Haunted Houses of the Ancient World, Part 2

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

0:12 Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

0:16 And I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're back with the second part in our Halloween season series about tales of haunted houses.

0:24 From the ancient Greco-Roman world.

0:27 Of course, the haunted house is a well-known setting for modern ghost stories, but it turns out there are descriptions of haunted houses going all the way back into antiquity. So in the last episode, we focused on one of the big examples, one of the things that scholars talk about the most from the surviving literature, which is a letter from the first and second century Roman author Pliny the Younger, In this letter, Pliny writes to a friend, a Roman senator named Sura, asking if Sura.

0:58 Believes in ghosts.

0:59 And he's like, and you really, I know you like to argue both sides of something, but you really got to come down one side or the other because I need to know.

1:06 He says, I want to know if you believe in ghosts.

1:09 And then Pliny gives a trio of stories that he says, that Pliny says compel him to accept that ghosts are real and have their own substance and divinity. And one of the three stories he describes is the tale of a philosopher named Athena Doris, who rents a haunted house in Athens, confronts the ghost, and is able to solve the problem of the haunting by finding bones that are hidden under the courtyard. And then he makes sure that they get a proper public burial, and that allows the ghost to move on to the afterlife. So we talked about a lot of interesting features of this account, including the question of whether it provides any evidence of a broader haunted house genre of folktale at the time of

1:59 Pliny's writing. Because you can't know for sure when you read the story, whether it's just a unique account that Pliny has heard, or whether it is a type of story that was common in the Roman Empire. Of course, we modern readers recognize that it is a type of story today. But the question is, did that type of story, the haunted house format, evolve later? Or was that something that existed at the time?

2:24 Yeah.

2:26 And of course, it's worth noting again that there's still plenty of other ghost stories, but we're dealing very particularly with ghost stories that involve like a ghost localized to a home. And it's haunting is very much tied up in some sort of essentially in kind of like property issues to a certain extent. And we talked about that in the last episode.

2:48 Yeah.

2:48 And often has a There's a problem solving element to the haunted house story. Unlike some other ghost stories, which just have a random scary thing happening. Whereas in the haunted house story, it follows like the, the, the structure we see with the Athena Doris tale, where there is a haunting people are driven away from the home. Eventually somebody must solve the problem. They investigate, they figure out how to fix the problem. In this case, it has to do with finding the bones of a person left there.

3:19 We don't ever learn the full story of the person, of the ghost or the person the bones belong to, but the bones are given a proper burial and that fixes the issue.

3:29 Yeah, yeah. Involving a brave person, generally a scholar or some sort of skeptic who essentially does like the very what is today cliche thing of like, well, I better spend the night in this haunted house or I better like settle in and do some studying in this haunted house, do some reading. and then wait for the ghost to appear to me. Now, I want to mention again a couple of sources that I'm going to refer to. One is Haunted Greece and Rome, Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity by D. Felton. And then the other is Magic Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds by Daniel Ogden.

4:04 Both of these are great authors. These are both really fun books. I recommend them to anyone who wants to learn more about this. And both of these authors have a number of books dealing with various supernatural traditions. from antiquity. We've referred to Ogden's work before, and I might come back to another of Felton's books later this month. There's one of her takes on a particular topic that I've been thinking of, like, oh, that would be a great single episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. We'll see. Okay.

4:33 I do want to come back to one thing we talked about. So in the last episode, we talked about the different varieties of ghosts that you might encounter. and in Ogden's book, he lays out the three varieties that we already discussed, but also mentions a fourth. So first, the three that we already referenced. First, there are the aoroi.

4:56 These are those that are dead before their time. We talked about this. Certain time is measured out by the fates, and if you die before that time, well, you still got some time that you're supposed to be on Earth, so you're just going to have to Wait that out until you can enter into Hades. Then there are the Baeothanatoi, and these are those that are dead by violence. And these are supposed to be particularly dangerous, as you might imagine, because their end is tied up in violence, and therefore their ghosts may be violent as well. Then there are the Atofoi, and these are the ones that were deprived of a proper burial. They might have been buried, but it wasn't a proper burial, and therefore that's what needs

5:38 to be rectified.

5:39 And we mentioned this in the last episode, but it really is worth emphasizing again how much preoccupation in actually many different cultures around the ancient Mediterranean and the ancient Near East where you find this literature with a preoccupation with getting the proper funeral rites and getting whatever your culture thinks the right thing to do with a dead body is. It's really important that you get that yourself.

6:06 And if you don't get it, that is not just something that's a little distasteful. That is a terrifying prospect to people.

6:12 Yeah. And we've discussed similar situations in other cultures like the Jiangxi, the hopping vampires of China. Like that tradition has its roots in kind of a big public outcry and a lot of anxiety about corpses not being given a proper burial. So go back and listen to that episode in the audio archives if you're interested. But anyway, there's a fourth example that Ogden lays out, and that is the agamoi. And these are those that die before marriage.

6:45 He says that they could be male or female, but it sounds like female agamoi were more common and were more typical of the case as marriage and motherhood were, quote, a woman's defining rights in antiquity.

6:59 So it was another way of sort of a variation on dying before your time, but like Dying before you could can reach this important milestone in life.

7:10 Yeah. Yeah. Like one imagines a ghost of a Hollywood director who who is haunting because he hasn't won an Oscar yet. Like some sort of defining milestone for a particular individual or a class of individuals has not been met. And therefore, some haunting has to be done.

7:29 Hmm.

7:30 Yeah. I'm reading a book about old Hollywood ghosts right now, so that's probably why that particular example came to mind.

7:38 That did seem very specific. Yeah.

7:50 Okay, are you ready to talk about another example, one of the three big examples of a haunted house story from the ancient world, the one from Plautus?

7:58 Yeah, I love the title on this one.

8:01 This is from a play called The Mostelaria. So The Mostelaria is a farce written for the stage by a Roman playwright named Titus Macius Plautus, who lived 254 to 184 BCE. The name of the play translates to the ghost or maybe ghostly ghost. And the plot is basically a cross between House on Haunted Hill and risky business.

8:31 But it really is.

