• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Ghosts of Opposing Cultures.

A

Anonymous

Guest
I've been thinking about this for a while and would welcome other views because it's something about which I can't make my mind up.

America is a faily new country in terms of Western civilisation (about 500 years old) and all the ghosts I've heard about there are of Western origin, but there was a native population there before that of which as far as I am aware don't do hauntings.
Over here in England we've a deeper, richer history and ghosts appear to go back as far as being Roman infantrymen, probably further.

I think what I am trying to say is Are ghosts a cultural thing?
Are there native American ghosts pre-dating European arrival over there? What of other cultures?
 
I've heard several stories about American Indian ghosts. Usually it's the "oops, we've built on a burial ground" variety. Now, of course, they're building on whitey's boneyards too--there is a part of the DOT (Department of Transportation) whose job it is to remove family/small graveyards that stand in the way of the new four-lane. They try to identify and notify the families, only going back so far, and if the graves are too old, they just dig 'em up and do something with 'em.

I recently visited my wife's uncle in Cape Cod. He's got "the shine" and said that there were the ghosts of two American Indians on his property, and that they had been murdered and were still angry about it. He asked if I felt the "cold spot" and honestly, I couldn't. :(
 
Minor Drag said:
there were the ghosts of two American Indians on his property
Click to expand...

Do these ghosts come from a time before or after the whiteman arrived?
 
Actually after, RD--it was whitey who bumped 'em off!
 
Minor Drag said:
Actually after, RD--it was whitey who bumped 'em off!
Click to expand...

Yeah, this is the point I'm trying to make.
Where's all the ghosts of pre 1492 native Americans, and where's the bronze age Brits, etc.

Afterthought:
Do we need to reach a specific cultural evolution before we can become ghosts?
 
Perhaps we need specific cultural "radar" to experience them.

Interesting point. There are no stories, to my knowledge, of pre-1492 spooks stateside.
 
Red Dalek said:
where's the bronze age Brits, etc.
Click to expand...

Aren't there a number of stories of strange phenomena around longbarrows and even stone circles? Not ghosts exactly, but unspecified weirdness, mysterious lights etc?

I read somewhere that ghosts have a "life" of around 400 years and then begin to fade away.

Perhaps they fade away as memories do... which would explain why people still see Anne Boleyn but not Moll the serving girl, as there is no-one left to recall her.

I'm not saying ghosts are all in the mind, but it does seem that seeing them isn't just a passive experience, they seem to require some input from the viewer.
 
I am sure a professor saw a ghost of a bronze age horseman,some time in the 20's i think.As for the queen-serving girl thing,may it not be because if someone is lucky enough too see a female ghost in an ancient building they will say it was a queen, because they are of more interest then servant girls... :cry:
On a slight side note i read a book once, in which a ghost investigator said people from Asia where more accepting of ghosts and more likely to see them and that Germans where much less accepting of ghosts, and thus less likely to see them,anybody think that is true?
 
Books available free from Project Gutenberg:

Greek & Roman Ghost Stories - Lacy Collison-Morley (1912).
Indian Ghost Stories - S. Mukerji (1914).

I also have one from Japan but can't locate it at the moment. It doesn't answer the pre 1492 question per se, but there are books out there of ghosts of different cultures.
 
Interesting discussion.

There's quite a famous ghost story in England of a man driving along and noticing someone riding a horse alongside the road. Then they noticed there was no modern riding tackle on the horse of any sort, and the chap riding I think had a spear (not sure about that bit), and seemed to be dressed in animal skins or something that made them think bronze age. Turned out he had been seen in the same place before, which was quite near an old long barrow.

I think that's the only pre-Roman ghost I've come across in the books I have though.
 
Don't, or didn't people of many indigenous cultures communicate with their (dead) ancestors?
I have had a couple of Aboriginal friends over the years who have been quite particular in terms of what they will and won't do because of their spiritual ancestors.

Someone told me that there is said to be an angry Aboriginal spirit around the area that I work. That's all I know sadly and who knows how that story began. A person told me this after I fell down some stairs once. I really could not work out how I came to fall. They said I must have been pushed by it :?
 
I've posted before about a conversation I had with a french work colleague who was fascinated by the english interest in ghosts.
I asked him to tell me some french ghost stories and he said there weren't any.

