Dissecting Literature

Hey there, traveler! In our last post, we discussed some cultural and psychological background about everyone’s favorite paranormal trope – the ghost stories. However, for some people, these spooky otherworldly apparitions go beyond the realm of fiction and myth and turn very real. Throughout history, some swore on their life that they experienced hauntings personally and raised the fascinating question: can ghost exist?  Similar to many topics about people’s beliefs, there’s no hard answer. Since science considers anything possible until there’s concrete evidence against it, we can only dissect a number of particular events and consider circumstances that may drive people to believe what they saw, heard or otherwise experienced was indeed a ghost. The very first ghost sightings happened early in history, and as such, people needed no concrete evidence, only credibility. If you are a 14th-century peasant and someone you trusted said they saw the ghost of Old McDiedhorribly in his s...

  Hey there, traveler! Spooktober continues its march towards Halloween, and so, I’ve returned with another famous macabre trope – ghosts. Since it’s directly linked to last week’s post about more fleshy and brain-eaty living dead beings, I suggest you check that out (here’s a link ). Now, onto the topic. As we discussed before, dead things returning to life is a tale as old as time, having ancient origins like (as one of our reader’s pointed out) Egyptian mythology with the resurrection of Osiris, or Greek epics like Odyssey, where the titular hero converses with ghosts of long dead heroes. But ghost is a much more variedly used term in contrast to zombies and the undead. If you think about the Ghost of Christmas Past, celtic ghosts such as the banshee or your friendly neighborhood poltergeist, sometimes a ghost isn’t even a dead person. So, how do we start to tackle this trope? At the beginning, of course. Ever since the days of ancient Mesopotamia (a.k.a. the first civilization ...

Hey there, traveler! Since Spooktober has officially begun, I thought it only fair to use this opportunity to shed some light on the oldest horror trope ever: zombies. Or to be more precise, the reoccurring theme of living dead creatures, as they are so common nearly every civilization has one version of the legend. The basics are pretty simple – something or someone that by all logic should be dead and buried now walks among the simple folk, terrorizing brains and eating children, or the other way around. Legends of these beings are so widespread they have different subcategories to them based on how touchable they are and how easily they come back after their should-be-final departure. The meatier (or to sound intellectual, corporeal) variants range from the previously discussed vampires to literal rotting corpses pushed around by angry or just really bored demons. In contrast to the ephemeral ghosts, these living dead mean more direct physical threat, and by extension, cause a diffe...