8:32 It's set in Athens in Greece. And I was thinking about this because this is set in Athens. Pliny's haunted house story is also set in Athens. This made me start to wonder if the ancient Romans thought of Athens as particularly haunted, maybe the way Americans would think of. Salem, Massachusetts or New Orleans, you know, these cities that are known for having a lot of ghost stories and hauntings.

9:00 I couldn't find any evidence of this as a general belief. Both of these stories, as best I can tell, both of these stories being located in Athens is probably just a coincidence and maybe even has to do with just Athens being a common reference point in Greece. It's like, yeah, that's where things in Greece happen.

9:18 Yeah, yeah. I looked into this. I was reading in Ogden. And he indicates that Athens is just kind of the default setting for the Greek new comedy. This is where the focus is on more domestic life and drama over political satire. And Romans, you know, later adapted these plays. And so it became the main setting for these sorts of dramas and also the subset of those dramas that have supernatural elements to them. So I guess it's kind of like New York is a setting for movies. Is New York haunted? Yeah. I mean, it's an historic city and a lot of supernatural stories are set there. But then again, there are just a whole lot of stories set there in general. So Chud and Ghostbusters take place in New York City, but so do, I don't know,

10:00 at Tiffany's and Midnight Cowboy. But at the same time, it's like you can still focus in and say, yeah, New York is a haunted city. You can take horror movie location tours of New York City. So, you know, it's kind of like both are true at the same time.

10:12 But that doesn't mean that like hauntings or supernatural events are one of the top associations people would have had with this place.

10:20 Right.

10:20 Yeah.

10:21 It's not like if you had something set in Salem, to your point, because if you're setting it in Salem, it probably involves witches. Surely there's an example contrary to this, but I would be surprised if it just happens to be a romantic comedy that takes place in Salem and never acknowledges witchcraft at all.

10:39 That would be funny.

10:40 Yeah.

10:40 Okay.

10:41 So the most Delaria, one thing to really note about this play is that it is not a work of horror and it is not even a serious work of drama. It is a farcical comedy. So the haunting in this play is not genuine. Instead, this is an early example of the Scooby-Doo format. It is a Scooby-Doo style hoax perpetrated by a naughty young man who and his co-conspirator to avoid getting in trouble with the young man's dad.

11:17 So the plot goes like this. It concerns the antics and misbehavior of Philolakis, the son of a rich Athenian merchant named Theopropides. Theopropides has been out of town for a long time. He's been away, I think, for years on business. leaving his son Philolakis in charge of the house. So together with his slave, Trenio, Philolakis has been throwing wild, huge parties, has been drinking wine, has been spending money, just lavish spending of money. So it's a total party house.

11:58 And Philolakis also ends up borrowing a large sum of money to purchase the freedom of a slave named Philematium with whom he is in love. Uh, so now the house is a wreck. It's full of party guests. You can just imagine the, you know, wine bottles scattered everywhere. Uh, I don't know if there would have been bottles at the time when, you know, what's the ancient, ancient Athens equivalent of solo cups all over the floor. Uh, and Philematium is has purchased the freedom of Philematium, but he is now badly in debt. He owes a lot of money to a loan.

12:35 Shark, basically.

12:37 So that's the state of affairs at the beginning of the play. But then suddenly things get a lot worse because Tranio runs up to the house, having come back from the harbor. I think he was supposed to be down there buying fish.

12:48 Maybe for the party.

12:50 And Traineo says, uh-oh, dad's home. Theopropides has landed in the harbor and he is on the way up to the house now. So the question is, what are Philolakis and Traineo going to do to get out of this mess? Traineo has a brilliant idea. He says, we're going to convince Theopropides that he cannot come into the house because while he was away, we discovered that it was haunted.

13:20 And he comes up with this story about how there was once a murder that took place in the house, and the ghost of the man who was killed is now running wild and will maybe inflict a death curse on anybody who touches the front door.

13:36 So, Rob, I don't know.

13:37 Do you want to do a reading of this? Do you want to trade off these lines or something? Okay, so we haven't rehearsed this. This may be a little creaky. But I pulled in some of the original text. This is from the translation by Henry Thomas Riley. And the setup to this exchange is that Theopropides, the father, has just arrived home. And Trenio, the very smart, improvising slave, is coming up with a cover story. So when Theopropides tries to open the front door, Trenio warns him not to touch the house, saying it could lead to the death of his entire family. And then Theopropides demands an explanation. Rob, do you have a preference which role you take here?

14:19 Oh, I can be Traneo. Okay.

14:22 Do you do the Traneo lines? I'll do the dad lines, the Theopropides lines.

14:26 All right, let's see. A crime, tell you, has been committed here a long while ago, one of olden time and ancient date.

14:34 Of ancient date?

14:36 Tis but recently, in fact, that we've discovered this deed.

14:39 What is this crime, or who committed it? Tell me.

14:42 A host slew his guest, seized with his hand he, I fancy, who sold you the house.

14:48 Slew him?

14:49 And robbed this guest of his gold, and buried this guest there in the house, on the spot.

14:54 For what reason do you suspect that this took place?

14:57 I tell you, listen. One day, when your son had dined away from home, after he returned home from dining, we all went to bed and fell asleep. By accident, I had forgotten to put out my lamp. And he, all of a sudden, called out aloud.

15:12 What person? My son?

15:13 Hold your peace. Just listen. He said that a dead man came to him in his sleep.

15:19 In his dreams, then, you mean?

15:20 Just so. But only listen. He said that he had met with his death by these means. What?

15:27 In his sleep?

15:28 It would have been surprising if he had told him awake who had been murdered 60 years ago. On some occasions, you are absurdly simple. But look what he said. I am the guest of Diapontius from beyond the seas. Here do I dwell. This has been assigned me as my abode, for Orcus would not receive me in Acheron because prematurely I lost my life. Through confiding was I deceived. My entertainer slew me here, and that villain secretly laid me in the ground without funeral rites in this house on the spot for the sake of gold. Now do you depart from here. This house is accursed. This dwelling is defiled.

16:06 The wonders that Here take place. Hardly in a year could I recount them. Hush, hush.

