Lexicon.

European folklore, broadly

The visible form of a spirit, briefly maintained, ordinarily silent. The category is broader than the figure. An apparition may be the recently dead, seen at the moment of death by someone at a distan…

Ireland

The Irish *bean sí*, the woman of the fairy mound. A female spirit who attaches to particular families and announces an approaching death by keening, the older funerary lament. She is heard rather tha…

South Asia, Hindu and Jain traditions

The Sanskrit *bhūta*, the wandering spirit. The figure of the dead who has not received the proper *Śrāddha*, the post-funerary rites that release the soul from its attachment to the place and the mom…

South Asia

The restless female dead of the South Asian record. The figure is recorded across the Punjab, North India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, with cognates further afield. The cause given is consistent across…

Germany; broader Northern European parallels

From the German *Doppelgänger*, the double-walker. The figure is the visible double of a living person, encountered by a third party, at a place the living person is not. To see one's own doppelgänger…

Old Norse

The Old Norse revenant. The walking dead, animated rather than spectral, retaining the body and its weight. The figure is recorded extensively in the Icelandic sagas, where the draugr keeps to the bur…

Eastern European Jewry (Yiddish-speaking lands)

A possessing spirit of the Jewish folk tradition, recorded across the Yiddish-speaking lands of Eastern Europe from the sixteenth century forward. The Hebrew *dibbuk* derives from the verb *davak*, to…

Recorded West, mid-twentieth century

Electronic Voice Phenomenon. Voices, words, or fragments of speech recovered from audio recordings that were, at the time of recording, made in apparent silence. The category was named by the Latvian…

Korea

The general Korean term for the spirit of one who has died and not passed cleanly into the next country. The category is wide. It admits the unmarried girl who could not bear a son, the soldier whose…

Old English; broader Indo-European parallels

From the Old English *hægtesse*, an older feminine spirit-figure, narrowed in later usage to the witch and to the figure who visits the sleeper at the threshold of waking. The hag is the original name…

Norway and Sweden

A female forest spirit of the Norwegian and Swedish record, recorded across the saeter (mountain pasture) tradition and the deep-forest oral corpus. The figure appeared as a beautiful young woman to t…

Arab world (pre-Islamic and Islamic tradition)

A class of jinn in the Arab record, distinguished from the lesser orders by power, longevity, and rank. The figure appears in the Qur'an in *Surat al-Naml* (27:39), where an *ifrit* of the jinn offers…

China

The Chinese revenant. Literally, the stiff corpse. The figure is recorded principally in Qing-dynasty sources, where it is associated with the practice of returning the bodies of migrant workers acros…

Japan

A small water-dwelling spirit of the Japanese tradition, recorded across the rivers, ponds, and irrigation channels of rural Japan. The figure was given the body of a child, the beak of a turtle, scal…

Japan

A figure of the modern Japanese oral record, documented during the panic of 1978 and 1979 in Gifu prefecture and across the country before subsiding. She approached children at dusk wearing a surgical…

Mexico and the American Southwest

A female spirit recorded continuously across Mexico and the American borderlands since the colonial period. She is heard before she is seen, weeping for children at the river-banks, the canal-edges, a…

Vietnam

The Vietnamese spirit of one who has drowned in still or slow water and remains held in the place of drowning until another takes the place. The mechanism is recorded as *thế mạng*, substitution. The…

Philippines, primarily Visayan provinces

From the Tagalog *tanggál*, to remove or to separate. The figure is recorded principally in the Visayan provinces of Capiz, Iloilo, Bohol, and Antique, and is one of the older female spirits of the Ph…

Japan

A demon of the Japanese tradition, recorded from the Heian period forward in temple narrative, *setsuwa* tale-collection, and household custom. The figure was given horns, a third eye in some accounts…

France, mid-nineteenth century

From the French diminutive of *planche*, a small board. A heart-shaped, three-legged piece of wood designed to glide across a flat surface beneath the lightly placed fingers of two or more sitters. Th…

Germany

From the German *poltern*, to make noise, and *Geist*, spirit. The literal translation is the noisy ghost. The category names a particular kind of household disturbance: knocks, thrown objects, doors…

South Asia (Sanskrit and Pali tradition, transmitted across Buddhist Asia)

The hungry ghost of the Sanskrit and Pali traditions, recorded in the Pali *Petavatthu* (Book of Stories of the Departed) within the Khuddaka Nikaya. The figure was given a tiny mouth, a needle-thin t…

Medieval Europe

From the Old French *revenir*, to return. A category older than its name, recorded in twelfth- and thirteenth-century English and French chronicles. William of Newburgh and Walter Map both describe th…

Mid-nineteenth-century United States and Western Europe

From the French *séance*, a sitting or session. The formal gathering at which the living attempt to address the dead. The form crystallised in the eighteen-forties around the Spiritualist movement of…

South Asia (Sanskrit tradition)

A corpse-possessing spirit of the Sanskrit and Hindu folk record. The figure was given the form of a corpse hung from a tree at the cremation ground, animated rather than spectral, capable of speech,…

Greece and the Greek-speaking world

The revenant of the modern Greek tradition, recorded in continuous folk practice from the Byzantine period to the twentieth century. The figure was held to be the body of one whose burial was incomple…