Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Ghosts gathers six accounts of the dead who remain and can be met by the living, one a deliberately general entry and five specific traditions it exists to introduce.

Ghost itself states the grouping's premise directly: a belief attested in every region the atlas covers and in no two of them the same, where what varies is not the fact of the belief but everything around it, whether the dead are dangerous or dependent, fed or dismissed, and whether the remedy is a funeral rite, an exorcism or a spade. The five named traditions bear this out. Gui, the general Chinese word for a ghost, is distinguished from the ancestor who receives regular offerings, most often because the death was violent, the burial improper, or no descendant survives, and the seventh lunar month's rites exist to feed this hungry, aggrieved class. Yurei, the ghosts of Japanese belief and stage tradition, remain because their funeral rites were incomplete or something binds them to the living, and Buddhist memorial service is the usual answer, release rather than defeat. Bhoot, the common South Asian word for an unsettled dead, is given inverted feet and an aversion to iron and turmeric in popular belief, and haunts the place of death rather than following a person. Duppy, the Jamaican and Caribbean spirit of the dead, is seen off by a nine night wake and kept off by precautions like salt, its vocabulary traced to West and Central African roots carried by the slave trade. La Llorona, the weeping woman who drowned her own children, searches for them along rivers and canals across Mexico, the American southwest and Central and South America, her motive changing from telling to telling.

Read together, the five confirm what Ghost predicts: the belief is nearly universal, its shape everywhere local.