In the materials below, the term "agent" refers to the person or animal whose ghost can be seen, and the term "percipient" refers to the person who saw this or that ghost.
According to a study describing the main features of ghosts, published in 1956 by American sociologist and researcher Hornell Hart and coworkers, there is no significant difference between ghosts of living things and the dead. In some cases, ghosts seem to observers to be quite real and corporeal creatures that have fairly clear outlines and even (if they are human figures) clothes. In other cases, ghosts appear to be blurry, transparent, and glowing. Sometimes they are characterized by clumpy and indeterminate shape. Some eyewitnesses even described them as streaks or spots of light.
Ghosts appear and disappear completely unexpectedly. Sometimes they slowly melt away. They have the ability to go through walls and various objects, or bypass them. They can cast shadows and even be reflected in the mirror. For some ghosts, a very limited set of gestures and movements is characteristic (like puppets in a puppet theater), aimed, for example, at drawing the attention of the percipient to a wound in his ghostly body. Other ghosts are smoother and can even talk. According to some evidence, the appearance of ghosts can be accompanied by sounds, smells, sensations of cold, or the movement of real objects around the percipient.
Sometimes the observer tries to touch the ghost. In most cases, such attempts ended with the percipient's hand passing through the ghost, but there was also evidence that the fingers felt some kind of substance that resembled light clothing.
Ghosts that appear in the same place, thereby express a certain emotional connection with this place, for example, with a violent or just sudden death that befell them there. It is also believed that such ghosts are spirits of the dead associated with the earth, unable to leave this place due to some unfinished business (see Liberation).
Some researchers of spirits and everything connected with them are convinced that some ghosts (for example, the spirits of the dead that regularly appear in the same place) actually have a mind that allows them to establish mediumistic contact with them. Some of the ghosts do not respond to any attempts to establish contact, on the basis of which the researchers conclude that in these cases the ghosts represent something like a kind of mental "record" of this or that event.
REVENANT - GHOST
The dead who rise from the grave. "Ghost" is a term that was widely used in the past, and is still sometimes used synonymously with the word "ghost" (GHOST). In almost all civilizations, at least during a certain period of their historical development, there was a belief in the ability of the dead to return to the world of the living. People and animals can be ghosts.
Ghosts can take many forms - from fog-like creatures (which corresponds to the modern concept of ghosts) to solid forms that appear to be alive until they suddenly disappear. In Irish folklore, ghosts can be living corpses, bodies that come to life for a short time to take part in their own funeral. Vampires can also be seen as ghosts.
Discussion of this phenomenon, possible motives for the return of the dead and related theories (see Ghosts).