16:11 Okay, and so the scene obviously continues from there. One thing that's worth noting in this play is the dynamic between the son, Philolakis, and the slave, Traneo. In some ways, it is like the Jeeves and Worcester stories by P.G. Woodhouse, where in these stories you have Worcester, the young aristocrat, who is a good-for-nothing fool, just totally incompetent, never understands what's going on. And then you have his manservant Jeeves, who is incredibly quick-witted and resourceful and has to solve all of Worcester's ridiculous problems for him. This story is a lot like that. Philolakis is totally hapless. He can't do anything. And Trenio is very clever and quick-witted and resourceful.

17:03 But one difference, I think, from Jeeves is that Traneo is not blameless. He's not just solving problems the son created. He's also partly responsible for causing the mess in the first place. Like the parties have been instigated by Philolakis and Traneo together.

17:18 They have been partying.

17:19 Yeah, very much an accomplice in all of this. Yeah.

17:21 Yeah.

17:22 So from this scene, the normal dynamics of a farce continue. Uh, new problems keep arising. Like people will show up, you know, like the money lender appears, say, Hey, I'm here to collect on that debt that Philo Lockheed owes. And Trenio has to find a way to cover for this too. So he comes up with this idea that, uh, actually we have a debt because we bought the.

17:45 House next door.

17:46 Yeah.

17:47 We're buying, we're investing, uh, you know, cause he's trying to make a good impression on the dad. Like we're getting into business. It's real estate now. And they just keep having to improvise. Traneo is doing all these elaborate tricks to keep from being discovered. And eventually they go into touring the house next door under false pretenses, and it's a whole thing.

18:11 Yeah, and as both Ogden and Felton mentioned, especially Felton, the story that he's telling actually has a lot of errors and inconsistencies in it, which maybe we'll tease apart in a bit, because the idea is He's making all of this up on the spot. I am reminded of this, and maybe some of our people my age are reminded of this as well. Like the John Lovitz character on Saturday Night Live where he's just like, ah, that's the ticket.

18:36 He's just making up the story on the fly. Liars Anonymous or something. Yeah, yeah. And so part of the whole dramatic comedic tension here is, is the father going to really be able to have time to call him on any of these errors and these various inconsistencies and plot holes? And is Traneo going to be able to just sort of like charge through it and be like, no, no, no, you're in danger, you know, and just really moving on to the next thing and making sure there's not enough space in the conversation for the old man to really call him on it.

19:10 Yeah.

19:10 And this is still a dramatic form today, like the farce in which somebody is putting together, like improvising an elaborate ruse or lie, and they just have to keep coming up with new covers more and more quickly to cover up more absurd problems. Uh, but eventually at the end of the story, uh, Theopropides discovers the truth and there is a happy ending there. There's an interlude where things look really rough, like, uh, Traineo runs to claim sanctuary by he like grips the altar of a god to be like you can't punish me yet but theopropides is like well i'm going to crucify you.

19:49 I'm going to have you flayed.

19:50 Like he threatens a lot of really, uh, harsh punishment, but then, uh, things are redeemed when. I follow Lockie's wealthy friend who I think had been showing up in the play drunk earlier. Uh, he now seems sobered up and he, uh, shows up and says, Oh, Hey, you know, I'll repay the son's debt for him. And then the father forgives the son and eventually forgives Trenio, too.

20:12 So they're off the hook.

20:14 Yeah, it's a comedy, right? You got to send everybody home happy.

20:18 So the Mostelaria is thought to be a Latin adaptation of an earlier play in Greek by an author named Philemon. But I believe, Rob, did your sources also say the Greek play is lost? We don't have that, whatever it was.

20:33 I think that's the case, yes. Yes, but they did refer to the Greek play.

20:37 And just want to note one more time, there is no haunting in this play. So it's a haunted house story, but the haunted house is only a lie made up to cover up for a house that has been turned into a total party house against the owner's wishes. So a ghost never appears.

20:54 It's more like Scooby-Doo.

20:56 And there's one interesting thing about that fact, I was thinking, which is that if this is a comedy... And the haunted house is suggested as a farcical ruse to cover up the evidence that Philolockes and Trenio have been partying. That would sort of imply that haunted house was already like a culturally available concept with widely understood implications.

21:24 Does that make sense?

21:25 Yeah, absolutely.

21:27 It feels like you couldn't pull that in as a comedy concept if it wasn't already a thing people had heard of.

21:33 Yeah, and I think that's generally the scholarly take on all of this. Like, this is essentially a parody. For instance, you can't have scary movie if you don't have Scream first, right?

21:42 Perfect, exactly.

21:42 That's sort of what's going on here.

21:44 Yeah, I think that's right.

21:46 And given, again, how little we have in terms of surviving haunted house tales from this period, like, this is telling. This means that stories like this widely circulated and were known because you can parody it in this form. Like, I imagine this play would still be humorous and entertaining if you were not up on haunted house tales but it does seem to ask or expect that kind of knowledge of the intended viewer yeah let's see um referring back to ogden and felton um i have some notes here to refer to on other other comments they had um this is very similar in form to the next tale we're going to discuss the tale from lucian um though this one, to be sure, occurs much earlier. So 200 BCE versus the 170 CE.

22:36 Yeah.

22:37 So the chronological order of the main three examples we're going to be talking about in this series is that this one comes first. You've got Plautus, and then several hundred years later, you've got Pliny's letter. And then after that, still, you've got the next example we're going to get to, which is in the works of Lucian of Samosata.

22:53 Yeah, yeah. So we talked about Pliny first because it's the big one, and it's in a way the most insightful example. But You know, these are just the three that have remained. Everything else has been washed away by the tides of time. But yeah, like we can see the similar form in all of them. We can see them referring to seemingly to expected tropes concerning a haunted house story.

23:16 Yeah, totally.

23:18 And let's see here. We also get some grounding as well that may be somewhat subverted in Pliny's 107 CE account. to come into contact with a ghost or even a haunted house may pretty much mean certain death. The ghost might beckon you straight to Hades. Remember, we talked about the beckoning of the ghost in Pliny the Younger's story, where to be beckoned by the ghost, it could just mean instant death, but a wise man knows to sort of brave that out and take it to the next level.

