The Ghost Story is as old as The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Bible and the ancient Greeks. Originally ghosts appeared to an individual to warn of a situation. The Old Testament tells the story of the ghost of the Prophet Samuel appearing to King Saul and predicting Saul's death. Odysseus goes to the Underworld to find out from his father what is going on back home in Ithaca. The first story we hear of a haunting of a house by a ghost is told by the Roman Pliny the Younger. Shakespeare uses ghostly appearances to predict events or to seek revenge. Remember Hamlet's father. As the ghost story moved into modern times, they became creatures haunting particular places or people.
"Then I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn't no use. I felt so lonesome I wished I was dead. The stars was shining, and the leaves rustled in the wood ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me and I couldn't make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave and has to go about that way every night grieving."--Huckleberry Finn in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain, pp.239-240).
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Winchester Mystery House (door to nowhere), 525 S. Winchester Blvd. San Jose
Author: Spiel Used under CC BY-SA 3.0
Source: The world's most haunted places: Creepy, ghostly, and notorious spots.
"It was an evil house from the beginning--a house that was born bad."--Dr. John Markway, The Haunting.
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