Haunted Houses of the Ancient World, Part 1

0:02 Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

0:13 Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

0:17 And I'm Joe McCormick.

0:18 And we are into October here. We're covering our spooky topics. And we have at least a couple lined up here that are going to involve Haunted Houses of the Ancient World. Joe and I are going to spend a couple of nights in this topic and see if we survive to meet the dawn on the other side.

0:39 See if we can earn that prize and get 100 tacos for $ 100. There you go.

0:45 So haunted houses. We don't even have to present this idea to you. I think everyone out there like us, you just grew up knowing what a haunted house was. Like I was trying to think back to my earliest introduction to the concept. And I think it would have had to, it had to have been old episodes of Scooby-Doo and or the 1937 Mickey Mouse cartoon, Lonesome Ghost.

1:11 It's a short, this is the one where Mickey has a shotgun and there are ghosts after him and his buddies in a haunted house. This is one that they would air on like Disney TV specials alongside other Um, spooky, uh, Halloween shorts from, you know, across the decades. I think those were the main ways I was introduced to it.

1:30 And then at some point I also saw parts of 1982s poltergeist and I was way too young to see this. Uh, and it terrified me for most of my childhood. Yeah. Yeah.

1:42 Weird to see that you've got this picture in here of the the lonesome ghost it is weird to see mickey mouse with a gun it's one of those sneaky guns in old media it's like you forget about how in the wizard of oz movie for some reason the scarecrow has a.

1:54 Gun yeah where'd he get that yeah i got those in oz.

1:59 Yeah it's just uh it's a different time back when uh mickey was packing heat yeah how about you joe do you remember your earliest uh exposure to haunted house media.

2:10 I have no idea, though the concept is broad enough that it shows up in a lot of kids' media, too. So even before I was into horror movies, adult horror movies, I'm sure I got it in all kinds of cartoons and things. I liked Scooby-Doo a lot when I was a little kid, so yeah, I'm sure I got Scooby-Doo.

2:26 That was probably pretty early.

2:28 Scooby-Doo was kind of a nice dose of skepticism about the supernatural, right? Because it was never an actual ghost, as I recall. It was always... like a grumpy old man in a mask. There was always some sort of natural explanation for what was going on.

2:43 It's old man Donner who's trying to, you know, get a cheap price to buy the old mansion. And so he's like running around in a ghost costume to scare away the other buyers.

2:53 That's a good idea. We'll come back to this concept here in a bit. But of course, you know, anyone who listens to our Weird House Cinema episodes know that We like a lot of haunted house media. For my own part, eventually I discovered Stephen King's The Shining, Richard Matheson's The Legend of Hell House. And then on Weird House, we discussed Obayashi's 1977 film House, the Japanese haunted house film that is one of our favorites.

3:20 One of the greats.

3:21 The novel, The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson, I think is one of the best of all time.

3:25 And Oh, we talked about that on the show before.

3:28 I think years ago it was one of my summer reading picks, uh, cause I just read it for the first time and thought it was so great. Interesting how, and I think this was an idea that came in the forward to that book. The, the addition of that book that I had had a forward by Guillermo del Toro who pointed out that in the novel, the house as a malevolent kind of total entity, uh, behaves like a predatory animal. In that it tries to isolate members of the herd. It's constantly trying to shuffle people apart and get one alone from everybody else so that it can psychically attack them. And then he springs off from there to talking about how that's like an early dynamic.

4:10 But then later on, there's the horrifying revelation that even when you're around other people, you're always alone in your own head and the house can attack you there.

4:17 Nice. Yeah. Yeah. This also touching on this idea that the house itself becomes an entity. It becomes personified. Very much the.

4:25 Case in The Shining as well. Like, the hotel is evil. It's not just that there is a ghost in it. There's this total entity that sort of inflicts all of the sub-hauntings.

4:36 Yeah. And, of course, this becomes, even though I don't know if I ever saw one all the way through, but just being exposed to posters and trailers for the Amityville horror films, the house has eyes. It has those two windows. It looks kind of like a face. And I don't even know if they really personify the haunt in those movies or not, but the poster sure as heck did.

4:55 I've never seen that one.

4:57 Yeah, I know it's spawned out the whole thing, and it's based on a supposed and allegedly true haunting. But I guess, okay, so we'll get back to what is a haunting, what is a haunt, but first, like, what is a house?

5:12 Great questions.

5:13 What is the house in a haunted house? Like, this is one of the things we just kind of, like, blow past because we just grew up knowing about haunted houses, but you know, it's, it's a human domicile. Uh, it's a place with a personal human history that predates us. People lived here before, um, you know, all sorts of things happen like mundane occurrences. You know, people made love in this house before you lived here. People probably died in this house. If it's old enough, people may have been born in this house. Crimes took place. Tears were shed.

5:43 It's a place that literally contains secrets, flaws, and hidden problems, you know, in its design or construction and repair work. And it doesn't seem like too much of a step then to assume that it has secrets in a supernatural sense as well. You know, it has an actual crawl space, but maybe it has like a spiritual crawl space on top of that.

6:06 That is a really good point. Domestic houses, especially if they're old, just come loaded with all of this potential for haunting because they have the history because they have history and it's a private history.

6:19 It's a history of.

6:20 Like, uh, you know, what people were doing that the neighbors didn't know about. So you can have like interesting mysteries attached to the history of the house. It's the kind of the reason that you probably wouldn't get a haunted building story about a taco bell location that was built in the last 10 years.

6:38 You know, something about that doesn't feel ancient. Doesn't feel secret.

6:43 You know, it's like a public place and it's tied to profane associations. The house is the best kind of place for this. Or maybe like an old church, you know, things that have a deep history. Maybe things could be buried there. Things took place there that people don't know about. And the associations are not overtly profane. Yeah.

7:04 Yeah, so we have lots of traditions and stories as well from around the world of not only haunted homes and houses, but yeah, haunted churches, haunted temples, haunted, you know, other things of that nature, haunted hospitals, haunted asylums, things like this. So, you know, and a lot of what we're going to be talking about is going to, we're going to be mostly talking about houses, but a lot can be applied to these other locations and other stories.

7:30 You know, I think in all cases, like the house becomes a localization place for other beliefs and traditions about the continuation of the human soul. So where do we get these ideas of haunted houses? We get them from ghost stories of haunted houses, of course. That's the main way to acquire them. Outside of having some sort of an experience that you then interpret and retell as haunted.

7:51 But then that's like self-generation of a haunted house story. Narrative is key to all of this.

7:56 Yeah, and though I guess I shouldn't prejudge this, I think obviously there is some question about about whether you would be getting new spontaneous hauntings and haunted house stories if there were not this tradition of haunted house stories in the culture.

8:10 Right.

8:11 Yeah, I do think that is key, as we'll discuss. But, you know, certainly for most of us, nothing new. We grew up watching it on TV, reading stories, hearing stories, and on the Internet engaging in creepypasta about hauntings, playing video games and tabletop RPGs that have hauntings. So, you know, it's a rich haunted ecology that we were all born into.

8:33 And the idea is certainly not new. Many of our traditions of haunted houses broadly have like 19th century Victorian and 18th century Gothic origins. But the stories of haunted houses go back much further than that. And of course, they're not uniquely European in origin. But in these episodes, we're going to dive into some of the oldest recorded accounts of haunted houses from antiquity, from the Greek and Roman world. and discuss what they lay down, what do they seem to reveal about our fascination with haunted houses, what do they have in common with the haunted house tradition that still continues on today, and what particulars of the time and of the tellers of these tales we can sort of piece out amid the details.

9:17 On one of those later points you made, the thing that struck me the most about the big example we're going to talk about today is how similar it is to haunted house stories that you would still get in brand new media of today. There is a shocking amount of similarity, actually.

