As the Halloween season hits, Mary and Charlotte turn to the wealth of ghost stories from the ancient world to ask: did the Greeks and Romans really believe in ghosts and why are their stories so similar to ours when many of our beliefs are so different? 

Mary and Charlotte recount a ghost story recounted by Pliny the Younger about a haunted house in Athens and the successful attempt by a philosopher to both encounter the ghost and lay its spirit to rest. They also tell the story, written down in Greece in the 3rd century CE, about a young man who is seduced by a vampire. And they discover the Roman methods of exorcism, which involves chewing on some beans and throwing them behind you. When it came to ghostbusting, then as now, don’t cross the beans! 

Some Romans even believed that the city itself was haunted by the restless spirit of Remus who - in one telling of Rome’s favourite origin story - was murdered by his brother Romulus to take sole control of the new city. 

@instaclassicpod for Insta, TikTok and YouTube

@insta_classics for X

email: [email protected]

Instant Classics handmade by Vespucci

Producer: Jonty Claypole 

Executive Producer: Natalia Rodriguez Ford

Video Editor: Jak Ford

Theme music: Casey Gibson

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices