The First Ghosts: A rich history of ancient ghosts and ghost stories from the British Museum curator

by Irving Finkel

1. Something survives of a human being after death. 2. That something escapes the grasp of the corpse and goes somewhere. 3. That something, if it goes somewhere, can quite reasonably be expected to be capable of coming back. From this vantage point we should reckon that ghosts arrived on stage by the Upper Palaeolithic, perhaps around 50,000 bc.