9:35 Yeah, absolutely. And part of that is it's a great story. Why mess with it? So, yeah, it'll be fun to get into this. Two sources of note that I want to bring up at the beginning that I'll be referring to. One is by Dee Felton, a professor of classics at the University of Massachusetts Sam Hurst. published in 1999, titled Haunted Greece and Rome, Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquities. And the other is Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman World by Daniel Ogden, professor of ancient history at the University of Exeter. This is the second edition from 2009. Both authors have published numerous works that are right in the stuff-to-blow-your-mind zone of classical studies. including Ogden's

10:19 The Werewolf in the Ancient World, or Werewolves of the Ancient World. I'm blanking on which title it actually is, but I referenced this work in my Monster Fact Werewolf series last year, and it's a great read.

10:31 I just had to look it up to remember which episode it was. But we talked about an article by Daniel Ogden in our series on necromancy from one or two years ago because he had some stuff about this, too.

10:42 Yeah. Yeah. He's written multiple works that deal with this sort of thing. And in fact, the work that I'm referring to of his magic, witchcraft and ghosts, it has almost an encyclopedic list of like different elements that you find in different stories. Yeah.

10:57 The main interesting fact from the tradition of necromancy in the real world is that unlike in Dungeons & Dragons, it does not involve resurrecting skeleton warriors. It's all about getting information from the dead.

11:09 Yeah. All right, so what constitutes a haunted house? Again, there's sort of a know-it-when-you-see equality to the genre. It's easy to sort of plow forward without actually looking at the criteria. Felton especially gets into the details of this, stressing that when we talk about haunted houses... We're, of course, talking about haunted house stories, and certain plot elements are often very much in play and in the view of some scholars are present in all or most of the key examples from antiquity that we'll be looking at. So what are they? These will not come as a surprise.

11:44 An unsettled spirit of the dead due perhaps to murder and or improper burial. Sure. Sounds familiar. We've all heard that one a million times, right? Yeah, the ghost is haunting because they were murdered or they weren't buried right. Okay, another one is some sort of continual haunting by said spirit observed by multiple parties over time. That's always key, right?

12:09 If I'm the only one who can see the ghost, is it really a ghost story or is it another type of story? You need some sort of like independent verification of the haunt. Like someone else needs to be able to see it too. There need to be stories about people who have seen the ghost before. Yeah.

12:25 Also that it's bound by place and that it happens multiple times over time.

12:31 Yes.

12:31 If it just happens once, that's not really a haunted house story. If it can leave the house, that's not really a haunted house story.

12:38 Yeah. And I erred slightly by saying, talking about seeing a ghost, perhaps because we have that, you know, we talk about, oh, you look like you saw a ghost. But of course, haunted phenomena don't just mean visual. And this is another thing that Felton points out is that you... you need some sort of haunted phenomena to, to be occurring in your story. It might be purely audible. It could just be sounds like I heard this, you know, crashing sound, but there was nothing that there's no physical evidence of crashing, but I heard it. Uh, you know, that alone is often, uh, a detail in a story of a haunted house. Other times audible plus physical evidence.

13:18 Like I heard a crashing and then I went in and yeah, something had like torn up part of the room or, you know, broken a couch or whatever the case may be. All the mirrors were shattered. So you have sound plus physical evidence, but no visual evidence of something having occurred beyond that.

13:33 Keeps knocking over my Warhammer miniature.

13:35 Yeah. Yeah. That sort of thing. And then the third category would be either it could be on top of these other two things. It could be the culmination of these things. And that is that you actually visually see something. And a lot of times this is going to be seeing a ghost, seeing some sort of a specter, some sort of person. You know, maybe they're walking through the walls.

13:57 Maybe you can see through them. Maybe they just look like a person. And then sometimes there's added sensory input as well. Like there's a chill in the air. Now, as far as like, you know, creepypasta and oral traditions go, sometimes that is all there is to the story. It's like there's a place. These are the details of the ghost.

14:15 You might not even have much in the way in details about who saw the ghost. Sometimes there's a specific person because you want to be clear that a real person saw this and therefore it's on some level authenticated. But sometimes that's all there is to it. It's like, yeah, it happens. Nobody knows what it's about. Don't go there because you might be frightened. Or the dare is, of course, go there. You will be frightened. And it becomes like, you know, a test for young people. this sort of legendary quest that they're going to put themselves up against to sort of push the boundaries of mortality and so forth.

14:54 Though if it only has those elements, it's not really a story, is it? It kind of doesn't have the full contour of a story that's like a problem is presented and someone confronts it. So that is more like I guess there are things that you might call stories, but they're more like urban legends where you just describe a situation or a kind of persistent way things are in a place.

15:16 Yeah, yeah. Then it's just like a bad screenplay. It's just a scenario that's been laid out. Yeah, for a proper ghost story, you need, as Felton points out, you need a brave person to solve the haunting, to go in there, to figure out what's going on. Often this is a scholarly, studious, skeptical or wise person that is going to actually brave the haunting, figure out why the haunting is occurring, and solve it. Correct whatever wrong has been done in order to stop the haunting from occurring.

15:49 I do think it's interesting that ghost stories, especially stories where the ghost turns out to be real, like the premise is there really is a supernatural being here, so often need a character who's a skeptic. They either need a skeptic who is later convinced and becomes a believer or a skeptic who is proven wrong by a believer.

16:14 So the believer gets vindication over them. I think that's there because it gives human drama, but it also gives credibility to the situation. Like you, it doesn't feel as powerful if everybody going in is already like, yeah, I believe in ghosts and there is one here. You've got to have at least one person who's like impossible.

16:33 I doubt it.

16:34 And then they get their comeuppance one way or another. Either their mind is changed or they are humiliated.

16:40 Now, is this still largely true of the many recent haunting movies that have come out? I'm thinking about, what are the insidious movies? Are those the ones that have a pair of paranormal investigators that are based on.

16:53 The Conjuring.

16:54 Yeah, The Conjuring. That's what it is. Are they presented as skeptics or are they true believers?

17:00 Well, they're presented... I mean, the movie very much... It's awkward because these are based on real people who, I don't know how deep we want to get into it there, but the real people that the main characters of the Conjuring series are based on would have their critics in real life, I think. But the characters in the movie are presented as devout Christians and true believers in spiritual powers and hauntings. Sometimes they practice a kind of pose of skepticism where it's like, well, we, of course, know that these powers are real, but we don't think in every case that's really what's happening. So they will they're presented as believers, but also practicing responsible skepticism in the

17:45 early stages of the investigation. And then, of course, you always find out in the end, like, oh, yeah, it's really the devil.

17:52 Well, that makes sense that even in these cases, you still have to have at least some of the skeptic present. in order to tell the story the way we're accustomed to it being told.

18:00 And there are other characters who are more skeptical and they end up getting their minds changed or get proven wrong.

18:07 All right. So we have to have all of that. And then of course we also need a house. Uh, and it depends on how picky we want to get on all of this. Again, is it, is it fine to just say it's a building? Um, and again, we have haunted temples, we have haunted castles and these can blur the line. Did someone actually live there or how much time has to be spent in a place and so forth. And, um, we'll mostly set that aside, but as Felton points out, it also does seem to help if a haunted house is also in disrepair and is big. Um, and I had never really thought about this before, but I was thinking like, what are examples of haunted houses from media that I've, I've loved? And I, I was thinking like, okay, the house in, uh, the 1970s house movie, uh,

18:49 the house in haunt and the house on haunted Hill. I was thinking of the, the house and Stephen King's it. And I was thinking of, hell house and richard matheson's hell house and indeed these are all big buildings like the the sort of coded idea of a haunted house i think in most of our minds is some sort of a dilapidated mansion of some sorts.

19:09 Yeah uh a bigger house there's more room for there to be something else going on in another part of it and you were drawn through the hallways and through the there's just more space for action to develop, you know, for things to draw closer or be farther away. If you're in a one room shack, I guess that could be haunted, but try to like actually stage out the drama of that. How does that, like, how do you, how do you go into the other room to see the ghost if there's just one room?

19:37 Yeah.

