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The next world

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Coming back from the next world
Ghosts stories have always captivated the interest of lots of people and many of those reports were popular in ancient Greece. We find them in their literature where the Greeks, probably because they believed in the existence of ghosts, registered all the slightest fact that seemed to cross the border of paranormal experience. Just as today happens in the European castles or in the ancestral palaces where there is always some family ghost - from the white lady to the headless horseman – and where the least that could happen to their tenants is to hear moans to freeze the blood and rattle of chains dragged around, Athens nights were peopled by phosphorescent shades and by dark prodigies. Also then there was people who believed blindly in this phenomena and other who ascribed them to a drop too much, an upset stomach or a high fever. However everybody talked about it.
Talking and talking, those facts entered in the popular tradition and they were collected by the writers who, together with the life of some important personages, ended by gliding them in history. In the meantime ancient geographers registered all the legends tied to the places they were crossing while listing all the marvels of our world.
Reading their works we succeed in gleaning a large quantity of paranormal news. If nothing else what they write confirms the fact that on this problem ancient people had more or less the same idea that we have now. However they were much interested in ghosts and on this problem they wrote some books called Paradossographics, (“Tales of extraordinary happenings” just to translate this title in simple talk) that contains all the tales about the apparition of dead people and other paranormal experiences. One of this book was even attributed to Aristoteles, but it had been written in a much later epoch, a fact that has been proved out of any doubt by because in it we find cited Poseidonios Rhodius who lived a century after the death of the philosopher between the II and the I cent B.C.,