, in which ghosts appear, for example, as sentinels or prophets of coming events. The belief in ghosts is found in all cultures of the world, and stories about these supernatural beings are transmitted orally or in writing.1

From a psychological point of view, according to the English compilers Michael Cox and RA Gilbert, in their seminal anthology Ghost Stories of English Literature (1986, original edition), the belief in ghosts stems from the fact that 'whatever we do , the dead do not disappear. Whether we bury and isolate them or scatter their ashes, they remain in the form of ghosts in our memory and, faced with their constant presence, we have no choice but to learn to live with them. Perhaps the most effective way to accommodate them is to enclose them within stories, either as the dead and vengeful or comforting folklore, as the boring and prosaic ghosts of scientific investigation, or as the unpredictable appearances of fiction. Strictly speaking, according to the Oxford Dictionary, a ghost is "the soul of a deceased person [...] who appears to the living", but other, less precise meanings are admitted both in folklore and in narratives .9 Cox and Gilbert, on the other hand, defend a fundamental characteristic of literary ghosts: 'Ghostly protagonists must act with intent; their actions, or the consequences thereof, should be the central theme of the story, rather than the actions of the living.