23:51 Yeah, that's interesting. Both stories make reference to the ghost causing death. In this case, Traneo says to the father, don't even touch the doorknob, because that could mean everyone in the family dies. In the story told by Pliny, of course, Athena Doris, the brave philosopher, is not harmed, but it says that the people who were in the house before that, they had encounters with the ghost and then literally died of fright. They were so terrified they became ill and just passed away.

24:16 Yeah.

24:17 So Ogden points out that, yeah, there are all these little logical inconsistencies. Like he mentions that the ghost has been dead for 60 years, but shouldn't that be enough to fulfill the remainder of its span-based contract, you know, if it died before its time? And Trenio doesn't bother with these details and is perhaps, again, is just telling, he's just making it up as he goes. So it's just like press through and then just make sure you insist on how dangerous everything is.

24:43 Yeah, I think you can probably get a flavor from that dialogue we read that the text has this fast-moving quality where the improvisation is occurring so quickly it's as if to paper over any kind of discrepancies or questions that may arise.

24:57 Yeah, I mean, Trenio is acting like a con artist, and he is keeping things moving and really insisting on the urgency of the scenario.

25:05 Yeah.

25:06 Trenio is also careless in naming the ghost of a guest from across the sea Diapontius, which apparently literally means guest from across the sea. So, You know, it's almost like, you know, staring across the street and naming a character off of a street sign, you know, which is often done to, sometimes done for dramatic effect, obviously, but often done for comedic effect. And so there's maybe a little of that energy going on here.

25:29 His name was Cat Branch Man.

25:32 Yeah, that sort of thing. Felton says that, yeah, we have all these errors and inconsistencies, and it suggests that the tighter, leak-free versions of the popular ghost story would have made this exchange both funny and tension-building.

25:46 Like, there were.

25:47 Anybody watching this would know how things are supposed to line up and know that there are some errors here. The author is also playing on the beats of popular tragedies. The big one being that the ghost reveals a crime that was committed against it in life. And apparently it's uncertain if this is a direct parody of such a play or the trope itself. But authors such as Euripides use this specifically in the telling of Polydorus. in his Hecuba, Polydorus of the Iliad, is a ghost and a character, and his death is the cause of the main conflict in the play. And in fact, the ghost delivers the prologue.

26:28 So again, we also have to factor in, yeah, there are all these other ghost stories that are not haunted house stories, and there are all these other plays that have ghosts in them.

26:35 Yeah.

26:36 Another thing Felton points out is that in a comedy, an enslaved person like Trenio would never get to kill his master, but can instead, quote, slay him with words. And so there's a lot of that in here. I think even what we read, there's a little bit of that flavor where he gets to do some little asides.

26:52 I think there's a bit in what I read that maybe sounds like a direct insult, and maybe that would be a part that would be kind of directed at the audience, breaking the fourth wall. So I think that's amusing here as well. And it's part of why this character is a lot of fun, because he has kind of a, He serves like two kind of befuddled or dimwitted people. Both the son and the father are kind of fools in their own way. And he's kind of like suspended between the two of them, making the best of the life that he can. But he's also, to our point, very much an accomplice of the son.

27:25 Yeah.

27:26 There's this bit, I happen to have forgotten to put out the lamp, which Felton connects to something we were talking about in the last episode, this idea that lights... can draw in spirits. Lights are left in graves. Lights are used in funeral processions. And so there's a connection between ghosts and lanterns or lamps or candles. And then there's also some discussion in Felton's work about dream ghosts versus ghosts encountered in reality. Because obviously in the part that we read, that keeps tripping up the father. He's like, wait, wait, was this a dream? And so there's like some known difference between what it means to encounter a ghost within a dream and a ghost like in the real world,

28:07 maybe not quite in the flesh, but maybe in the ectoplasm. Felton also points out that Trenio risks tipping his hand and saying the ghost was improperly buried because we all, just from listening to the last episode, you know how this is easily rectified in stories, right?

28:21 Right.

28:22 Okay, if there's an improper burial, let's solve this right now. So Trenio has to push through this With inspired delivery, also speaking of the ghost as the victim of violent death, as these were, you know, particularly dangerous ghosts in many tellings. So, you know, just steamroll through it.

28:38 Yeah.

28:39 And then he also, he has to keep covering for claims that can easily be checked on. Like, for instance, the idea that the previous owner knows about this, who it's revealed still lives and is like down the street. Yeah. You want to keep the father from being like, OK, well, let's just go check in with him and get the details. No, no, no.

28:59 It's too dangerous. The urgency is too great.

29:02 Wait, am I remembering the detail right? If the previous owner is still alive, doesn't Trenio say that the previous owner was the murderer?

29:08 Yeah, like everything.

29:10 He killed his guest.

29:11 Yeah, if he has time to think about any of this, like all these things don't add up. Like it was 60 years ago. And then the guy down the street is maybe the murderer. And we can just check in with him and we can just properly bury the body. But, you know, everything's very fast moving and the father's not given time to think about this. And then Felton describes some that, yeah, here we have an intentionally muddled ghost story told by a clever slave, which was a stock character of the time and a gullible. old man, which is another stock character of the time. And to your point, Joe, these stock characters continue on into the modern day in different forms.

29:51 Yeah, removing some of the harsher, specific cultural aspects like slavery and the threat of crucifixion and stuff, but Still, it is a fun type of story people still do where, like, somebody leads the boss on a wild goose chase. Somebody is, like, pulling one over on the boss, and the boss is just, like, befuddled and falling for it.

30:12 Yeah. So we can think of any number of ways this could be adapted for today's setting. And I was looking around a little bit, and I think this place is occasionally adapted for a modern setting, like, directly. And then, of course, the influence of this sort of story can be found all over the place as well.

30:37 Are you ready to talk about the next example from Lucian?

30:40 Let's do it.

30:41 Okay. So this next.

30:44 Story of a haunted house comes to us from a text called The Lover of Lies, also sometimes called The Doubter, by the second century Syrian author Lucian of Samosata. We have talked about Lucian on the show before. I know he came up in the past because Lucian Lucian wrote extensively detailing the tricks and fraud used in the Roman cult of the snake god Glycon, allegedly perpetrated by the cult leader Alexander of Abinotychus. And according to Lucian, Alexander used special effects and sleight of hand to fake miracles and supernatural events and thus trick his gullible followers.

