The Greek and Roman stories hardly come up to the standards required by the Society for Psychical Research
- Date of account
- Published 1912
- Source
- Greek and Roman Ghost Stories
- Reference
- Greek and Roman Ghost Stories · selected passage 13
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English discussion of Greek and Latin source traditions
- Translation
- Lacy Collison-Morley citing classical sources in translation
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
The Greek and Roman stories hardly come up to the standards required by the Society for Psychical Research
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyThe Greek and Roman stories hardly come up to the standards required by the Society for Psychical Research. They are purely popular, and the ghost is regarded as the deceased person, permitted or condemned by the powers of the lower world to hold communication with survivors on earth. Naturally, they were never submitted to critical inquiry, and there is no foreshadowing of any of the modern theories, that the phenomenon, if caused by the deceased, is not necessarily the deceased, though it may be an indication that "some kind of force is being exercised after death which is in some way connected with a person previously known on earth," or that the apparitions may be purely local, or due entirely to subjective hallucination on the part of the person beholding them. Strangely enough, we rarely find any of those interesting cases, everywhere so well attested, of people appearing just about the time of their death to friends or relatives to whom they are particularly attached, or with whom they have made a compact that they will appear, should they die first, if it is possible.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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