Halloween is almost here! Last weekend’s shift to daylight savings time means that the world seems a whole lot darker than it did just a few days ago, inducing a spooky mood in all of us here at Eternally Cool. For that reason, we’ve decided to celebrate Halloween – a decidedly non-Roman holiday – by showcasing Rome’s scary side for the next few days.
We start our Haunted Rome series with an interview with Dr. Debbie Felton, a Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. A fan of ghost stories since she was child, Dr. Felton began digging into the Greek and Roman horror stories when she was working on her doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She wrote her dissertation on haunted-house stories from Rome and Greece and later revised and expanded the dissertation into a book, Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity.
We asked Dr. Felton if she’d be willing to answer a few questions about ancient Roman ghosts and ghost stories and she was kind enough to agree. Her commentary is fascinating and so we’re excited to share this interview with our readers:
Did the ancient Romans believe in ghosts?
A very difficult question! Although the ancient Romans told ghost stories, it’s impossible to state with any certainty that they definitely believed in ghosts. Most likely some did and others didn’t, same as today. Their belief in ghosts would have been connected to their belief in a spirit world and an afterlife; if you believed in the latter, you were likely to believe in the former.
Whether individual Romans believed in ghosts or not, we do know that there were state-sanctioned holidays to honor and appease the spirits of the dead. The Roman poet Ovid, in his work the Fasti, describes the Roman festivals for the dead. There were two main festivals: the Parentalia and the Lemuria. The Parentalia refers to a period that began on February 13 (which is our equivalent date) and lasted at least ten days, during which business basically shut down—temples were closed for the festival, no fires burned on any altars, no marriages were contracted, and so on. The name of this festival indicates that this was a period to commemorate dead kinfolk, though the rituals of the Parentalia were conducted at the grave site and not at the family home.
The Lemuria took place over three days in the Roman equivalent of our month of May. This was another festival for bringing offerings to the spirits of ancestors, but it took place in people’s houses instead of in the cemeteries, because the ghosts were believed to return to their old homes for the days of this festival. The ritual to appease the ancestral ghosts involved the head of the family walking through the house in the middle of the night with bare feet (to acknowledge that corpses were buried with bare feet) and throwing black beans over his shoulders saying, “With these beans I buy back myself and my family”. Then the head of the family would clash bronze pans or cymbals together (this would drive the ghosts away) and say, “Spirits of my ancestors, depart!” Supposedly this ceremony would lay the ghosts to rest for the year.
These rituals for the dead generally also included leaving food offerings for the dead, in the hopes that the spirits would not trouble the family. Although our modern Halloween descends directly from the Celtic festival of Samhein, the idea of offering “treats” to the spirits to prevent them from harassing the living by pulling “tricks” does seem to be reflected as far back as the Roman rituals.
Was the belief in ghosts thought to be a superstitious one or did people in the Roman world commonly accept the presence of ghosts?
For this question, too, there is not a black-and-white answer. It’s difficult to say whether people who believed in ghosts were mocked for their beliefs and labeled as superstitious. There were certainly specific Greek and Roman authors in antiquity who satirized people for being overly superstitious and gullible—the authors Theophrastus and Lucian come to mind—but there does seem to have been a pervasive uncertainty, at the very least, as to whether the spirit might survive the body. The Roman writer Pliny the Younger, who was well regarded by his contemporaries, recorded several ghost stories, but does not seem to have held any strong specific religious beliefs about an afterlife. He sends some ghost stories in a letter to a friend of his, asking his friend’s opinion:
I should very much like to know whether you think there are such things as ghosts, and whether they have their own shapes and some divine existence, or whether they are unreal images that take their form from our own anxieties. (Letter 7.27)
Did the Romans believe – as we often do – that ghosts were the spirits of the deceased?
Yes. Finally, a question with a definite answer! And the most frequently given reason for ghosts to appear was the lack of a proper burial for the person’s body, which tended to be the case when a person was murdered, or buried hastily, or simply died unnoticed. The person’s spirit could not rest otherwise. Many of the ancient ghost stories end with the ghost disappearing once the body is given the proper burial rituals. The spirits might even be grateful for such burial. One such story of the Grateful Dead is told by Cicero, in his work On Divination:
[The poet] Simonides, having seen the body of an unknown man lying unburied, buried him. He then planned to go on a sea voyage, but was warned not to go by a vision of the man whom he had buried. The vision told him that if he were to go on the sea voyage, he would perish in a shipwreck. And so Simonides did not go, but those who sailed perished. (1.27)
Did the Romans think of cemeteries and burial places as spirit-filled and spooky sites?
Not necessarily. There’s some indication that, in general, you wouldn’t want to hang around cemeteries at night, but because anyone buried in a cemetery had presumably been given a proper burial, they weren’t known as particularly haunted places. Very few restless spirits in a cemetery. It’s only on the days of those festivals I mentioned earlier that the spirits of those buried might come out to visit the living.
We know that you published a book called Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity and are working on another book called Things That Went Bump in the Night: Strange Stories from Ancient Greece and Rome. Would you be willing to share with us a ghost story from the ancient Roman world?