31:28 Was this our series on mystery cults? Yes.

31:31 We talked about it there.

31:33 Not because this was necessarily a mystery cult, but it came up in the context of talking about using special effects to create spectacle in ancient religious practices. So this is, by the way, very in character for Lucian because Lucian was sort of a James Randi figure of the Roman Empire. A skeptical debunker, not in the sense of being an investigator like Randy was, who would do experiments. There's no real indication that Lucian did that. But he was a skeptical debunker in the sense that he wrote satires mocking superstition and detailing the outrages of various alleged conmen and frauds of his time. So he was just a guy who loved to lampoon trickery and gullibility.

32:24 Yeah, yeah.

32:25 And I think in this, and also in the nature of parody in the last story that we discussed here, I mean, this does, I think, continue to drive home that the people of ancient Rome were, you know, they had kind of a mixed relationship with supernatural ideas, much like we do today. You had true believers, and you had hard-line skeptics, and you had people just trying to sort of figure out where they fell. And the way they fell might vary depending on what's going on in their life and what kind of, story or, you know, phenomena that they're presented with.

32:58 I think that's right.

32:59 And in fact, this whole, this diversity of relationships to supernatural and superstitious beliefs is exactly the subject matter of this book, The Lover of Lies. So the form of The Lover of Lies is a narrative dialogue that is used to illustrate and ridicule a variety of superstitious beliefs. The main narrator is a young man named Tycheides. who begins by pondering the question of why people love to believe in lies, not just why they ever fall for them, but why do they cling to them with such emotional intensity and refuse to give them up. And then he narrates a bunch of instances in which people have tried to convince him to believe in superstitions and miracle cures.

33:47 So here to get to the scene in question where we have the description of a haunted house, I went to the original text of The Lover of Lies, in translation, of course. It's a translation by A.M.

33:58 Harmon.

33:59 And the setup is that Tycheides is hanging out at a house belonging to a sick friend of his named Eucrates. And there are a bunch of people coming and going, and they're all trying to share their miracle cures. And they're all talking about times they've had supernatural encounters. And insisting that Tycheides believed them. And so just to give you an idea of the sort of things that are coming up in conversation before the haunted house scene. The story right before this is told by Tycheides' friend Eucrates.

34:33 And Eucrates says after his beloved wife died, he burned all of her favorite possessions on the funeral pyre with her. But on the seventh day after that, he was sitting on the couch reading Plato. Like you do, you know, just having a little Play-Doh time. And then suddenly her spirit appeared to him and he says that he cried out and tried to embrace her, but the ghost wouldn't have it. And instead she began to criticize him because when he burned all of her favorite clothes and possessions to send them away with her into the afterlife, he forgot to burn one of her favorite sandals, a gilt sandal.

35:11 which was lost under a chest. So he burned the left sandal, but didn't burn the right.

35:16 Sandal or the other way around.

35:18 And then while she's describing this, a puppy dog barks at her and then she disappears. It's specified it's a Maltese dog. And so Eucrates says he looked under the chest and he found the other sandal and he burned it just as she had asked.

35:34 And there you go. That's proof. Ghosts are real.

35:37 And then Tycheides notes that somebody else enters the house right after the story. The person who enters the house is Eregnotus, the Pythagorean, whom Tycheides describes as having long hair and a majestic face with a reputation for being both holy and wise. So you're like, OK, the really smart guy has come into the house now. And Tycheides is relieved. He says to himself, quote, there now. A broad ax has come to hand to use against their lies.

36:11 The wise men will stop their mouths when they tell such prodigious yarns. So the philosopher asks Eucrates about his illness. And then he's like, hey, it seemed when I came in, there was a debate happening.

36:25 I love debates. What was it about?

36:27 And Eucrates explains, he says that they were all trying to convince Tycheides, quote, that spirits and phantoms exist. and that souls of dead men go about above ground and appear to whomsoever they will. Tycheides, after this, becomes embarrassed, and he lowers his head out of respect for the Pythagorean.

36:47 And then the Pythagorean weighs in. Erichnotus says he thinks he may understand the crux of the disagreement. Here's how he's going to sort it out. Quote, Perhaps, Eucrates, he said, Tycheides means that only the ghosts of those who died by violence will. For example, if a man hanged himself or had his head cut off or was crucified or departed life in some similar way, and that those of men who died a natural death do not. If that is what he means, we cannot altogether reject what he says.

37:21 And then another guy at the house, this guy named Dinomachus, is like, no, Eregnotus, you've got it all wrong. He is so much worse than that. He says ghosts don't exist at all. And Aragnotus cannot believe it. He turns to Tycheides with a sour look on his face, and he's like, how can you not believe in ghosts? Everybody sees ghosts. Everybody knows ghosts exist. So this is not going the way Tycheides expected. He thought he was just having a really smart, powerful ally walk into this argument.

37:52 And instead, now the wise Pythagorean is making him look a fool. So, still showing deference to the great man, Tychides says that he would believe in ghosts if he could see one himself, but he never has. And so here's where the haunted house comes in. And now I'm going to read from the text, picking up with Eregnotus' reply. Quote, Come, said he, if ever you go to Corinth, ask where the house of Eubatides is, and when it is pointed out to you beside Cornell Grove, enter. and say to the doorman Tibius that you should like to see where the Pythagorean Eregnotus exhumed the spirit and drove it away, making the house habitable from that time on. And note that this still would not meet Tycheides' standard of seeing

38:43 a ghost himself, but instead it would be travel a great distance to Corinth to see a house where Eregnotus did something awesome. So then Eregnotus backs up and.

38:54 He tells the whole story.

38:56 He says of the house, quote, It was uninhabitable for a long time because of terrors. Whenever anyone took up his abode in it, he fled in panic at once, chased out by a fearful, terrifying phantom. So it was falling in and the roof was tumbling down, and there was nobody at all who had the courage to enter it.

