Case Western Reserve University

Ghosts are everywhere. Ghost is a concept for which there is no referent, no evidence, anywhere, any place, any time in the entire sweep of human experience, yet one that is vital in many cultures and perhaps in every culture since the Upper Paleolithic Age. Apparently, there is a powerful impulse within human imagination that flows inevitably to this unwarranted fiction. From the ghost of Hamlet's father to the ghost of Banquo, from the ghost of Samuel, conjured by the witch of Endor, to the Heiké ghosts who make poor blind Hôïchi chant their doleful tale, we encounter a concept whose regular place in the landscape of human thought poses a deep scientific riddle. There is no evidence that hyenas or bonobos think of ghosts, but human beings easily imagine ghosts, not only of human beings, but also of hyenas, bonobos, cats, polar bears, wolves, and, for that matter, freight trains and clipper ships. Ghosts exist for us alone. They should not exist at all, but they do. There they are. Why? The literary critic, conditioned to attend to the special and local features of a text, of an author, or of an audience, is likely to attend to incidental inflections of the concept ghost—how one ghost differs from another. Stephen Greenblatt, for example, in Hamlet in Purgatory, takes as his goal the analysis of the special nature of one outstanding and idiosyncratic ghost