19:38 Like I was thinking along these lines and I was thinking, okay, you can maybe make a case for like the evil dead movies. Cause at least you have the division between the upper house and the cellar. Right. But, but that's not really a haunted house movie. That's like a that's like a zombie demon movie. It's a different sort of story.

19:54 Even in that case, the house ends up feeling bigger inside than it looks on the outside.

20:00 Yeah, of course, I guess that's that's probably pretty common, too. And you could also chalk that up to the hauntedness of it, kind of a house of leaves sort of a thing. But yeah, I was trying to think of any haunted house media I've seen with a small haunted house. And the main things that came to mind were things where we're dealing with something that's not truly a house, like it's a dollhouse, or it's absolutely not a house.

20:22 It's a car like Christine. Or again, thinking about cases where, okay, is the cabin haunted? And if so, is it really a haunted cabin or is it just a cabin, the cabin location where something haunted occurs? But yeah, Felton points out that that a lot of haunted house literature from recent times doesn't even waste much energy on describing the outside of the house, because on some level, we all know what one looks like. You don't need to go into a lot of detail, like a few flourishes, maybe.

20:54 It's established, and most of the action is going to take place inside the house. And so the exterior is just kind of a teaser.

21:01 That's interesting. So you just say haunted house and automatically there are going to be some attributes that come in. People probably picture something big, old in disrepair and somewhat isolated. They're not going to picture like, uh, a recent construction with a fresh coat of paint that's part of a, you know, it's like a McMansion and a series of houses all close together that all look like, you know, kind of the same. Like there is something that it kind of needs to be isolated. It kind of needs to be old and different. And the disuse appearance is a big part of it too. Yeah. Because if it's something where there's just continuous habitation without any problems, that also kind of feels like, well, how bad could the

21:43 haunting be?

21:43 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why maybe the Taco Bell is not haunted. Or it's certainly not haunted during the day. Maybe it's haunted at night. Right. Yeah, something like that. So the question, is there some sort of a fixed image of a haunted house in antiquity that we can find in the few remaining haunted house stories that we have from this time? Well, Felden stresses that mainly we just don't have enough source material here to really have a firm answer on this. We just don't know if you said haunted house, if someone in ancient Greece or ancient Rome would have like an instant mental image of what you were talking about.

22:30 Though the main story we're going to talk about today has in common with these modern stories that the house is big. It is made clear that it is roomy and spacious.

22:39 Yeah. And yeah, size does seem to be important here. It's apparently been argued that we may have so few haunted house stories in the ancient world, in part because people lived in small homes. So Felton mentions this, citing Adrian Nicholas Sherwin-White in his scholarship. She writes, quote, the relatively small size in the compact building of houses, even of the wealthy classes and the preponderance of urban life did not allow the free development of the haunted house and lonely castle themes dear to the ghostly literature of the 19th century hmm, so the idea being it's like on some level you need to have big houses that That that have an emptiness to them And it's to even generate these stories and give these stories a chance

23:33 to like grow and then take hold of the public imagination.

23:36 I love stuff like this, thinking about ways that whole genres of literature are in ways we don't appreciate, possibly dependent on historical trends in architecture.

23:47 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just thinking about the way that the spaces that we built for ourselves and occupied, how they end up informing that we think about something as detached from reality as a haunted house. Yeah.

24:05 What other kinds of literature could we have if we lived in very different types of buildings than the ones we do?

24:12 Yeah, and of course we do now. And we can have haunted stories about haunted apartments. Stephen King has a really good one. We can have stories about haunted cars and haunted trailers. We can have all of these because we have the tradition that maybe, arguably, emerges because we have big empty castles and big empty mansions, that sort of thing. So... Felton, again, points out that the three most complete examples of the haunted house story from antiquity are found in three surviving tales. And we're going to we're going to talk we're going to talk about those three.

24:45 We're going to mostly talk about the one by Pliny the Younger in this episode. And then there are possibly a couple of other examples that I'm going to bring in from Ogden when we get into the second part. But, you know, Felton points out it was such a small sample size. We just can't be sure how many additional narrative forms there were for haunted house stories in these days.

25:07 But all three survivors that we have, the main three that she's referring to, they all do seem to have similar structure in many ways. They have things in common, and this would at least suggest a commonly known structure for a story even then. So even at the time, there was an idea of what a ghost story was, and if you were going to tell one, It needed to sort of fall in line and hit those beats.

25:32 The example we're going to talk about today from Pliny the Younger feels almost suspiciously well-structured. It's working like a, you know, like they say, like a well-oiled machine. And it's kind of strange that it would have that feeling if it were just a spontaneous tale being recounted rather than something that had a familiar and recurring form.

25:55 Yeah, it does have a literary feel to it. And that's certainly a point that Felton makes about it. And I compare that to other writings that I've heard where you have writers from other times and other parts of the world where they're sharing some story, some little moral tidbit that they picked up. And it won't be story-shaped.

26:15 It'll be like, hey, somebody told me about this. A weird thing happened. Isn't that strange? It's not particularly in the form of a story. It's not story-shaped. It doesn't have characters and so forth. Yeah. But yeah, the connections that she says, you know, that are going to be in common, you know, they can be literary, they can be oral, or they can be based on a sort of common social experience. And that's another key thing. Like once the haunted house story has taken hold of the imagination, there's going to be a certain amount of it that just comes from our understanding of what it's like to see a place that could be haunted, you know? Like most of the listeners out here, you know, some of

26:57 you may have experiences where you perceive something that that you describe as supernatural. But I think most of us, we've been to places where we might be like, oh, yeah, this seems like a haunted house or perhaps there's one in your neighborhood. I walk by one, you know, pretty much every week that for years and years, for over a decade of that, it kind of looks like a haunted house. But I don't actually think it's haunted, obviously. Okay, one more interesting general observation that Felton writes about, and it's something that factors into both ancient and contemporary haunted house stories and traditions, and that is, get ready for it, disclosure issues in real estate, which I was not expected

27:40 to be excited about. This, of course, is very broadly we're talking about what happens when you go to sell a house I don't know, lease a property, rent a property. There's the idea that you have a moral obligation. And then generally, especially today, there are going to be certain legal obligations about what you have to disclose about that property. Like, you know, this might be, does it leak? Does it flood?

28:08 Or it might factor into something else like, what are the crime statistics? Or in certain cases, like, have, you know, crimes been committed here within a certain period of time? That sort of thing. Mm-hmm. You know, all boring stuff, generally the kind of stuff that we wouldn't talk about and stuff to blow your mind. And also just kind of like part of the mundane world of buying or renting property, right?

28:31 But I can imagine that hauntings would be in a kind of middle ground, wouldn't they? It's something that most people probably.

28:38 Would want to know about.

28:40 But on the other hand, could you really legally obligate someone to report supernatural events?

28:47 Yeah, because, you know, with due respect, to any subjective experiences of hauntings that listeners may have had, we have to acknowledge that there is no objective reality to haunted house stories. There's no like legal body that's going to come in and say, Oh, this house it's haunted. It's legally haunted. And that's something you have to report. Right.

29:06 How could you verify that in the court?

29:08 Yeah. But depending on state laws in the U S at any rate, it is felt and discussed. And this is of course, you know, many, many years old at this point. Uh, but I'm, I'm to understand that the laws are going to be basically the same on this, depending on the state you're in. And then this probably applies internationally and simply in many places as well. You might have to disclose any factors about a property that you're selling, for example, that might affect a property's value.

29:36 And that can certainly include things like murders and deaths. which may be covered by other laws regarding criminal history of the location. But even the public perception that a place might be haunted might be, depending on where you are, might be the kind of thing you would have to report. Though, as Felton points out, That can cut both ways, especially in today's world with stigmatized properties, as they're called, sometimes fetching higher prices because people are drawn in by the story.

30:07 They're like, what? There's like a lady ghost that appears on the top floor. That's exciting. That will add excitement to my life. I will pay a premium to have that in my house. Other people are like, no, thank you. I'm not going to live there unless you really bring that price down. Yeah.

