Ghosts

Ghosts are a popular traditional Halloween costume (partly because its so easy to create a ghost costume with a white bedsheet!). Halloween is traditionally the most haunted night of the year, when the barriers are down between the Earth and the Spirit World, and when the ghostly spirits of the dead may walk among the living.

Ghost scares children - Halloween
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Ghosts are the apparitions of the dead. A ghost is often thought to be the spirit or soul of a person who has remained on Earth after death. Every culture in the world carries stories about ghosts, but its beliefs vary substantially across time and place, with disagreements both as to what ghosts are and whether such things exist in reality.

Ghosts are often depicted of a human size and shape, but typically described as "silvery", "shadowy", "semi-transparent", "fog-like", or similar. Sometimes they do not manifest themselves visually, but in terms of other phenomena, such as the movements of an object, spontaneous throwing of a lightswitch, noises etc., which supposedly have no natural explanation.

In the West, those who believe in ghosts sometimes hold them to be souls that could not find rest after death, and so linger on Earth. The inability to find rest is often explained by unfinished business, such as a victim seeking justice or revenge after death. Criminals sometimes supposedly linger to avoid Purgatory or Hell. It is sometimes held that ghosts reside in Limbo, a place, according to non-orthodox Catholic doctrine, between Heaven and Hell where the souls of unbaptized infants go.

In Asian cultures (such as China), many people believe in reincarnation. Ghosts are those souls that refused to be 'recycled' because they have unfinished business similar to those in western belief. Exorcists can either help a ghost to be reincarnated or blow it out of existence. In Chinese belief, apart from being reincarnated, a ghost can also become immortal and become a demigod, or it can go to hell and suffer for eternity, or it can die again and become "ghost of ghost".

Both the West and the East share some fundamentals about ghosts. They may wonder around places where they frequent when alive, or where they have died. Such places where ghosts frequent are known as "haunted"; the rounds they go on are known as "hauntings". Ghosts do not have a physical body like human beings. They often wear the sort of clothing in which they would have been seen when alive.

Famous Ghosts

It seems likely that the real estate that enjoys the most distinguished ghosts as tenants is the Tower of London, which is haunted by:

The headless ghost of Anne Boleyn;
The ghost of Thomas Becket allegedly appeared during the construction of the Traitor's Gate;
The ghosts of King Edward V of England and Richard, Duke of York, the "Princes in the Tower";
The ghost of Lady Jane Grey;
The ghost of Sir Walter Raleigh;
A troupe of ghosts who re-enact the execution of the Countess of Salisbury;

Several other ghosts make the Tower their home; phantom troops of soldiers appear there, and a lady in mourning with no face.

The White House in Washington, DC is said to be haunted by the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, and by several lesser spectres. The ghost of the Roman Emperor Caligula was said to haunt the Lamian Gardens of Rome, where his body had been hastily and unceremoniously buried after his assassination.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia and from White-On.com

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