I hmmmd a bit and from memory could think of the time-travelling ladies at Versailles and the couples in the hotel that didn't exist...but these were english abroad. I asked him WHY there were no ghosts in France and he said that it was probably that the Revolution instilled a more rational thought and superstitions were done away with. (Or maybe they didn't want to have hundreds of headless aristocratic phantoms moping about.)

Looking into it a little bit closer, Britanny is probably the spookiest but I guess that may be down to Celtic roots and that underlying prescence of the Underworld as a motif.
 
Aztec ghosts

If I remember right, the Aztecs believed that the spirits of women who had died in childbirth haunted crossroads and were thought to have been quite dangerous - I'll have to dig a book out.
 
I remember reading a (rather dull) book on Roman ghosts. there was a cultural difference in that the spirits tended to have unfinished business or a request and were quite corporeal. I think one ghostly barber even gave his former master a shave! We don't tend to see the sort of spirits popular in Victorian times - monks, ghostly carriages and seem to report more 'ordinary people'. This all suggests that the 'weird stuff' happening either outside or inside our brains gets reinterpreted according to your culture.

Maybe what we might see as a headless RAF airman another culture might see as an animal guardian?
 
And maybe what we see as a lady in grey would be a fairy in the middle ages?
 
I know at least 2 grey lady ghosts from my neck of the woods. Both acquainted and attached to grand houses. If I was a cynic, and lived in an earlier time rife with superstition, I would employ them as staff in my Grey Lady Security Systems company.
 
After the 2004 tsunami, weren't a bunch of locals terrorized by ghosts of foreigners (i.e. westerners), to the point that some places became no-go areas. Feeling haunted by entities of an alien culture must be pretty threatening.
 
Re: Aztec ghosts

SimonBurchell said:
If I remember right, the Aztecs believed that the spirits of women who had died in childbirth haunted crossroads and were thought to have been quite dangerous - I'll have to dig a book out.
Click to expand...

A proto-version for La Llorona? Interesting...
 
jimv1 said:
I asked him WHY there were no ghosts in France and he said that it was probably that the Revolution instilled a more rational thought and superstitions were done away with. (Or maybe they didn't want to have hundreds of headless aristocratic phantoms moping about.)
Click to expand...

It's a good explanation, yes. But what about many ghost stories that are still part of the parisian folklore?

Let's consider the case of the Red Man of Tuileries, for instance :

http://www.suite101.com/content/nap...ignores-his-little-red-man-of-destiny-a289862

There are plenty of links, in french, about parisian ghost folklore...
 
Perhaps the reason ghosts fade after a certain time is that the places they were familiar with in life are gone. Difficult for a antebellum gray lady to glide down the hallways of her former plantation, if it was torn down in 1915.

The ghosts from pre 1900 that do still make appearances seem to be attached to the place of their death because of a traumatic event which would seem to be the bond that keeps them there, such as Gettysburg.
 
chicorea said:
jimv1 said:
I asked him WHY there were no ghosts in France and he said that it was probably that the Revolution instilled a more rational thought and superstitions were done away with. (Or maybe they didn't want to have hundreds of headless aristocratic phantoms moping about.)
Click to expand...

It's a good explanation, yes. But what about many ghost stories that are still part of the parisian folklore?

Let's consider the case of the Red Man of Tuileries, for instance :

http://www.suite101.com/content/nap...ignores-his-little-red-man-of-destiny-a289862

There are plenty of links, in french, about parisian ghost folklore...
Click to expand...



Ah....but the introduction gets to the nub of my very point.

Napoleon, like many people from Corsica, had grown up with stories of ghosts and vampires. His nurse, Ilari, chanted incantations over him to protect him from demons and he believed in omens and good luck charms.
Click to expand...
 
jimv1 said:
Ah....but the introduction gets to the nub of my very point.

Napoleon, like many people from Corsica, had grown up with stories of ghosts and vampires. His nurse, Ilari, chanted incantations over him to protect him from demons and he believed in omens and good luck charms.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

But JimV1, the origin of the Homme Rouge is parisian an way older than Bonaparte ; It"s a certain Jean l"Ecorcheur, murdered under Catherine de Medicis orders. So, a legitimate parisian. :)

Looking for more details on this subject all over the internet, I stumbled pn a page that formulates the same hypotesis that I posted elswhere on this same thread, about the similarities between Aztec hauntings and La Llorona,a contemporary mexican urban legend / ghost. The page was in spanish. Again, on the subject of ghosts in Paris, the links that I found were in (surprise!) french.

