Of course, Cicero didn't tell it quite the same way. But the broad picture's the same-and that's what makes such stories from ancient Greece and Rome so fascinating, maintains Debbie Felton, an associate professor in foreign languages and literature at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. In many ways, today's ghosts are just following in the footsteps of their fore-specters. Modern or ancient, they usually come in shades of black, white and smoke, though they often look just like they did in life. They generally show up in the dead of night, vanishing by dawn.
Dogs always know they're around.
Typically, a haunted location is the ghost's former home or the spot where the person died. No one will spend a night there until at last, a philosopher, intrigued by what he's heard of the house, rents it and waits for the ghost. The philosopher follows the beckoning phantom to the courtyard, where it vanishes. The next morning, he has magistrates dig up the spot where the ghost disappeared. They find the bones of a man, shackled and chained.