Cases when the ghost of the deceased shows where the remains of the person in whose image he appears before eyewitnesses are buried are known at least since the time of Pliny the Younger (born in 61 or 62 AD - died about 114). All of them are quite stereotyped.
For example, a new tenant settles in a haunted house. At night, a ghost in the form of a skeleton chained in chains appears to him and leads him into the courtyard of the house, where he disappears.
An eyewitness notices this place and the next morning, after excavating, he discovers a skeleton bound in chains. The remains are given a proper burial, after which a terrible ghost ceases to annoy people.
The Benedictine monk Augustine Calmett, in his book On the Apparitions of Spirits, published in the middle of the 18th century, cites four such cases: the story with the philosopher Athenodorus, the case in Corinth told by Lucian, the incident with St. Hermanus of Auxerus, and the event described in one of the books, published in Salamanca in 1570 by Antony Torquemada. All of them are so similar that they seem to have been copied from some more ancient primary source.
As for what Torquemada is talking about, even a skeptic like Calmett makes a reservation: this story contains circumstances that make it more likely than others, since it happened shortly before his time. Here it is, as presented by Calmet.
A young man named Basquez von Aiola with two comrades arrived in Bologna to study jurisprudence. Not finding a suitable apartment in the city, the young people rented one large beautiful house, in which no one lived, since ghosts appeared in it and terrified anyone who dared to stay in it. After a month, one night, when Aiola was still awake, while his companions were already asleep, he heard a noise from afar, similar to the clatter of chains drawn on the ground. The noise was constantly approaching.
Ayola committed himself to the will of God, made the sign of the cross, armed himself with a shield and a sword, and with a candle in his hand stood at the door. Suddenly it opened and a terrible ghost appeared in front of him - it consisted of only bones and dragged on itself chains. Iola conjures him to say what he needs, - the ghost made a sign for him to follow him. Iola followed.
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When he ascended the stairs, his candle went out. He lit it again and continued to follow the spirit that led him along the courtyard to the place where the well was. Iola wondered if the ghost wanted to throw him into the well, and stopped, but the ghost followed on, and they finally came to the garden, where it suddenly disappeared.
Iola plucked a handful of grass in the place where the ghost had disappeared, and, returning, told his comrades about what had happened. In the morning he informed the city authorities of Bologna about the incident; began to dig in the designated place and found human bones chained.
They began to ask who this corpse could have been, but they could not find out anything definite about it. The bones were given proper burial, and since then the ghost no longer harassed the house. Torquemada assures that there are witnesses of this incident in Bologna and Spain to this day.
Aiola's experience is obscenely similar to that experienced by the philosopher Athenodorus almost one and a half millennia ago. However, the similarity of events is explained by the similarity in the manifestation of the phenomenon, while the difference must be associated with differences in the psychological attitudes of the participants and with the specifics of the spirit of different eras. This becomes especially clear when comparing those old and some relatively later cases. Here is one of them, reflected in the dry lines of the trial.
The minutes of the city court of Exeter, the main town of Devonshire, England, contain the most interesting evidence of a ghost who appeared to show the place of the secret burial of the villainously murdered man in whose guise it appeared before an unsuspecting eyewitness.
It happened in 1730. The protagonists of this whole story were the fourteen-year-old boy Richard Tarvel, who served in the kitchen in the wealthy Harris family, and his posthumous ghost.
Once the head of the family, George Harris, while in London, received a letter from Richard Morris, a butler who enjoyed the complete confidence of the owners. Morris asked his patron to come urgently to his place of residence. I had to return home immediately.
It turned out there was a theft. The family silverware, very expensive, was gone. It happened at night. The butler woke up when he heard the incomprehensible fuss and crackle of opened caskets, in which silver was kept. Not thinking about his own safety, he rushed to the scene of the crime, where he found two robbers gutting boxes. There was also Richard Tarvel, the kitchen boy. He worked for only two weeks and slept in some closet near the closet. The butler thought it was he who could have let the thieves in.
The robbers, according to Morris, immediately tied him up, beat him, tied him up, gagged him and fled. Since then, no one has seen the robbers or the boy. True, Richard's father claimed that his son was innocent, but in the boy's absence this was not convincing.
Harris himself reacted to the loss philosophically - his family was not the first and not the last robbed. He again went to London and returned home only a few months later. Arriving, he discovered that neither the silver nor the kidnappers had yet been found.
One night, he suddenly woke up and in the light of the night lamp burning in the bedroom, he saw a boy who was standing half a meter from his bed.
Although Harris had never met him before, for some reason he immediately realized that it was the disappeared Richard.
Harris' first thought was that the boy had somehow been hiding in the house all these months. He asked him what he was doing. But Richard didn’t answer, only made signs with his hands. Harris thought the boy had something with his throat or that fright made him unable to speak.
Richard started toward the door, signaling to follow him, and for some reason Harris felt something literally compelling him to follow. He put on his boots, threw a cape over his shoulders and drew his sword. Then he followed the boy.
As they crossed the hall, Harris noticed that the figure was moving completely silently. It was only then that he began to realize that Richard Tarvel, who was walking in front, was not a living boy, but his ghost. Strange, but Harris did not feel the slightest fear: for some reason he was sure that the ghost would not do him any harm.
The ghost and the man descended to the first floor of the house and exited through a side door, which, to Harris's surprise, was unlocked. But he himself had seen more than once how Morris locked it with the key every night!
On leaving the house, the ghost led Harris in the direction of a large oak tree, which was about a hundred meters away. The trunk of the tree was almost invisible due to the dense undergrowth of bushes. Approaching the oak tree, the figure stopped and pointed a finger at the ground. Then she walked around the tree and disappeared.
Harris waited for the ghost to reappear, but in vain. Then he returned to the house, wondering what might be hiding in the place marked by the ghost.
Early the next morning, Harris ordered two footmen to start excavating there. Very soon they stumbled upon the decomposing remains of a child's body. Harris was now quite sure that he was beginning to suspect that his butler had committed a crime, and Richard Tarvel was just an innocent victim.
They sent for the police, and after the remains were shown to Morris, he broke down and told everything. Two robbers were his accomplices, whom he let into the house. Their "work" awakened Richard, who was sleeping nearby. He left his closet and was extremely surprised by the night meeting with strangers.
One of the robbers attacked the boy and killed him. Then they all together buried the body under an oak tree, and decided to blame the theft on the allegedly disappeared Richard Tarvel.
The butler's accomplices promised him that they would sell the silver in Plymouth and send the due share, but they deceived him. Since then, no one has heard anything about them or the silver they stole. Only the butler was punished: he was hanged.