30:24 So I wonder how that works out overall. Does it just kind of even out or does it mean?

30:29 It sounds like if you have something that is truly, and I'm not a real estate person, I would love to hear from our real estate folks listening to the show. This is your time to shine. But it's my understanding that stigmatized properties are probably, it's probably going to be generally more of a detriment to something than an attractive aspect.

30:50 Unless you have You know, you're dealing with, say, like a haunted house and I don't know, a place that has a lot of value for that. Like I'm thinking like you have a house in New Orleans and it has a ghost story. Right. Like that seems like that could be an advantage or something of that nature. You want to.

31:06 Turn it into an attraction.

31:08 Yeah. Turn it into attraction or, you know, just maybe this property would be appealing to somebody that would like that kind of story. But the crazy thing, as Felton discusses, is that these issues were seemingly in play for ancient haunted houses as well, or things that were seen as haunted houses. You had stigmatized properties. The Pliny story we're going to discuss includes details about low rent due to haunting.

31:34 Other ancient writers mentioned property disclosure issues not related to alleged ghosts. And as far as the ghost stories are concerned, it factors into situations as well, within the narrative of the story. With at least one tale we're going to discuss probably in the next episode, where the ghost claims squatter's rights, essentially. Where the ghost is like, well, I live here. I am the resident. This house belongs to me. Oh, yeah.

32:03 What are you going to do? Take the ghost to court?

32:05 Yeah. The other factor that she mentions is that and this seems to be implied by plenty as well, is the idea that occupants of a haunted house can't simply leave because they end up squandering their investment if they do so. Because this is always the thing, like house is haunted, you just run away from it, right? But in reality, you know, what does that mean to say, oh, I guess I'm not going to live there? You know, it means having to like make an argument that something wasn't disclosed to you and legally get out of the purchase or the rental and so forth. you know, it's going to be a lot more complicated. It's like living in a house with any other, like, mundane problem. Like, sure, that problem's there. What are you going to do about it?

32:50 I guess you just got to live there and fix it or put up with it, right?

32:53 Yeah, so it is kind of strange to think about this, but some haunted house stories are money and class stories.

33:00 Yeah.

33:01 And finally, Felton does point out, and certainly read the book if you want the precise examples on this, but she does point out some examples of legal cases that from recent decades where someone was able to get out of a housing situation with an alleged haunted house. But these seem to be rare today and maybe even more rare in ancient times.

33:23 Usually you're stuck.

33:25 Yeah. One more thing that I think it's important to think about before we dive into a specific example, and that is, did the ancient peoples we're discussing believe in ghosts more than we do today? Hmm. And I think that's a much trickier question to consider than many might think, because on one hand, we're dealing with religious cultures that entailed the belief in household gods and ancestor veneration, like the idea that there were spirits at work in the home or that could be called into the home. Like this was not like a crazy idea. It was kind of like built into the systems of belief that people shared with each other.

34:03 Right. So it wasn't necessarily all or nothing on spiritual entities. You can imagine, it seems to me, at least perfectly plausible, that you'd have a Roman citizen in the first century CE saying, yeah, I believe in gods, but no, I don't believe in ghosts.

34:19 Yeah, yeah, I think that's perfectly reasonable. And I think, you know, it's also complicated today, obviously. We've talked about this before when it comes to belief in the afterlife. You know, it's entirely normal for a person to have multiple conflicting viewpoints you know you could have somebody that is like technically an atheist or agnostic but then you know under the right circumstances they may entertain the idea of ghosts it's kind of like it's a lot easier to believe in ghosts when the lights are out and there's a weird noise coming from the next room um you.

34:49 Don't have to rationally believe in something to be a little bit afraid of it.

34:53 Yeah and wonder if you're wrong yeah and it doesn't uh it doesn't mean that that other like your primary belief system is um is fraudulent or anything. It's just the way that our minds work. You know, you can believe in heaven and ghosts, even if like strict theology of your faith tells you that ghost visitations are not happening.

35:12 And then I guess the next thing to think about is if we acknowledge that, you know, various environmental and inner conditions can lead to the experience of the supernatural, you know, mainly through things like hallucination, we don't actually have much reason to believe that the actual perception of haunting sound sites or certainly specters was more common in the ancient world. And even Pliny the Younger wrote that actually seeing ghosts was possibly something divine in nature, but also possibly, quote, only the visionary impressions of a terrified imagination.

35:45 So in other words, people knew then, as they know today, that it's possible to see things that are not actually there And those things may have no objective meaning whatsoever.

35:59 And there could be maybe even middle categories as far as Pliny the Younger is concerned. We'll get to that in just a minute. But before we do, I just wanted to mention one thing real quickly that I was reading in a book from 1912. So this is an older scholarship at this point, but the book is called Greek and Roman Ghost Stories by an Oxford scholar named Lacey Collison Morley. I just wanted to mention this because in the first chapter of this book, Collison Morley identifies broadly three classes of people who in the Greek and Roman world might be thought to end up as ghosts.

36:35 And you already acknowledged two of these classes. Uh, one is people who met violent deaths. So, you know, say a murder victim or somebody who dies suddenly violently. And the other thing is, uh, that you already said is the unburied, uh, very often ancient peoples, not just Greek and Roman peoples, but, um, You know, it's a very, very common thing in the ancient world to find writings where people are intensely consumed with the idea of getting the proper burial rights. It's very important that you are disposed, your body is disposed of in the way that your culture deems is the correct way to do it. And having your body meet some fate other than the appropriate deposition in the ground or. or cremation or whatever is

37:18 specified by your culture is thought of as a really horrible fate. People are constantly terrified about the idea of their body not meeting the correct end.

37:29 So those are.

37:30 Two violent deaths, the unburied. And then finally, Collison Morley mentions those who had died before their time, quote, who had to wander till the span of their natural life was completed.

37:42 Yeah.

37:43 Thought that was an interesting idea too because that's more about like uh it almost makes me think about the greek fates you know the idea that maybe you would have a certain amount of thread allotted to you but something goes wrong and you die before your thread has run out so you have to wander around on the earth until you reach the end of.

38:00 It that's interesting this is one that i think maybe in its full form we see less of today certainly we have tales of like oh someone died too young another ghost you know that that i think is still very much a an in-play concept But this idea, like you said, involving the fates, like I don't know if it necessarily meshes as well and exists as well in the light of, say, a lot of Christian theology where it's like, well, you died. That is your time. Like whatever time you died, like that was the time that was allotted. And there was no nobody was adjusting that schedule.

38:31 But if you have a more sort of complex system that, you know, decides like how the threat of fate is spun out and where it's clipped, then you could have a scenario where, oh, loophole here. You're dead, but you can't pass on because it's not your time yet. You're just going to have to haunt for a little bit.

38:48 I guess it's somewhat different, I think, in Christian traditions because, at least for the faithful, Christianity generally has a view of a positive afterlife, whereas the Greek and Roman view of the afterlife is It's complicated. There are different visions of it. But on the whole, it seems sort of neutral to somewhat negative. So it's not just like, oh, you went on to Hades.

39:12 That's fine. That's good, actually.

39:24 Okay, you ready to talk about this haunted house in Athens?

39:27 Let's do it.

39:28 Yeah, this is the... this is not only the most most well-known haunted house story from the ancient world. It may be the most well-known ghost story from the ancient world. So it's pretty cool.

39:39 So this story is recorded in the letters of the first century Roman figure Pliny the Younger. We often cite his uncle Pliny the Elder because Pliny the Elder was was the author of an ancient Roman encyclopedia called The Natural History that informs us of all kinds of things that learned Romans thought about stuff in the world. Sometimes it is fairly insightful. Other times it is quite funny. But, you know, it's got lots of good stuff in there.

40:07 I mean, it's always insightful the way that he gets something wrong or even if he doesn't mention something like, yeah. Like when we're talking about horseshoe crabs, I believe that was the one where it's like Pliny doesn't talk about horseshoe crabs. And that tells you something important about where you find horseshoe crabs.

