Pliny – Letters – Book 7 Letter 27 (On Ghosts)

Pliny asks Sura to decide whether ghosts exist as real beings or arise from fear and imagination. He offers the career of Curtius Rufus as evidence: a supernatural woman in Africa supposedly predicted his rise to office, return as governor, and death there, and each event came to pass. Pliny then recounts the haunting of a notorious Athenian house, where a chained, ragged apparition frightened residents into illness and death. The philosopher Athenodorus rents the house despite its reputation, follows the ghost to a courtyard, and marks where it disappears. Excavation reveals human bones bound in chains; after they are properly buried, the haunting ends.

Pliny adds two incidents from his own household. A freedman’s younger brother and, later, one of Pliny’s enslaved boys awaken - or are found - to have their hair cut off, with the hair left scattered nearby; both report seeing figures in white. Pliny connects the episodes to a political threat: under Domitian, an informer had filed an accusation against him, and he takes the cut hair as an omen that he escaped danger, since the accused traditionally let their hair grow. He presents these accounts as grounds for serious inquiry, asking Sura to weigh the arguments and reach a definite conclusion rather than leave the question unresolved.