What if the problem here is a language bareer ? Maybe there were lots of ghost stories all over France, South America, East Europe, Asia, that are becoming forgotten because they are written down on their original languages ? Not to mention oral traditions and family stories that vanishes with the time.
 
Well, I worked with a girl from Thailand a few years back and she told me that in Asia ghosts are considered as real as anything else we call normal.

However, having grown up in a German family they were a non-event. Realm of fantasy. Bah Humbug.

But being Catholic, we got to witness the miraculous transformation of wine into blood every Sunday. Now THAT was real... :roll:
 
jimv1 said:
I've posted before about a conversation I had with a french work colleague who was fascinated by the english interest in ghosts.
I asked him to tell me some french ghost stories and he said there weren't any.
Click to expand...

I'm a bit surprized that he has never heard of any ghost stories in France. In the 80s and the 90s, there were some mini-frenzies in the press relating to stories of phantom hitch-hikers. Identical with those reported in Britain and North America. Until the 80s at least, I remember that some poltergeist cases had been reported. In 1979 or 1980, a case of supposedly spontaneous fires in Sauron in the South-West had attracted media attention for days (they were later blamed on a young person, although as often in such cases, it didn't satifactorily adress all observed phenomena). But it is true that in the recent years, the interest has dropped dead.

jimv1 said:
Looking into it a little bit closer, Britanny is probably the spookiest but I guess that may be down to Celtic roots and that underlying prescence of the Underworld as a motif.
Click to expand...

There seems indeed to be a cultural influence. Not that there are necessarily more ghosts in Brittany, but they are more reported. A map of phantom hitch-hikers shows that they are more common in the North-West.
 
Tapeloop said:
Interesting discussion.

There's quite a famous ghost story in England of a man driving along and noticing someone riding a horse alongside the road. Then they noticed there was no modern riding tackle on the horse of any sort, and the chap riding I think had a spear (not sure about that bit), and seemed to be dressed in animal skins or something that made them think bronze age. Turned out he had been seen in the same place before, which was quite near an old long barrow.

I think that's the only pre-Roman ghost I've come across in the books I have though.
Click to expand...

Reading an excellent book at the moment and came across this story. Although it doesn't give a source the other stories in it are very well researched and quoted in their original texts and speech. I'm going to recommend it on the book thread when I'm finished.

A Doctor Clay, in the winter of 1927 was driving along the B3081 road from Cranbourne to Sixpenny Handley, in Dorset and had just passed Squirrel's Corner. He saw the horseman to his north east and could see no bridle or stirrups for the rider. The horse had a wild mane and tail and the rider had long bare legs wearing a long loose cloak, he came close enough to see the face but no features were visible. He was threatening the Doctor with an implement he waved in his right hand. Two girls on bikes in the late 20's reported to police they were terrified by a horse rider who rode soundlessly beside them on the same stretch of road.

Anyone in Dorset...with a car...and a good camera?
 
I had a ghostly horse experience in Dorset :) We were staying in converted stable block that belonged to a hotel in Dorchester and I was kept awake all night by the horses clopping on the cobblestones and their horsey accoutrements jingling. It was only in the morning when we went out that I twigged as the entire outside area was the hotel carpark it was highly unlikely that noisy horses were around.

Maiden Castle, on the outskirts of Dorchester, has a wonderfully rich atmosphere, and there's loads of Roman history around there.
 
chicorea said:
Maybe there were lots of ghost stories all over France, South America, East Europe, Asia, that are becoming forgotten because they are written down on their original languages ? Not to mention oral traditions and family stories that vanishes with the time.
Click to expand...

Well, as far as I know the original languages of the regions you mention are not being forgotten: you simply cannot read them, which is a different issue. :) It's more accurate to say that ghost stories, if ever there were as many in continental Europe, have gone the way of the horse carriage and the windmill. Btw, never heard of all these Paris ghost stories before: just imagine the use that could be done if the Paris catacombs were in London.

That said, being Spanish and knowing quite well French and Italian literature and folklore, I can tell you that in no other place in Europe ghost stories are such as important part of national culture as they are in the UK. You can hear the occasional creepy story here and there outside the isles, but the ghost population in Britain is by far the largest. Ghost tales are part of the British traditions in a manner that is not currently found elsewhere in Europe.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top