39:16 When I heard all this, I took my books. I have a great number of Egyptian works about such matters. and went into the house at bedtime, although my host tried to dissuade me, and all but held me when he learned where I was going. into misfortune with my eyes open, he thought. But taking a lamp, I went in alone. In the largest room I put down the light, and was reading peacefully, seated on the ground, when the spirit appeared, thinking that he was setting upon a man of the common sort, and expecting to affright me as he had the others, he was squalid and long-haired and blacker than the dark. Standing over me, he made attempts upon me, attacking me from all sides to see if he could get the best of me anywhere, and turning

40:04 now into a dog, now into a bull or a lion. But I brought into play my most frightful imprecation, speaking the Egyptian language, pent him up in a certain corner of a dark room, and laid him. Then, having observed where he went down, I slept for the rest of the night. In the morning, when everybody had given up hope, and expected to find me dead like the others, I came forth to the surprise of all, and went to Eubatides with the good tidings that he could now inhabit his house, which was purged and free from terrors. So, taking him along, and many of the others too, they went with us, because the thing was so amazing, I led them to the place where I had seen that the spirit had gone down and told them to take

40:53 picks and shovels and dig. When they did so, there was found buried about six feet deep a moldering body of which only the bones lay together in order. We exhumed and buried it, and the house from that time ceased to be troubled by the phantoms.

41:10 Nice. I really imagine this character as being more in line with... Christopher Lee from The Devil Rides Out, you know? Oh, perfect. Kind of a pompous authority on occult matters.

41:23 And that is exactly, clearly he is being parodied by Lucian here. Like Lucian is poking fun at this great wise Pythagorean who shows up to, you know, boast of his great deeds and of his piety and bravery.

41:39 But actually this guy is a windbag.

41:41 Yeah.

41:42 So I notice immediately a lot of similarities to the story told in Pliny's letter about the philosopher Athena Doris. So it's almost the same story in most details, but I will note a few differences. But the similar details are old house haunted by a phantom. Nobody has the courage to enter, let alone live there. And then the brave philosopher or wise man goes in by himself. Sits through the night reading. Here's a slight difference. Athena Doris was writing on tablets, whereas it has Eric notice here reading.

42:17 The spirit appears and begins trying to scare him, quote, thinking he was sitting upon a man of the common sort. So he's like, you know, I'm too good for that. He describes the spirit as being squalid with long hair. Pliny's ghost was squalid with a long beard. The philosopher is unafraid. He stands up to the ghost. He marks the spot that the ghost retreats to. The next morning, the philosopher has the spot dug up, finds a skeleton moldering in the ground. People remove the body and give it a proper burial, and the hauntings are brought to an end. However, there are differences. Unlike the story from Pliny, the ghost transforms into various animals. He turns into a lion, a bull, and a dog.

43:03 Also different.

43:04 is that when Athenodorus in Pliny's story is confronted by the ghost, he merely shows his lack of fear and then follows the ghost to its resting place so that the bones can be found later. So the way that Athenodorus prevails is by keeping a cool head, using clear thinking and resolve, and solving the problem in a rational way.

43:28 Whereas Eregnotus solves the situation with knowledge of Egyptian esoterica, Presumably he is using spells from an Egyptian magical papyrus or from, uh, like, you know, Greco.

43:41 Egyptian magical papyri.

43:43 Uh, so Eric notice engages in a wizard battle with the ghost is similar to exorcism scenes in haunting movies today. And this fits the, the different uses of the scene in these two sources. Athena Doris is a stoic philosopher, so he prevails by way of personal virtues like courage. Eregnotus is being used in the story by Lucian to make fun of superstition. So it makes sense that he shows up with what he believes is knowledge of Egyptian magic.

44:18 And even through the translation, it feels very funny when the Egyptian spells are first mentioned. It feels like somebody implausibly claiming to know Kung Fu.

44:28 Yeah, I think that's a good comparison, yeah. According to Felton, the consensus seems to be that this is a direct adaptation of Pliny the Younger's tale, though some scholars have disagreed on that. Essentially, the plot is the same, but with these key differences in place. And yeah, this character is just far more pompous. Instead of being a humble, studious character, person who just kind of like just has an intellectual curiosity about the location. Oh, the rent is low here. It said to be haunted. I want to investigate further. No, this is a guy who's so ready to confront the ghost that there's talk in the tail of him. They're trying to physically restrain him. Like, no, you shouldn't go in there. You're going to die. And

45:10 he's like, no, I must. I, you know.

45:13 So don't hold me back, bro.

45:14 Yeah. Yeah. He's a pompous man looking to make a name for himself in confronting the ghost.

45:20 Yeah, so despite the differences, overall it is very similar to Pliny's story. So similar that, yeah, so you said it's thought that this is based directly on Pliny's letter.

45:32 I think that could be true.

45:33 Or I guess you could imagine that they are both partaking of a common genre of story with expected tropes.

45:39 Yeah, because we don't, again, we don't have all the other stories that sort of populate the rest of the haunted house tale ecology of the time.

45:46 Exactly right.

45:48 So I wanted to mention a few more details from the wrap up of the narrative in Lucian. So after the story is told, Tychides narrates that when everybody at the house hears the story from the mouth of the superhumanly wise Eregnotus, they think Tychides is even more a fool for not believing in the obvious reality of ghosts.

46:10 And Tychides has been very respectful and deferential to the Pythagorean up to this point. But now finally he bites back. He says, what is this, Eregnotus? Were you truth's only hope, just like the rest, full of moonshine and vain imaginings? Indeed, the saying has come true. Our pot of gold has turned out to be nothing but coals. And Eregnotus then gets his feelings hurt. And he sort of responds by doing something.

46:38 This is a.

46:39 Common move people make in conversations like this. He's like, oh, I get it. You don't trust me. You don't think I'm trustworthy. Well, if you don't trust me and you don't trust any of your dear friends in this room, and if we're so terrible, tell me who would you trust? And then Tycheides says, well, I can think of one guy.

46:57 There's a wise man named Democritus of Abdera. And he actually has something to say on the subject because one time he went out to prove that there is no such thing as a ghost. And so Tycheides tells the story of Democritus. He says, quote, he shut himself up in a tomb outside the gates, I guess outside the city gates, and constantly wrote and composed there by night and by day. Sounds like Athenodorus again.

47:24 Mm-hmm.

