Ghost

Origin

The iconographic origin is the post-mortem soul belief of all the ancient civilisations of the world. From the Sumerian gidim (soul of the dead) of Mesopotamia (c. 4500-1900 BCE), the Egyptian akh (soul ascended to heaven) and ka (life force), the Greek psyche (soul) and eidolon (phantom), the Roman lar (family guardian spirit) and lemur (evil spirit), the Chinese hun-po, and the indigenous shamanism of Korea — in which the post-mortem soul wanders this world — the universal iconography settled. The decisive Western textual canon is Letter 27 of Book 7 of the Epistulae of Pliny the Younger (61-113 CE) of the late first century CE: the contemporary Greek Stoic scholar Athenodorus Cananites (74 BCE - 7 CE) lived in a cheaply rented haunted house in Athens and every night met the ghost of an old man rattling chains, finally excavating the underground burial place the ghost had pointed to — and granting the corpse a proper funeral — the decisive Western canon of the first haunted-house ghost story. Medieval English literature systematised ghost stories in the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (731) of Beda Venerabilis (672-735) and the Canterbury Tales of the fourteenth-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400), and the ghost of Hamlet's father in Shakespeare's Hamlet of 1599-1601 established the decisive canon of the English-literary ghost. Horace Walpole's (1717-1797) The Castle of Otranto of 1764 — the origin of the English Gothic novel — established the haunted-house ghost canon. Charles Dickens's novella A Christmas Carol (published 19 December 1843 by Chapman and Hall) and the ghost of Marley and the three Spirits of Past, Present, and Future are the decisive work of the Victorian ghost canon, and Henry James's (1843-1916) The Turn of the Screw of 1898 is the canon of the psychological ghost story.

Features

• Transparent or translucent form, bound to a specific place
• Poltergeist phenomena (German: 'noisy spirit', moving objects)
• Cold draught and power outage
• Manifestation through apparition, sound, and weeping
• Transmission of messages, warnings, and prophecies to the living
• Canonical resolution: departure to the afterworld when the bound circumstance is resolved

Stories

Letter 27 of Book 7 of the first-century Pliny the Younger Epistulae and Shakespeare's Hamlet of 1599-1601 are the origins of the Western ghost-literary canon, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto of 1764 established the English Gothic novel ghost canon, and Dickens's A Christmas Carol of 1843 is the decisive work of the Victorian ghost canon. After the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, began acting as mediums in 1848, the Spiritualism movement that swept the Anglo-American world in the late nineteenth century established the decisive canon of modern ghost-belief iconography of media, spirit photography, and the seance, and the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded in London in 1882, is the origin of academic ghost research. Stanley Kubrick's (1928-1999) 1980 film The Shining (released 23 May 1980 in the United States, based on the Stephen King novel, starring Jack Nicholson) — the ghosts haunting the Overlook Hotel of the Colorado Rocky Mountains — is the decisive work of the modern horror cinema ghost canon. M. Night Shyamalan's 1999 film The Sixth Sense (released 6 August 1999, starring Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment), with the line 'I see dead people', settled the twenty-first-century ghost-film canon, and Alejandro Amenabar's 2001 film The Others (released 2 August 2001 in Spain, starring Nicole Kidman) is the canon of the ending-twist ghost film. The Oiwa ghost in the 1825 Kabuki play Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan by Tsuruya Nanboku (1755-1829) is the canon of the Japanese Kabuki ghost, and the Sadako of Hideo Nakata's 1998 film Ring settled the canon of the Japanese J-Horror ghost.

Weakness

The ghost's weaknesses are: (1) resolution (haewon) of the bound circumstance — the canon of Dickens's 1843 A Christmas Carol, in which Marley's ghost departs after telling Scrooge his story; the decisive weakness in Shakespeare's 1599 Hamlet, in which the ghost of Hamlet's father departs after entrusting his son with revenge; (2) ascertainment of truth — the decisive canon since the Athenodorus canon of Pliny the Younger's first-century Epistulae that the ghost vanishes when its indicated burial place is excavated and properly buried; (3) sacred objects and rites of purification — the canonical weakness of the ghost-evil-spirit pacification by Catholic exorcism since the canon of William Friedkin's 1973 film The Exorcist (based on William Peter Blatty); (4) sunrise and the cock-crow at dawn — the canonical weakness in Act I Scene 1 of Shakespeare's Hamlet, 'It started, like a guilty thing / Upon a fearful summons'; (5) resolution of lingering attachment or promise — the decisive weakness common to East-West ghost canon, in which the living's resolution of the ghost's attachment or promise sends it to the afterworld; (6) the courteous listener — the weakness since Pliny the Younger's first-century canon, in which the ghost is softened before a sincere listener who hears its story; (7) proper burial and funeral — the East-West common pacification canonical weakness, in which the unburied ghost is pacified by proper funeral; (8) absence of physical substance — the decisive weakness that the ghost has no physical substance and therefore direct harm is limited, the canonical iconography of modern horror.

Cultural Significance

The ghost is not merely a horror icon but the canonical iconographic figure of universal human horror that traverses the post-mortem soul belief of all ancient civilisations, medieval Catholic Purgatory doctrine, Shakespeare's 1599 Hamlet, nineteenth-century British Victorian Gothic, the late-nineteenth-century Anglo-American Spiritualism, twentieth-century American horror cinema, and twenty-first-century global J-Horror. The medieval Catholic Purgatory (Purgatorium) doctrine — the post-mortem purification belief settled around the Cluny monastery in the eleventh century — is the theological foundation of European ghost belief, and after Luther's Reformation of 1517, when Protestantism abolished the Purgatory doctrine, ghost belief was degraded as superstition in Protestant England, but Shakespeare's Hamlet — the ambivalence of Catholic Purgatory doctrine and Protestant scepticism — became the decisive canon of English literature. The Spiritualism movement begun with the Fox sisters incident in New York State in 1848 — with eight million adherents in the Anglo-American world by the 1880s — settled Victorian-British Spirit Photography and the seance as the decisive cases of late-nineteenth-century Anglo-American popular culture. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded in London in 1882 by Cambridge University philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) and others — the decisive canon of academic ghost research — and its American branch (founded 1885) included William James (1842-1910) and Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). Kubrick's 1980 The Shining, Shyamalan's 1999 The Sixth Sense (worldwide box office of about 670 million dollars), Nakata's 1998 Ring, and the American 2002 remake The Ring (worldwide box office of about 250 million dollars) settled the twenty-first-century global ghost-film canon.

In Popular Culture

Pliny the Younger, Epistulae 7.27 (first century) — decisive Western canon of the first haunted-house ghost storyShakespeare, Hamlet (1599-1601) — decisive English-literary ghost canonHorace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764) — origin of the English Gothic novel ghost canonTsuruya Nanboku, Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan, Oiwa (1825) — Japanese Kabuki ghost canonDickens, A Christmas Carol (1843) — decisive Victorian ghost canonFox sisters Hydesville incident (1848) — origin of the American Spiritualism movementFounding of the Society for Psychical Research (1882) — decisive academic ghost research canonHenry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898) — psychological ghost story canonStanley Kubrick, The Shining (1980) — decisive modern horror cinema canonM. Night Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense (1999) — twenty-first-century ghost-film canon