Here’s my favorite ghost story, about a haunted house. It’s from the same Letter of Pliny the Younger I mentioned before:
In Athens there was a large and roomy house, but it had a bad reputation and an unhealthy air. Through the silence of the night you could hear the sound of metal clashing and, if you listened more closely, you could make out the clanking of chains, first from far off, then from close by. Soon there appeared a phantom, an old man, emaciated and filthy, with a long beard and unkempt hair. He wore shackles on his legs and chains on his wrists, shaking them as he walked. And so the inhabitants of this house spent many dreadful nights lying awake in fear. Illness and eventually death overtook them through lack of sleep and their increasing dread. For even when the ghost was absent, the memory of that horrible apparition preyed on their minds, and their fear itself lasted longer than the initial cause of that fear. And so eventually the house was deserted and condemned to solitude, left entirely to the ghost. But the house was advertised, in case someone unaware of the evil should wish to buy or rent it.
There came to Athens the philosopher Athenodorus. He read the advertisement, and when he heard the low price, he was suspicious and made some inquiries. He soon learned the whole story and, far from being deterred, was that much more interested in renting the place. When evening began to fall, he requested a bed for himself to be set up in the front of the house, and he asked for some small writing tablets, a stylus, and a lamp. He sent all his servants to the back of the house, and concentrated his mind, eyes, and hand on his writing, lest an unoccupied mind produce foolish fears and cause him to imagine he saw the ghost he had already heard so much about.
At first, as usual, there was only the night silence. Then came the sound of iron clashing, of chains clanking; yet Athenodorus did not raise his eyes or put down his stylus. Instead he concentrated his attention on his work. Then the din grew even louder: and now it was heard at the threshold—now it was inside the room with him! Athenodorus turned, saw, and recognized the ghost. It was standing there, beckoning to him with its finger as if calling to him. Rather than answering the summons, he motioned with his hand that the ghost should wait a while, and he turned back to his writing. The ghost continued rattling its chains right over the philosopher’s head. Athenodorus looked around again: sure enough, the ghost was still there, beckoning as before. With no further delay, the philosopher picked up his lamp and followed the phantom. The specter walked very slowly, as if weighed down by the chains. Then it walked to the courtyard of the house and suddenly vanished, abandoning its comrade. Athenodorus, now alone, plucked some grass and leaves to mark the spot where the ghost had disappeared. In the morning he went to the local magistrates and advised that they order the spot to be excavated, which they did. Bones were found, entwined with chains—bones that the body, rotted by time and earth, had left bare and corroded by the chains. These bones were gathered and given a public burial. After these rites had been performed the house was no longer troubled by spirits.
What I particularly like about this story is how timeless it really is. Take out the words “Athens” and “Athenodorus” (and, I suppose, “writing tablets” and “stylus”) and this story could have taken place anywhere at any time. Pliny actually says he heard it somewhere, so he apparently recorded a story that had been circulating in society for a while via an oral tradition. He just added a literary touch to it. And the story has a nice air of mystery about it: we never do find out exactly what happened—why or how the man died, why his skeleton was in chains, buried in the courtyard. The story leaves a lot to our imagination.
Did the Romans live peacefully with their ghosts or did they attempt to exorcise them? If they did try to exorcise them, do we know anything about what the rituals were?
The ancient concept of exorcism was pretty specific, rather like today: an exorcism might be necessary if a person were possessed by a spirit. The Greek shaman Apollonius of Tyana (first century A.D.) was known to perform successful exorcisms. A man names Eleazar was said to have performed many exorcisms, delivering men of the spirits that possessed them, and doing so in front of the emperor Vespasian. Jesus and Paul, of course, were known for performing the occasional exorcism. But it’s always on people, not places.
Although haunted places could be purged of their ghosts by proper burial of the spirit’s corpse—a process known as “laying the ghost”—there’s virtually no information on exorcism rituals in ancient Rome being performed on places instead of on people. You can contrast this with stories from medieval times, such as that of St. Francis helping to drive demons out of the city of Arezzo during the war there. The demons flee, and the citizens can return to their business in peace.
You’ve told us that there are no known haunted sites in the ancient city of Rome. Are there any specific sites elsewhere in the ancient Roman world that were believed to be haunted? If so, could you give us an example or two?
The sites in the stories usually don’t get much more specific than “a house” or “the baths” and, interestingly, most of the locations are Greek rather than Roman: Athens, for example, or Corinth. One of the most specific references to a haunted place is the Greek writer Pausanias’s claim that the battlefield at Marathon was haunted by the ghosts of warriors who had died there. But the Roman writer Suetonius, in his biography of the emperor Augustus, says that a room in Augustus’s childhood home, a villa near Velitra, was rumored to be haunted:
“Because of an old rumor, no one dares enter the room unless it is necessary. . . . It is as if a certain horror and dread prevent those approaching casually from entering.. The reason for this dread was recently made plain: for when the new owner of the villa, whether by chance or to tempt fate, decided to sleep in the bed in that room one night, after a few hours he was thrown out of the bed by a sudden unknown force.”
Your research and writing is focused on ghost stories from all periods – not just the ancient world. Would you tell us how you became interested in ghost stories and why you find them so compelling?
I’ve been interested in ghost stories since I was very young; I think it was my father who introduced me to them, and his enjoyment of ghost stories influenced me. There’s something about the mysterious and often never entirely explained phenomena that is spookily attractive. And it’s interesting to speculate as to the existence of ghosts, and whether their existence might be proof of the survival of the spirit after death. I can’t honestly say that I believe in ghosts, but I would like to believe in them.