40:24 Yeah.

40:25 So we've talked about Pliny the Younger on the show before because we actually read and discussed his harrowing firsthand account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. This is actually the event where Pliny the Elder died because, remember, he led a naval mission across the Bay of Naples. to a settlement on the other side, presumably to help people who had been trapped there by the eruption, but died during that experience. So Pliny the Younger, years later, writes about his observations and experiences during the eruption. I don't remember exactly when we did that episode. It was a few years back at this point, but I remember that one was really interesting.

41:05 Yeah, you'll find that in the audio backlogs for the show.

41:08 That was before we were doing video, definitely, yeah.

41:11 So this letter is to a Roman senator named Lucius Licinius Sura, or just Sura. It is in the collected letters of Pliny the Younger, Book 7, Letter No.

41:24 27.

41:24 And the translation I'm using is one I found by J.B. Firth from the year 1900. This was hosted on a website called Atalus or atalus.com, so shout out to them. And the letter starts off like this. He says, hey, Sura. He says, we've both got some leisure.

41:41 Time at the moment.

41:42 I think maybe he thought they both were, I don't know, on vacation away from business or something. We've both got some leisure time right now. We should use that to share information. What I want to know is, do you believe in ghosts? And he asks some follow-up questions. He asks, do you think ghosts have a real shape and divinity of their own? or are they nothing but the shadows that rise from a terrified mind? Uh, so that could, that second option could be like, they're just hallucinations. They're only in the mind, or it could be like, there, there's some other thing apart from the body. And, you know, this would be evidenced, uh, when multiple people see ghosts, but still it's just something that arises from fear or

42:26 they could be independent entities. You know, there's something that has a, uh, a divine spirit all of its own, and they have their own unchanging form.

42:37 Yeah, and it's very much the sort of question one would ask today. It's like, hey, do you think ghosts are real, or do you think it's just a product of human imagination?

42:48 Pliny gives his own opinion in this letter. He says, I think ghosts are real. He does think they have a substance of their own. And he says that the main reason he believes this is because of what happened to a guy named Curtius Rufus. So I looked this Curtius Rufus up, and he seems like an interesting and kind of mysterious figure himself. He was a first century Roman magistrate and political player and social climber. He was clearly very ambitious. He wanted to go up the ranks, and he has somewhat obscure origins. He's mentioned in the writings of both Pliny the Younger here and the historian Tacitus.

43:26 I see that there is a lot of back and forth about his parentage. Like in Tacitus's Uh, Tacitus says, I'm not going to comment on the rumors that he is the son of a gladiator. Uh, so he's just like not confirming, not denying. I'm not going to speak at that. Uh, but I think at the time among, you know, if you're trying to be a Roman elite, a rumor that you were the son of a gladiator would be, uh, not working in your favor.

43:54 Hmm.

43:55 So Pliny says that in the days when Curtius Rufus was young and still, quote, poor and obscure, he had attached himself to the governor of the Roman province of Africa. So he became sort of part of the general retinue of this Roman governor of Africa. And then the ghost part goes like this. This is before we get to the main haunted house, by the way.

44:20 This is preamble.

44:21 He's talking about other examples of ghosts. Pliny writes, quote, One evening at sundown, he was walking in the portico, when the figure of a woman, but taller and more beautiful than mortal woman, presented itself before him and told Rufus, who was terrified with fright, that she was Africa and could foretell the future. She declared that he would go to Rome and hold high offices of state, and that he would also return with plenary powers as governor to that same province and there meet his death. So courteous is in the portico. He sees a huge, beautiful woman.

45:00 She says, I am the spirit of Africa. You're going to go to Rome and get a bunch of high honors. You're going to get appointed to offices. You'll come back as governor of Africa, and then you're going to die.

45:11 And then plenty ads.

45:13 All of these prophecies would later come true. He says, uh, when courteous came back to Africa, after his commission in Rome, his ship landed at Carthage. And as soon as he stepped foot on the beach, the same spirit woman, the embodiment of Africa, was there to meet him. And soon after this, Curtius became sick, and his symptoms did not seem very concerning to his attendants, but Curtius himself lost all hope of recovery because the woman had said that he would die when he returned, and everything else she had said came true. And then Pliny does not explicitly say what happened next, but the way that I read it, it's implied that he did die, according to the prophecy.

45:55 so why does plenty find the story, especially convincing? Remember he says, this is the, the story that convinces him that ghosts are real. I think the part that's convincing is that as told, the ghost gives a series of predictions, which all later come true. And there is something reasonable about that. Like correct predictions in advance are one of the ways that we can increase confidence in a theory. But, uh, Like, do we have a clear record of what the predictions were before the events happened? We're just told here third hand after the fact that these events were predicted.

46:33 So I don't know.

46:34 Yeah, because the key way that prediction stories like this gain traction is either they're vague enough that they can be later interpreted as having been correct, or they are, of course, written down in reverse order. Like any prediction can be 100% accurate. If you write it after the thing is predicting has occurred. Right.

46:54 So it's always more impressive to make a prediction if you like publicly log that prediction before the thing happens saying afterwards, like I knew this was going to happen. That's, you know, people say that all the time.

47:05 Yeah.

47:06 Anyway, this is not the haunted house in the letter. And the interesting thing to me is that this story of courteous Rufus. doesn't it doesn't even seem that the spirit in question is what we would think of as a ghost like the spirit of a dead person that has not moved on to the underworld instead it seems to be something more like what we would think of as a goddess like a spiritual embodiment of a place but obviously plenty thinks that this story is informative on the question of whether ghosts exist so Maybe he didn't make the same distinction I'm making.

47:42 I don't know. I don't know exactly what to make of that.

47:45 Yeah, I mean, I'm to understand one of his key interests here in this topic is kind of self-centered. Oh, yeah.

47:52 It's going to be, yeah.

47:53 Yeah, it's like, what does this mean for me? Like, what does it mean to see a ghost as to perhaps interact with an omen?

48:00 Yeah.

48:01 So more about that when we get to the end of the letter. But first, we're going to tell this haunting in Athens story. So here I'm going to read directly from Pliny's letter. Again, this is in the Firth translation hosted on italis.com. Now I want you to consider whether the following story, which I shall tell you just as I heard it, is not even more terrifying and no less wonderful than the other. There stood at Athens a spacious and roomy house, but it had an evil reputation of being fatal to those who lived in it.

48:33 In the silence of the night, the clank of iron, and if you listened with closer attention, the rattle of chains were heard, the sound coming first from a distance, and afterwards quite close at hand. Then appeared the ghostly form of an old man, emaciated, filthy, decrepit, with a flowing beard and hair on end, with fetters round his legs and chains on his hands, which he kept shaking.

49:02 The terrified inmates passed sleepless nights of fearful terror, and following upon their sleeplessness came disease and then death as their fears increased. For every now and again, though the ghost had vanished, memory conjured up the vision before their eyes, and their fright And then I want to give a caveat on the next sentence that I'm going to read, because I'm going to read it as it appears in my translation, but I found other translations that render this part to mean basically the opposite. So the first translation here says, Then the house was deserted and condemned to stand empty and was wholly abandoned to the specter, while the authorities forbade that it should be sold or let to anyone wishing to take it, not knowing under what

49:53 a curse it lay. Now, I looked up other translations here and found that they do not mention the authorities forbidding the sale or rent of the house. Instead, these other translations say, have it that the house was put up for sale or rent at a very low price, implying that they were looking for a sucker to rent this house out without knowing what they were getting into.

50:18 Yeah, because it is a stigmatized property. There you go.

50:22 So I think this may have just been an error in this one translation I'm reading from, because I think the latter translation is more common.

50:31 That's the one that I see Felton referring to specifically.

50:34 So I think Pliny is saying that the house was put up for rent, low price. Somebody's hoping to trick a hapless out-of-towner into lodging there.

