the ghost vanishes. When the townspeople dig up the courtyard on Athenodorus’
advice, they find a skeleton entwined with chains. After they give the bones a proper
burial, the hauntings cease. This story has many characteristics of an urban legend: it
has a real setting, Athens; it takes place in the recent past; and the story is told by a
person of some education, i.e. Pliny, who says only that he will tell the story as he
heard it, but does not name his source (7.27.4). In this version, someone has been
killed on the property and buried secretively, without proper rites. The spirit of the
deceased haunts the place until the mortal remains are found and buried according to
ritual (Felton 1999:65–73).
Some spirits, however, angry at the lack of funeral ceremony in their honor, take
vengeance against the living rather than requesting belated rites. Pausanias tells of a
ghost in the town of Temesa who, furious at the lack of a funeral, actually started
killing people and had to be appeased. Odysseus is forced ashore at Temesa in
southern Italy by a storm, where one of his sailors gets drunk and rapes a local girl.
The people of Temesa take vengeance by stoning him to death. Odysseus either
doesn’t notice or doesn’t care (the story of Elpenor does suggest a lack of attention
on Odysseus’ part as to the fate of his individual crewmen), and sails away without
burying the dead man, whose ghost then begins killing the inhabitants of Temesa.
They consult the Delphic oracle, who tells them the ghost could be propitiated by
dedicating a sanctuary to him and by annually sacrificing a maiden to him. These
sacrifices end when the famous boxer Euthymus comes to town. Euthymus falls in
love with that year’s sacrificial maiden, who promises to marry him if he saves her, so
Euthymus waits for the ghost and wins a physical fight with him. The ghost disap-
pears, and Euthymus marries the girl (Odyssey6.6.7–11; also Strabo C255). This
ghost evidently has a corporeal component; the story suggests that it is a reanimated
corpse, or revenant, since it has the ability to cause physical harm to the living rather
than simply haunting them as a spectral appearance.
These myths and local legends involve the ghosts of heroes, and the haunting of
Temesa in particular has many folkloric analogs such as the story of Perseus and
Andromeda. But many towns around Greece had their own local legends of haunted
sites, reflecting popular beliefs in restless spirits. Places where men were killed were
often expected to be haunted. Pausanias reported that on the plain of Marathon the
sounds of men fighting could be heard at night, as if the battle were still being fought
(1.32.4). A spirit known as Taraxippus, or ‘‘Horse-Troubling,’’ haunted the racetrack
at Olympia, frightening the horses at a certain turn, and another Taraxippus haunted
the racetrack at Corinth. The latter was said to be the soul of Glaucus, son of
Sisyphus, who had been devoured by his own horses who went mad after losing a
chariot race (Pausanias 6.20.19). Whose spirit haunted the horses at Olympia,
though, was a source of disagreement. Another haunted site is described by Plutarch,
who says that in his native city of Chaeronea in Boeotia a criminal named Damon had
been murdered in the public bath, and that even down to Plutarch’s own time
apparitions appeared at the place and ghostly groanings were heard emanating from
the spot, causing the baths to be walled up (Cimon1.6). As with many sites that
garnered a bad reputation from crimes committed there, the place was abandoned.
Neither Pausanias’ nor Plutarch’s stories give any indication that purification rituals
were performed or offerings given in an attempt to placate the spirits. Rather, the
ghosts continued to haunt these places.
98 D. Felton