Strange. Just as people were putting out the above few posts, I was reading a short story by Anton Chekhov called The Black Monk. (!893)
At a bit of a stretch, you could call it a ghost story. The thing is, there is no tradition of ghost stories in Russian literature in quite the same way as there is in English literature. What ghost stories there are - starting with Pushkin's `The Queen of Spades` - tend to be allegorical or psychological (but no less interesting because of that).
In this story, a scientist-cum- philosopher, recovering from nervous strain in the mansion of an acquaintance, receives visitations from a mysterious black monk who informs the man that he has a special role in the spiritual development of mankind.
Both the characters in the story and the narrative treat the incidents as hallucinations and the protagonist eventually gets psychiatric treatment. Chekhov was a doctor by trade and may have had a case of delusional megalomania in mind. You can still read the tale as a ghost story though, as it's quite ambiguous.
The origins of the Black Monk myth (which predate the hallucinations) are given in the story as follows:
A thousand years ago a certain monk, dressed in black was walking across a desert -somewhere in Syria or Arabia....A few miles hence from where he was walking a fisherman saw another black monk slowly moving across the surface of the lake. This was a mirage....The mirage produced another one. This second mirage produced a third, so that the image of the black monk began to be transmitted endlessly fro m one end of the atmosphere to the other. (p-47, Chekhov, Anton, Penguin Classics: A Nervous Breakdown: London, Random House UK,, 2004).
What I can't tell you is whether this is some intriguing urban myth that was knocking around in Chekhov's day, or whether Chekhov himself just made it up for the purpose of his story and whether it was meant to represent a fantasy cooked up by the protagonist himself as a part of the onset of his madness.