50:42 Yeah, and I think Pliny makes it clear that a seller has a moral obligation to disclose a problem such as the haunting here.

50:50 Yes, but the person in this story probably did not do that. But to summarize what we've got so far, old house in Athens, you kind of wonder if it's implying that it belonged to a rich person. Pliny doesn't say that, but he does say the house is very large and spacious. It seems like that would probably mean it's like a big wealthy, you know, to do. Um, and then Pliny says, if you venture in at night, you will hear the sound of heavy iron clattering in the dark and you will hear the shaking of chains.

51:20 And then the sound.

51:20 Gets closer and closer to you over time. And then finally you will see a ghost.

51:26 It's an old man saying.

51:27 And then Pliny says that the people who live in this house have encounters with the ghost that are terrifying and unforgettable. They are haunted by memories of these encounters, even during the daytime. And they soon fall into ill health and eventually die. So the experience of seeing the ghost somehow kills them. I think the mechanism of death is said to be fear itself, like they are so afraid they die of fright.

52:06 One thing that Felton mentions as well is that at least in some of these translations, it's perhaps implied that the house is on the outskirts of town, which I think is an interesting detail that, of course, matches up with a lot of the haunted house stories we still have today. the idea that it's somewhere a little off the beaten path, somewhere where it can be forgotten, a place where fewer eyes are upon it, that sort of thing.

52:30 That's interesting.

52:31 Oh, and maybe that helps them trick the sucker who's going to rent it next, too, because you're not going to have as many people wandering by and saying, like, that house is haunted, you know. So I was just thinking about how similar this is already to haunted house stories of today. So far, is there anything that would really make it different from a modern haunted house story?

52:54 Not a lot.

52:55 Not really, yeah.

52:57 I want to come back to those differences in a minute. But first, I want to keep reading from the letter. So this part of the story is about to introduce a new character, a hero of the story, a philosopher named Athenodorus. And this is Some sources say this is probably, but not certainly, a reference to a historical 1st century BCE Stoic philosopher named Athenodorus Canaanites. So we don't know it's this guy, but that was a guy, and a lot of people think that's probably who it's talking about.

53:29 Yeah, Felton mentions that there are at least two historical Stoic philosophers with this name. And so it is possibly an historic person. And if it's not, it's certainly intended to give that sort of feel to it. Kind of like how at the beginning of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you have that little bit about how this really occurred.

53:49 Yeah, right.

53:51 You can connect it to a real person. And I think it also would make sense if this is supposed to be a known Stoic philosopher because the character in the story displays the virtues of the Stoic philosophy in the story. So it reads as follows. The philosopher Athenodorus came to Athens, read the notice board, and on hearing the price, hesitated because the low rent made him suspicious.

54:17 Then he was told the whole story, and so far from being deterred, he became the more eager to rent it. We've got ourselves a ghost hunter here.

54:26 Oh, there you go. They're like, okay, yeah, tell him because I think he might rent it.

54:30 Yeah. This is what you like.

54:32 Who who does want the stigmatized property? Who's like going to pay extra for the haunted house? It's your stoic philosopher.

54:39 Because I imagine then as well as now, like the reality of owning property is that you want somebody in there, even if even if they're underpaying for it. That's still better than having nobody in the house for a variety of reasons.

54:53 Yeah, I think that's right. And and as to like, why did Athena Doris like really want to get this haunted house? You could read it as he takes it as a challenge. He's like, ooh, this is a challenge. I'm going to meet the moment. You could just take it as curiosity. I think either one is a fair reading.

55:10 But anyway, the story, Pliny writes, quote, when evening began to fall, he ordered his people to make him up a bed in the front of the house and asked for his tablets, a pen, and a lamp. Dismissing all his servants to the inner rooms, he applied mind, eyes, and hand to the task of writing, lest by having nothing to think about he might begin to conjure up the apparition of which he had been told, and other idle fears. At first the night was just as still there as elsewhere. Then the iron was rattled, and the chains clanked. Athenodorus did not raise his eyes, nor cease to write, but fortified his resolution and closed his ears.

55:54 The noise became louder and drew nearer, and was heard now on the threshold and then within the room itself. He turned his head and saw and recognized the ghost which had been described to him. It stood and beckoned with its finger as if calling him, but Athenodorus merely motioned with his hand as if to bid it wait a little, and once more bent over his tablets and plied his pen. It's like, I'm busy right now. You can wait on me to finish writing this.

56:24 Oh, this is such a great common detail of like, if you can on any level, ignore the ghost, like that's the power move.

56:32 Oh yeah.

56:32 Like there's this understanding the ghost wants to scare you or needs to scare you or something like that.

56:38 And that act of making the ghost wait kind of changes what the ghost does because this does story doesn't end like the others where the ghost just terrifies people and then they grow ill and die. It goes on to say, quote, On the following day he went to the magistrates and advised them to give orders that the place should be dug up. Bones were found, with chains wound round them. Time and the action of the soil had made the flesh moulder, and left the bones bare and eaten away by the chains, but the remains were collected and given a public burial. Ever afterwards the house was free of the ghost, which had been thus.

57:46 Laid with due ceremony. Oh, great story.

57:50 Okay.

57:51 So, so let's recap it. Uh, Athena Doris goes to Athens. He needs to find a house to rent. Oh, this one's really cheap.

57:58 Interesting.

57:59 He learns it's haunted. Here's the whole story. And instead of running away, he's like, I want to get in on that, please. Uh, I'm interested in this. So he prepares himself to meet the ghost alone, by the way, it says he's in the house. He's got servants with him. He's got people there with him, but it says he sends them away to the inner rooms and, I guess you could read that multiple ways. The way I took it at first is that he's telling the servants, you go hide in here and stay safe, and I'm going to face the ghost alone. I'll make contact in isolation.

58:30 I wonder if this was maybe a... We don't really get much in the way of the description of this house. I wonder if this portrays something that the intended reader... Would know about common house layout layouts like is the inner portion of the house like closer to a inner courtyard and therefore safer? Like, I don't know, because we think of haunted houses and it's like the deeper you go in, you know, the worse off you are like to go into the basement or the crawl space of the haunted house. Like that's the worst.

58:58 This is almost like he sends them to the basement to be safe.

59:00 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

59:11 So the ghost shows up.

59:13 Again, it doesn't say to be safe, but that's how I read it. That makes the most sense to me. So the ghost shows up and Athena Doris then puts the ghost in its place by saying, I'm not finished writing. You're going to wait on me. And so he writes at his desk. And this is explained as a self-directed exercise in mastering his own fears. And eventually the ghost beckons him to follow. So Athenodorus does. And he follows to a spot in the courtyard and then the ghost vanishes.

59:42 And then the next day Athenodorus goes to the authorities. They come back and they have this exact spot where the ghost led him dug up where they find a buried body wrapped in chains. Pliny's retelling does not give instructions on exactly how to interpret this buried body wrapped in chains, but seems to me like some kind of illicit burial, maybe of somebody who died by violence or in some other unwholesome scenario.

1:00:09 But we don't really know for sure, do we?

1:00:12 No, I think Ogden and Felton mentioned the beard as being, you know, that's a signifier that this individual was perhaps a captive victim. and was not able to be groomed, and therefore they have the long beard. And certainly the chains speak to that as well.

1:00:30 Yeah.

1:00:31 Yeah, and that'll actually connect to something at the end of the letter also. But whatever the chains mean, the bones are taken away and they're given a proper burial. So I assume this means they're buried in a public place that is meant for burial with appropriate funeral rites, and then there are no more hauntings after this.

1:00:49 The ghost is gone.

1:00:51 And we see this in so many haunted house and haunting stories today. Like, I'm instantly reminded of The Ring, which is not really a haunted house. Of course, it's a haunted media, but it involves a plot by which they figure out why the haunting is occurring and then try to solve it by doing essentially a proper burial of a body, or a body that is not where it needs to be. And of course, in The Ring, it doesn't quite work because it turns out some ghosts...