47:25 Some of the young fellows, wishing to annoy and alarm him, dressed themselves up like dead men in black robes and masks patterned after skulls, encircled him and danced round and round in quick time, leaping into the air. Yet he never feared their travesty nor looked up at them at all, but as he wrote, said, Stop your foolery. So firmly did he believe that souls are nothing after they have gone out of their bodies. And then Eregnotus responds, He says, if that story is true, all it proves is that the supposedly wise Democritus was not so wise after all, all smart people believe in ghosts.

48:04 Everybody knows about ghosts. You're just being a fool.

48:08 Uh, so I didn't keep reading too far after that because it just goes on and on. But the next thing is that Eric notice starts talking about all of his paranormal experiences in Egypt and where he claims that he visited the Colossi of Mimnon, which we've done episodes on before, you know, a popular spot for tourists in ancient Rome. They would travel to Egypt to hear the statues sing. There was a phenomenon where they would actually, like, make a sound. They would sing, was it like at certain times of day, like around dawn or something?

48:40 Yeah, and it was kind of a whistling sort of a situation. And, you know, we can't, It eventually stops. But there are a lot of good theories as to why it was taking place to begin with. And of course, none of them involve actual ghosts or gods or anything like that.

48:57 Right.

48:57 But what Eric Noda says here is, quote, what I heard from it was not a meaningless voice as in the general experience of common people. Again, he's making the distinction like I'm very special. You know, I have special relationships with the supernatural, not in the general experience of common people. Memnon himself actually opened his mouth and delivered me an oracle in seven verses. And if it were not too much of a digression, I would have repeated the very verses for you. But we don't have time for that right now. So anyway, that is how Lucian of Samosata uses the haunted house story in the context of this book about superstition. And I think it really serves Lucian's purposes quite well, like the way that he

49:41 can pull in this story that's so similar to the way Pliny tells it and make these little variations to change the heroic Stoic philosopher into this, you know, pompous windbag and fool, Eregnotus here, who's just using it to both prove the existence of ghosts, which the author is making fun of as a belief, And also prove his own, you know, might and superiority and intellect, which also seems to be in doubt.

50:13 Yeah.

50:13 And also seems to illustrate the great difficulty, if not impossibility, of arguing this sort of matter with someone who believes in it, you know?

50:22 Yeah.

50:22 Like that, I think, becomes very clear, at least in this snippet that we're discussing here.

50:27 Totally.

50:28 So what we have here is essentially an exaggerated comedy based on the haunted house tale structure, which again, the author here and the readers would have been familiar with.

50:38 One thing I did not have time to look into deeply, but I think would probably be interesting if I could understand the historical context a little better, like what it meant to people at the time when Eric noticed is like, I have Egyptian knowledge. You know, I've got these Egyptian texts and I know Egyptian magic. that feels like a thing, like a trope that's being invoked in the storytelling here.

51:02 Like that meant something culturally to these people.

51:06 Yeah, yeah. I mean, we know that the ancient Romans certainly engaged in Egyptomania and were big into appropriating various belief systems and certainly the culture and beliefs of ancient Egypt. But yeah, I wonder how like self-aware, this kind of implies, like you're saying, it kind of implies a certain amount of self-awareness about that, you know, uh, like, are you really an ancient Egyptian sorcerer or you just get really excited about some of these ideas and some of the trappings of the thing, and you've just kind of like stolen it for your own pleasure here.

51:39 Yeah.

51:40 And this may be a, uh, an incorrect modern gloss, but that was also my reading. It was that like how Egyptian really is this Egyptian stuff that Eric notice claims to know, like, is he really speaking the Egyptian language? are these genuinely Egyptian spells or did he get some, you know, weird little booklet in Greece that says it's Egyptian magic?

52:00 Yeah, because we can, we can look to the modern world. We can certainly look to the, uh, sort of 20th century occultism. And of course there's a lot of adoption and usage of ancient Egyptian concepts, you know, not all in all cases in a foolish manner. Certainly. I mean, there's, there's some particularly interesting ideas that are explored through, uh, uh, through some of those, uh, those new occult, um, But at the same time, there's also a lot of fraudsters and all that are just sort of like grab some trappings of ancient Egypt and use it to prop yourself up.

52:33 I think it's probably a tale as old as time. Yeah.

52:35 It feels like another kind of metal of occult authority that you can pin on your chest. It's like I have mastery of the Egyptian arts.

52:45 Yeah.

52:45 Yeah.

52:56 All right. Well, at this point, we've discussed the big three, the big three stories, the haunted house stories of antiquity that scholars come back to again and again and try to sort of piece together and imagine what the rest of the haunted house literary ecology and environment looked like. But I do want to mention a couple of other tales that Ogden mentions that come later that also kind of give us a little more room to think about the influence of these tales and the traditions that these tales represent. Okay. So one is from 480 CE, composed four years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and Ogden describes it as a semi-Christianized version of the classic Greco-Romanand house tale. It is found in the life

53:43 of Saint Germanus by the cleric Constantius of Lyon in what is now France.

53:49 Hmm.

53:50 The story concerns the Roman cleric, Germanus, who is traveling with some clerk. He's not by himself. He has some clerks with him. He's traveling on a winter's day, so it's cold. They're all hungry. They haven't eaten all day. The sun is starting to set. And what do they happen to come across? They come across a rundown house.

54:09 It's half ruined. It's long unoccupied. Seems better than sleeping out in the cold. So he decides, yes, we will bed down here, despite the fact that that farther up the road, two old men gave him stern warnings about this place, telling him that it was, in fact, haunted.

54:27 This is funny, again, in how similar it is to later haunting stories. This could be like the setup of a 20th century ghost movie.

54:35 Yeah, in fact, it is. Weird How Cinema fans might remember our episode on 1987's A Chinese Ghost Story, which itself was based on a particular tale from Tales... from a Chinese studio by Qing Dynasty scholar and weird tale collector Pusong Ling, who lived 1640 through 1715, particularly the story, The Magic Sword in the Magic Bag. Very similar setup, except it's like a haunted temple, you know, liminal space, supernatural beings. I don't think that there's much to connect the two beyond that. Like, I'm not saying that one is inspired by the other or anything like that. There seems to be, you know, within Chinese tradition, traditions, there's this entirely sort of separate haunted house tradition. And in fact,

55:20 Pusong Ling has a story in that collection called, in translation, The Haunted House, which is a sort of telling of a Lilliputian hallucination experienced with a perceived chill in the air. But otherwise, it's like, you know, rather different from what we would think of as a haunted house story in antiquity or in Western traditions.

55:40 Well, Yeah.

55:41 I mean, all I meant by the comparison in this case of the story of Germanus is just that very often you have a story of somebody buys a house or moves into a house and it's haunted. Those are the ones we've been talking about already, but this is the other big variation. Somebody's traveling, there's bad weather, they have to find a place to stay for the night.

56:00 And so they go into an old abandoned seeming house or invited into an old house and it turns out it's haunted.

56:06 Yes. Yeah, exactly. We see it time and time again. So in this case, though, Germanus, he's not afraid. He's a wise man. He's a cleric. He sets up in one of the more intact rooms and soon falls to sleep as one of his clerks continues to read aloud from some holy book. You know, you didn't have a white noise machine, so you just had your clerk just do some holy readings while he slept, I guess. While he's sleeping, the ghost storms in in a terrible form.

56:33 But Germanus awakens and he rebukes the ghost in the name of Christ and forcing it to take on a more agreeable form and this is something that is also a big trope in ghost stories in general and in haunted house stories that the ghost has like a terrible form and then a form that you can sort of maybe negotiate with yeah we see that in everything we even see that in the ring right like sometimes the little girl is definitely horrifying other times just terribly spooky.

57:04 And then maybe it's more pronounced in other ghost stories where there's kind of like the sympathetic version of the ghost and then the frightful version.

57:10 Yeah, she has her merely creepy form and then her demonic killing form.

57:14 Yeah.

57:15 So Germanus, yeah, he's not having any of this with the terrible form. And then he gets the ghost to take on this more agreeable form and then questions it. What's the deal here? So it's basically like, you know, We were criminals in life. We were not properly buried. And our chain bodies are buried underneath some rubble in this building. So Germanus gets some townsfolk to come dig out the rubble. He doesn't do it himself. He has some folks from in town do it. They find the chain bodies. They unchain them. They clothe them in linen.

57:49 And they give them a proper burial with a prayer of intercession. And Ogden points out that this is kind of a hybrid tale. So Christian belief officially decreed that all souls are confined beneath the earth until the day of resurrection. So it's presented here that it's unconfessed sins that are seemingly holding the ghost back. Proper burial plus a prayer solves the haunting, and we're told that people live there happily to this day.

58:14 Interesting.

58:15 Yeah, so it's like theology may rule out some elements of your traditional ghost story. You just got to find some wiggle room in there to allow it to continue to take place with, at least within the story, the full blessings of Christian theology. All right, Ogden also discusses a haunted house in the tale, in the dialogues of Gregory the Great. I believe this is Pope Gregory I, 540 through 604 CE. And it's basically the Lucian tale all over again, but the ghost has been substituted with a devil or even the devil. So again, a Christianization of it. Like we can't really have a ghost in there, but we can have a devil or the devil popping up and being the enemy of the tale. And in this tale, Darius, Bishop of Milan, stays in the house,

59:02 you know, same thing, stay in the house overnight, drives out the devil by insulting him, just like talking smack to the devil and saying like, ah, you think you're so bad, you know, you fell from heaven and so forth. And then this drives the devil away and makes it once again possible for the faithful to live here again, and they do so to this day.

59:23 Popular like in-your-head-shower argument among bishops. Like, here's what I'd say to the devil.

59:29 Yeah, yeah, yeah. We see this time and time again, too. Yeah, what kind of insults do you have? Don't let old pitch or old Satan get the better of you. You've got all the dirt on him. You know what he's about.

59:43 Did you say, or did I just see in the notes that this tale is set in Corinth?

59:48 It is, yeah.

59:49 And I don't truly know what to make of that but i know we were just talking about how like important the athens setting uh was in some of these tales uh certainly corinth pops up so this this is another corinth haunted house.

1:00:03 Story yeah i just mentioned that because so while we said we didn't think athens had a reputation as being particularly haunted i i'm not an expert on this but i think it's possible maybe corinth did have a reputation as being more haunted than other places uh Not just because that's the setting of the Eregnotus story in Lucian.

1:00:23 It just seems like generally it was a place where there were a lot of kind of ghost and monster stories.

1:00:29 Okay, so maybe it is more of the sort of the Salem, right? Of the ancient world. Interesting.

1:00:38 Like I said, I'm not totally sure about that, but maybe that's something for us to come back and revisit sometime.

1:00:42 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Leave some room for further investigation. Likewise, we're not going to do this in this journey. But I think in the future, maybe another Halloween season, we might come back and talk about haunted house stories in the Chinese and Japanese traditions and in other traditions. Because, yeah, it's not just ancient Greek and Rome that have these tales of haunted houses. It's not just European, Victorian, and Gothic tales. These pop up all over the world. And so I think it would be fun to zero in on them some more. And, of course— Obviously, we have ghost stories of all sorts all over the world. And, you know, we're always talking about those on the show.

1:01:25 All right. Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this one up. But we'd love to hear from you out there. What ghost stories, ancient or contemporary, did these episodes make you think about? Particular details that stand out to you, particular stories, particular movies and so forth. Write in. We would love to hear from you. And if you actually have an encounter with some sort of a haunted house and you wanted to discuss your experience, you know, in an open to skepticism way, then write in. We'd love to hear from you on that as well. Likewise, as is always the case, if you have something you want to share with us and you don't want us to read it on the show in a future listener mail episode, just say that that is the case or

1:02:06 that you want it to be anonymous, that sort of thing. We're always happy to honor those requests. Totally. Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast. Let's see, on Wednesdays we do a shorter episode. On Fridays we do a movie episode, Weird House Cinema. And we just ask that wherever you get the podcast, be it the audio forum on your various audio providers, or if you're watching us on Netflix, because Netflix is where you get to see the video of our show, just rate, review, subscribe. On Netflix, give us two thumbs up. Ask to be reminded about new episodes.

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1:02:40 Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway.

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