Spectral Forensics

Traditionally, when you see a person’s ghost, you also see how the person died. The poet Alexander Pope, in his “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” (1717), asks

What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?
’Tis she!—but why that bleeding bosom gored?
Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?

Since the unfortunate lady got stabbed to death, the visionary sword is going to stick out of her ghost forever.