... Regards you with cold indifference, it is the seven-armed visage of the mother of monsters, the four legged, nine faced goddess of wicked births, the pretty jewels that once inflected her eyes lay at the idol's base, surrounded by the cursed but intrepid dead...

As for the matter of ghosts. 

Looking at the physical remains as reanimated (thus horrifying) machines proposes the corollary question – what of the spirit or soul or consciousness removed from the corpus?  In a lot of ways the Ghost is the opposite of the Zombie – it’s the unliving spirit-consciousness without any ambulatory form.  While the Zombie is physical and can be physically destroyed through trauma to the head (traditionally) a ghost is immortal and must be busted in a different way – possibly using unique methods or tools. 

While the physical undead are the remains of things – the spiritual undead are the shadows of ideas.  At least this is the construction I’m interested in developing.

Disclaiming – I personally gravely doubt the existence of a thing called a soul or any spiritual component to identity & personality.  I also am very confused about what this can mean for imagination, ontology & the relationship between fiction, reality & unreality & so on.  I think thinking hard on these matters can’t help but persuade you against pure materialism – but I don’t, in the world around me, find a compelling way to experience the unreal except as fiction.  So!  But! 

We’re here talking about fiction – so we can design whatever metaphysical logic / illogic we want & use that to govern our expectations & world-building.  So let’s consider the Soul/Spirit as being The Idea Of Self That Survives Without A Body.   This interpretation is useful, I think in a lot of ways, that refer to things like magical healing (what is the most-healed you can be?) and resurrection & reincarnation (what are you when you’re not you?  When you come back?) and Ghosts – what’s the idea of you that persists?  

My preference is to consider the soul as the idea of the Self the Cogito that ergo’s the Sums & to consider the spirit as the idea of the Other the Cogito that ergo’s Est.  So a Soul is a self and a spirit is a them – and that’s helpful for when you have creatures with limited senses of Self but which you want to return from the dead.

Right now I’m thinking about the Ghosts of Dinosaurs.  We have ideas about what dinosaurs might have been and taken in aggregate I speculate on a spirit-dinosaur that can be considered a ghost.  Spirit-Wolves, Spirit-Bears all the spirit-animals aren’t Ghosts imposed by their unincorporated consciousness – but by metaphysical forces causing an apparitional version of the imagined creature.

Man that’s esoteric.  That’s downright impenetrable. 

But you know – when you’re putting together theories of mind relating to the collective gestalt idiom of the dinosaur as a holographic presence interacting with the physical world?  It’s times like those that you realize that We Have The Best Hobby. 

But back at Undeath.  Ghosts as Undead I think need to have an amount of permanence.  There’s a stasis to the Self-That-Lingers-After-Death since after all there can be no new interactions that would inform or help that self to grow or change or even decay.  There’s just this one mode of the soul that persists.

So for me the Ghost is a Robot – it’s a programmed sequence that operates according to a pattern without excess deviation.  Doing only what the living self once did and doing only those familiar things forever and ever.  At least that’s the image of persistence I’d like to see for a ghost that’s comprised of a soul – the self-idea or a spirit – the other-idea. 

Fictional ghosts are motivated, often enough, by something unfinished or some material tether.  The Ghost must accomplish something that the self died attempting.  This ghost is intention and it has goals, a mission & possibly a plan.  It can still be the programmed hologram that continues – but it continues not in an aimless repetitive pattern but rather a straight line. 

Then there’s time. 

Really, questions of undeath as they relate to corpses are a lot easier than those that relate to ghosts.  Spirits in all their varieties really increase complexity overall – the whole universe must answer for the existence of even one ghost, once you begin to describe varieties of ghosts – now you’re into layer upon layer of details about the universe itself & it’s related universes. 

So time.  Let us say that the ghost is an idea or intention – a mental concept that is so powerful that it owns a bare existence – it comes to be in a phantasmal way because the mentality that caused it was so deeply focused.  The exterior focus of the mind on an idea of the other creates a spirit – What used to be called the Familiar Spirit.  The Genius Spirit is the interior focus of the mind on an idea of the self – it’s the Soul.  Then there’s the idea of place & time that evolves a ghost-  a spirit of location – that’s what used to be known as the Tutelary Spirit. 

