Once upon a time, there was a man who was looking for a house to buy. He came upon a large home on a lovely piece of land, something that most would consider a mansion, at a very cheap price. He was interested, but (understandably) suspicious -- at that price, there had to be something wrong with it.
"What's the catch?" he asked the seller.
The owner reluctantly admitted that it had a reputation for being haunted. Everyone who had taken up residence in the house, he said, had been visited nightly by the horrifying specter of a man in chains, whose appearance was so ghastly that it made sleep pretty much impossible. Not only that, but even when the ghost wasn't visible, there was a palpable miasma of fear around the house. No one, the owner said, stayed there long; some had even fallen ill from the effects of the haunting.
The prospective buyer thanked the seller for his honesty, and (to the seller's shock) said he was interested in purchasing the home anyhow. The owner, simultaneously giving thanks for his luck and questioning the buyer's sanity, sold him the house, and in due time, the transaction was completed and the new owner moved in.
Sure enough, on the first night, the man was awakened by the rattling of chains. Soon a hideous ghost appeared, an old man dressed in ragged clothes, chains around his waist, his face pale and glowing with a sickly light. Unmoved, the house's new owner stood his ground, and asked the spirit what he wanted.
The specter crooked one finger as if in summons, then turned away, leading the owner outside, to a place on the property. The ghost met the owner's eyes, pointed downward -- then vanished.
The next day, the owner contacted the local magistrates, who gave the order to dig at the place the ghost had indicated. After an hour's hard work, they uncovered a skeleton -- still bound by chains. Who the man had been was unknown; it was obvious the body had been in the ground for a long while. But the house's new owner made sure that the skeleton was respectfully unearthed, its fetters removed, and given a proper burial in a cemetery.
The spirit, satisfied, was never seen again.
Sound familiar? The bare bones (pun intended) of this tale have formed the basis of hundreds, possibly thousands, of folk legends and tales-around-the-campfire. But what may surprise you is this particular version's provenance.
It was related as a true story about the Greek philosopher Athenodorus Cananites (74 B.C.E. - 7 C.E.) by the famous author, lawyer, historian, and polymath Pliny the Younger (61 C.E. - 113 C.E.), and is one of the very first written examples of a ghost story. Athenodorus himself was the home-buyer who allegedly sent the spirit to its eternal rest and scored a nice house and property at a bargain-basement price in the process. (The source is Pliny's Letter LXXXIII - To Sura.)
Athenodorus Cananites was neither ignorant nor superstitious; he was a prominent Stoic, learned in a variety of fields, and in fact was one of the tutors hired to teach Octavian (later Augustus Caesar). I don't want to overstate the case, of course. Even scholarly Greeks and Romans of his time were steeped in the legends of gods, demigods, and spirits, and mostly bought into a worldview that many of us today would consider unscientific nonsense. But it's interesting that two prominent figures of the Classical intelligentsia are responsible for a story of with same flavor as countless other "restless spirit finds justice and is now at peace" tales told since.
It makes me wonder, though, how all of this got started. Once the first few ghost stories are told, you can see how people would continue telling them; they're good scary fun, and also, humans are pretty suggestible. Once your cousin tells you the house is haunted, it's easy enough afterward to interpret every creak and thump as the footsteps of a spectral resident.
But if you go back far enough, someone has to have told the first ghost story. What could have spurred that? What occurrence led one of our distant ancestors to decide that Great-Aunt Bertha had come back from the dead, and was still stalking around the place?
Impossible to know, of course. But what's certain is that just about every culture on Earth tells ghost stories. True Believers use that as an argument for their veracity; if there was no such thing as an afterlife, they say, why the ubiquity (and commonality of themes) between ghostly tales the world over? Me, I'm not convinced. After all, I've written here before about the widespread occurrence of stories similar to "Little Red Riding Hood" -- and no one believes that's because there ever was a wolf dressed up like Grandma waiting to eat a little girl with a basket of goodies.
At least I hope they don't.
In any case, I thought it was an interesting story, not least because it involves two prominent historical figures. Whether it, and others like it, have any basis in reality very much remains to be seen. So think about this if you're ever purchasing a house, and the price is way lower than it should be. Maybe there's a man in chains buried somewhere on the property, and you're about to be recruited by a long-dead specter to fulfill its quest for justice.
Or maybe the roof just needs replacing or something.
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