1:01:18 don't just want to be laid to rest. Sometimes they just want endless vengeance.

1:01:22 I mean, the ring is, I think, a twist on this modern version. But there are so many modern haunted house stories that have exactly this shape. The ghost needs something fixed. And this brings me back to something I wanted to talk about. Obviously, there are many, many ways that this story is similar to modern ghost stories. But I was thinking about what makes it different from a modern novel or horror movie. And the difference that occurred to me is the mechanism, the exact mechanism that resolves the haunting. So see if this makes sense to you, Rob.

1:01:57 In a lot of modern haunting narratives, the ghost is laid to rest when they achieve some kind of narrative justice. For example, if the ghost was the victim of a crime or a betrayal, the ghost is finally able to rest once the Once justice is achieved, like the perpetrator is discovered and punished, or at least maybe, you know, maybe it's too late for the perpetrator to be caught.

1:02:26 But there's some kind of vindication through exposure of the story, like the ghost is able to rest when the truth comes out. And there are multiple versions of this, like maybe the ghost is a victim whose story is unknown, or it's somebody who was falsely accused or misunderstood. And then the hero of the ghost story has to do some kind of investigation that exposes the truth in a way that vindicates the spirit, and then the spirit can rest.

1:02:54 Do you know what I'm talking about?

1:02:55 Yeah, yeah, pretty common to the format. The excellent BBC comedy series Ghosts, has the nice wrinkle on all of this where like a ghost, an apparition is stuck in this world because there's something unresolved in themselves, you know, like they haven't, you know, they haven't really gotten over a particular, you know, injustice that was done to them.

1:03:17 And the way that they eventually pass on or in the language of the show gets sucked off is that they, is that they, they solve this problem within themselves. Like it's not, You know, it's not about any actual vengeance or even like public vindication, but it's like they kind of it's almost like a therapy, modern therapy take on it.

1:03:37 Like they make some sort of important connection and that allows them to have the peace they need to move on.

1:03:42 Interesting. OK, but that's another kind of like the ring is a freaky horror twist on this thing. That's like a comedy twist on it, I guess.

1:03:51 Yeah.

1:03:52 But the interesting thing is to contrast that with the story told by Pliny. No such narrative justice occurs in the story told by Pliny. So as told, Athenodorus never learns the ghost's story. Even with these tantalizing details, like what happened to the ghost? It's wrapped in chains. You want to know what the story was. And if Athenodorus learns anything about it, Pliny doesn't include that part. It doesn't seem like a crucial part of the tale. And he doesn't even speculate about what happened to the ghost. Instead, what we get is ritual rectitude. So instead of this, like, squalid off-the-books grave in the courtyard of the house, the body is given a proper public burial. And that made me think about, like, what does that difference mean? So

1:04:41 in our modern secular world, we have to learn the story of the specter and, like, fix some kind of injustice as if in a court of law, we'd have to get like tangible justice or at least get the truth out, expose the true story. And in this Roman example, I don't know if this is broadly how Roman ghost stories would have worked because again, we have such a small sample size of them. Uh, but at least in this one story, like learning the story is not even mentioned. You, they, we never find out what happened to this guy because It's just that it needs.

1:05:16 An honorable burial.

1:05:18 It needs to be buried in the correct ways. And so it's like the most important thing is that the ritual is observed.

1:05:25 That's a great point. Now, Ogden shares a couple of additional things I'm going to mention here real quick. One, actually, this is something that Felton mentions as well, and that is the connection with the lamp might be essential to the story. The idea that the light or the lantern that he has That this maybe draws the spirit in or is some way, you know, some association with lights leading the dead. And then this beckoning of the finger, the way Ogden describes it, it might have been intended to be sort of a twist as well with the idea that like you're supposed to think that the spirit is going to like drag him to Hades, like I'm coming to get you.

1:06:05 Oh, OK.

1:06:06 But instead he's saying, no, I want you to come with me. I want to show you something.

1:06:10 And different kinds of beckoning or calling.

1:06:13 Yeah, yeah. So he's, and again, he kind of like by his bravery, by his stoic outlook on things and his skeptical nature, he's able to like push through the fear and get to the point where he can actually see what the ghost is talking about.

1:06:29 Yeah, that's a really good point. And in fact, I wanted to talk about stoic philosophy for a second.

1:06:33 Yeah.

1:06:34 You want to do that?

1:06:35 Let's do it.

1:06:35 Well, so I think that ghost stories are often used as a reflection, not just on the situation or on the character of the ghost, but as a reflection on the character of the person being haunted. And it seems to me that this story, uh, valorizes the character of Athena Doris. It's showing off his good qualities as a person. Uh, and this is especially interesting given that he's presented as a stoic philosopher. Uh, The Stoic school of philosophy is sometimes misunderstood in the modern day. A lot of times people today think it means like not caring or not having feelings about what happens. That's not exactly what Stoic philosophy meant in the ancient world. It's a complex tradition, but the best way to understand it, I think, is

1:07:22 to start with the fact that the Stoics believed the most important thing in life was cultivating your own personal virtue. So they believed in virtues like wisdom, self-control, fairness, and courage. And so the way some Stoic philosophers put it was like, there are things in life that you cannot control and things that you can control. It's important to understand the difference between them to not worry about the things that you cannot control and understand that the most important thing that you can control is your own virtue. And so devote yourself to that.

1:08:00 And this alone is a great concept. You see this in modern therapy techniques, thinking particularly of one where you make two circles. In the inner circle, you write down the things you can control. In the outer circle, you write down the things you don't have control over that may factor into your anxieties. And then it's not about just like lists because you're going to have a lot of things in that outer circle. It's not about just saying like, oh, wow, look at all these things I don't control. But it's about realizing, you know, to your point and to the Stokes point, that there are things within your control. Right.

1:08:31 Focus on those.

1:08:32 Yeah. Yeah. Those are the things that deserve your attention.

1:08:35 Absolutely.

1:08:35 And especially again, focusing on the task of cultivating your own virtues. So the, you know, they tried to cultivate attributes of character that we actually still give to a lot of heroes.

1:08:46 In modern storytelling.

1:08:47 Uh, so, you know, the ideal to a stoic philosopher was probably somebody who is strong, resolute, clever, and knowledgeable or wise, morally righteous and fair, cool and rational under pressure. And most of these are virtues that you could argue Athenodorus displays in the story. So instead of running away from the ghost in terror or just pawning the house off on somebody else and making it their problem, He's like, I'm not going to be afraid. This is a problem that can be fixed with correct action. And I'm going to take that action and fix it and achieve justice.

1:09:24 Yeah. And in the moment, I'm not going to yell back at the ghost. You know, I can't control your raging ghost, but I can control the way I respond to your rage.

1:09:32 Yeah, exactly.

1:09:33 So I don't know if illustrating stoic virtues is something that Pliny is really consciously trying to do here, but it seems like an undercurrent in the telling of the story.

1:09:42 Hmm.

1:09:44 And then finally in this letter, Pliny says that he believes that story is true.

1:09:50 He says, I think it happened.

1:09:52 And then he adds a brief, weird ghost story from his own house. This, I think, is the strangest of the three.

1:09:58 Yeah. And the least likely to be adapted for a major motion picture, I think.

1:10:05 So basically, he sets it up. He's like, something's been going on in my house. And he says that multiple times, His slaves and other people living or sleeping in his house have had their hair cut by ghosts in the night. So in the middle of the night, whoever is involved in this story, they think they see someone applying shears to their head. And then in the morning, they find that their hair is actually cut off.

1:10:33 This is sometimes described as being like dreams of having your hair cut, but then waking and there's evidence that your hair was cut. Yeah.

1:10:41 I could imagine there's another explanation for this, though it would be strange. I don't know why somebody in reality would just be cutting their hair at night, but that seems like the most likely explanation to me. And then Pliny makes a very strange interpretive connection between these events and the broader political environment during his life and how it relates to his own fate. So I'm going to read from the first translation of Pliny here. Quote, No incident of any note followed, unless it was that I escaped prosecution, as I should not have done if Domitian, in whose reign these incidents had taken place, had lived any longer than he did. For in his writing desk there was discovered a document sent in by Carus, which

1:11:29 denounced me. This gives rise to the conjecture that, as it is the custom for accused persons to let their hair go untrimmed, The fact that the hair of my slaves was cut was a sign that the peril overhanging me had passed away. So that's kind of hard to understand at first, but I parsed this out and did a little background research. So the political context is that the emperor Domitian in his later years instigated something of a reign of terror. I think this is one of those things where maybe historians debate to what extent this is a fair characterization or whether this is how it was characterized by his enemies. But anyway, uh, Domitian clearly was accusing people of treason. He's like, Oh, these people

1:12:18 are plotting against me. And so there was a surge in accusations against and prosecutions of notable Roman citizens, often ending with exile or death for the accused. And, uh, apparently in plenty's time, he says at least, uh, Allowing your hair to grow long would be associated with being under suspicion or prosecution of this kind. I think the idea is that like distress and anxiety make you ignore your grooming. So your hair grows long because you're just worried with the fact that the emperor's got it out for you. And it's obviously like it would be very scary to have the emperor have it out for you.

1:12:59 That's like a horrible thing.

1:13:01 And also makes me think of classic images of just, you know, the prisoner forgotten in a dungeon.

1:13:07 With long, filthy hair.

1:13:08 Yeah, yeah.

1:13:09 Anyway, Pliny looks back on these ghosts just cutting people's hair at night in his house. And he says, ah, this may have been a positive omen that I would get lucky and escape this persecution. So I'd get lucky in the fact that Domitian dies before he gets around to getting me.

1:13:29 Because he had the letter in his desk saying, hey, there's plenty of the younger guy. He needs to be on the list.

1:13:35 Yes, exactly.

1:13:36 So I think it works out like this. Long hair equals being under, you know, persecute. You are under accusation. The bad things are coming for you. Therefore, short hair would be not being under accusation. So ghosts coming and cutting people's hair in your house at night. means the danger is going away, right? Like it's an omen that the danger of prosecution by the emperor has gone away or will soon go away. It kind of makes me wonder if this personal story coming right at the end of the letter here is actually the main reason Pliny wants to know Sura's opinion about whether ghosts are real and have divinity. He ends the letter by saying, quote, I will let you follow your usual habit of arguing

1:14:33 on both sides of the case, but be sure that you take up one side more strongly than the other so that I may not go away in suspense and uncertainty when the reason I asked your advice was just this, that you should put an end to my doubts. So I think for Pliny, this got personal because And that makes me reframe my understanding of the entire letter that came before, all these stories of ghosts. I think there's something really interesting going on here about how our epistemic standards really can change when the events in question mean something important to us.

1:15:09 Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's more often the case, certainly in more recent tellings from recent centuries, to have some sort of a like a very personal connection, like suddenly like someone's lost somebody. And then it generates an interest in the occult and spiritualism and the idea that they might reach that person again. But here it's a little more abstract. It's about seeing, sensing an omen in this alleged haunting that's happening in his house. And I think it's also kind of humorous in its own way that it's like, he's not at plenty. The younger is not actually concerned about the fact that there may be a ghost cutting everyone's hair and cutting the hair of enslaved people in his house. No, he's, he's like, he's

1:15:50 made it about himself in a, in a, in a very like to him serious way.

1:15:55 Yeah.

1:15:56 Yeah.

1:15:56 I don't know how to read that. I don't know if it is taken as threatening that the people were getting haircuts. Like was that, is that perceived as a danger to them or is that just kind of, huh?

1:16:06 That's weird.

1:16:08 Yeah. Like it was, it, did it just make its way up the chain to plenty in the form of just an aside? Like, Oh, by the way, the people are complaining about the midnight haircuts. They think it's a ghost. And then he kind of, like, spirals just off of that, or is this, like, just every night this is occurring?

1:16:25 I don't know.

1:16:26 Yeah. But, I mean, it does... In a way, you can imagine just sort of, like, the picking at the general idea. Are ghosts real? Are the stories that I've heard of ghosts real? Like, if you start following it enough and you start sort of, like, connecting your own story to it enough, it does become personal, right? Because...

1:16:44 Like if these ghosts are real, then what does that say about like people that I know that have died? And then if you're wrapping it into this kind of idea that ghosts or non-physical apparitions have knowledge of the future and of secret things in the past, then it just adds to this as well. But whatever his reason, like the crazy thing is that he ends up telling this ghost story in a way that it is actually preserved.

1:17:13 For future generations and become, you know, it has all these hallmarks that, as Ogden points out, like these become the sorts of ghost stories that are told in the medieval times. And then, you know, certainly looking at the history of all this stuff, you know, these kinds of stories pass on into the into Gothic and Victorian tellings and then become part of our ghost stories today, our haunted house stories that we still tell, we still make up and we still adapt for television and film.

1:17:38 Yeah, totally.

1:17:40 In fact, I want to come back to something we were talking about earlier. The idea that the story feels almost too well put together to just be one random tale, you know, a random event that Pliny is recounting. It feels more like something that has a standard structure, if that makes sense. It feels like something that is part of a genre.

1:18:03 Now, maybe it.

1:18:04 Just feels that way to us because... a genre later emerged that has that borrowed things, maybe even directly from this letter or from things like it. Uh, but, but I, I don't know. I, I, it could be just that. And I'm like back, uh, you know, I'm, I'm retrospectively characterizing the letter in terms of the genre that emerged later, but it feels to me like something that's partaking of a genre, even at the time it's written, it's got this tight structure and a very strong, uh, narrative momentum, uh, And it has symmetry and it has set up and resolution.

1:18:39 It just feels like a very composed story that would be part of a form.

1:18:45 Yeah. And I think it brings us back again to the understanding that we don't have a whole. lot of stories to compare it to, but as we'll get into in the next episode that we do in this series, we can compare this one to at least a couple of other stories, and what they have in common does reveal something. And overall, this story is often interpreted as being one that sort of clues us into what may have been sort of the standard ghost story of the day, with this being pretty much the only complete surviving example.

1:19:20 It would be very interesting to me if it were the case that stories like this were common. There were tales a lot like this circulating all throughout the Roman Empire, but almost none of them made it into text sources that actually survived into the modern day. That would be surprising to me, I think, just because like we today think ghost stories are so notable and we want to write them down and proliferate them. But it could be the kind of story that was, you know, the people would commonly tell back then, but was not thought to be worthy of written literature.

1:19:55 I don't know.

1:19:56 Yeah. Now, to be clear, there are plenty of ghost stories in general. And there's, of course, there's one, at least one notable werewolf story. So there are other Other tales of the supernatural from.

1:20:07 Haunted houses.

1:20:08 Yeah, but haunted houses specifically, that's where this one stands out as being either singular or one of only three, maybe a few more, but around three tales seem to be all that we have to really go on.

1:20:22 So I guess we will have to explore those in the next part of the series.

1:20:25 Yes, one more night in the haunted house, and we'll get into that in the next episode. All right. In the meantime, certainly write in if you have thoughts on any of this and in general on haunted house houses, you know, send us your scary stories, I guess. And certainly if you have your own take on the question of when were you first introduced to haunted house stories, I want to know as well. Was it Scooby Doo for you as well? Was it something else? What's the answer across different generations and in different parts of the world? Yeah, I'm curious to hear all of that. Just a reminder, this stuff to blow your mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,

1:21:05 short form on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. It's October, so we're doing a lot of spooky content. And yeah, wherever you get the podcast, we just ask that you rate, review and subscribe. If you're on Netflix, that's where you get the video version of our show. Give us a couple of thumbs up.

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1:21:26 Huge thanks, as always, to our regular excellent producer, JJ Posway, and to our excellent guest producer today, Max Williams.

1:21:34 Thank you, Max.

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