Without hanging too closely to roman metaphysics we can still decide to incorporate some of these ideas into our worldbuilding. 

So far:

-          The Soul:  A sense of self so profoundly realized that it manifests a phantasmal presence.  The presence is the Self of a person no longer living & is an overwrought caricature of their mortal identity.  E.g.:  Jacob Marley

-          The Spirit:  A powerful sense of the other that is generated by collective experience and belief.  The idea of the thing so powerful that it becomes an overwrought caricature of the other’s physicality.  E.g.:  The Big Bad Wolf

-          The Ghost:  An intention or goal so strong that it continues after the death of its bearer, an idea of success that persists after failure.  Single-minded, it’s a caricature of the wishes of the dead. E.g.:  Hamlet’s Father

-          The Haunt:  A ghostly presence tied a place that continues after the death of a protector or owner, a caricature of the place’s qualities that possesses the location after it’s abandoned & who make problems for interlopers. E.g.:  A Haunted House

-          The Apparition:  A phantasm linked to an idea out of time, unrelated to the existence of a thing the Apparition is a foretelling of what is to come based upon the dreams of the living.  It is a caricature of ideas & plans, visions of the future.  E.g.: Ghost of Christmas yet to come

The names are necessarily arbitrary.  You’d fix them up to match whatever you want such things to be called in your setting & your adventures.  You could also link them together – multiple definitions & hybrid types.  The Headless Horseman is maybe a combination of the Haunt & the Apparition.  The Poltergeist is a combination of the Ghost & the Haunt & Etc…

Now to the revulsion, to the scare. 

In all my defining of terms I kept circling back to - The Caricature of – These things can’t look like living things, and their intentions & motives can’t be relatable.  These are monsters, after all, and must be made monstrous.  Caricature is my move.  Exaggerate the appearance, when it appears, throw out a lot of moving parts & mutable looks.  Make the ghost seem to flow & drip as if the ectoplasm is a continuous boil of energy & mass, something pressing into the world from outside. 

A ghost appears before you.  You aren’t a bit confused about what it is or why it is here, it is a ghost and it doesn’t want you to be in this house.  It’s startling, certainly that, but not ambiguous.  You can feel in your head, a pulse like a voice it rises & seems to keep rising never cresting it is constant crescendo Leave.  It wants you to go.  It’s been building, this voice and just now it’s clear – it’s getting louder, louder.  And the way it looks.  It seemed like a woman, at first, dressed in an obsolete style, wearing that tiara, of all things.  The color wasn’t right – none of them, she shimmered, like she’d been doused in emerald dust, glittered even.  That turned to undulation, the sparkle at the edges of her eyes, the gleam on her bared teeth, that twinkle became a wave and then she started to vibrate, concentrically, she began to cascade outward and then back in on herself – too many dimensions and all at once curving in on themselves.  Her voice rises up in your mind as she chases you – you’re running, have been running because she’s chasing you.  Her voice is increasing and the vibration, of her weird translucent body – suddenly appearing in front of you – shepherding you down hallways – her weird body, translucent, pours into itself, her eyes like a liquid dribble into her mouth while they reform in her head, her hair is rose-bushes and thorny arbors but twisting in jerks & fits, and falling & sliding down her body as it cycles up, up, along with her voice.  You look away and she’s in front  of you again, you run away and she’s turning you left, now right, now you’re out the door – and you hear it slam closed, hard – shaking the house’s foundations. 

That’s how I’d do a ghost, one of them.  There’s kinds – monstrous varieties and all the endless variations on the focal theme of death & the refusal of death. 

Here now, I’ve contended on the matter of the thoughtful dead and before on the matter of the walking dead and no doubt I’ll have some consideration of the undying, of some unity of these characteristics – some monstroushybrid that lives on the life energy of the living & masquerades assuch.  I wonder what I’ll call such a being…