Welcome to the latest installment of “Writer Fuel – cool real-world stories that might inspire your little writer heart. Check out our Writer Fuel page on the LimFic blog for more inspiration. Today:
Ghosts are both everywhere and nowhere, stories would have us believe. Their existence is constantly being investigated, but highly doubted, yet despite that healthy scepticism ghosts feature prominently in our culture. They are in television and film, from “Harry Potter” to “The Sixth Sense.” Ghost stories are told around campfires and found on bookstore shelves, in both fiction and nonfiction sections. Around Halloween, pop-culture images of ghosts haunt nearly every store, and hang as decoration in homes.
Ghosts even influence some of our everyday customs, in ways we may not recognize. “People used to believe a sneeze caused someone to expel their soul out of their body, and so ‘God bless you’ or ‘Bless you’ was used as a protection against the devil snatching your soul,” according to MIT. Here are some of the most famous ghosts of all time.
King Hamlet
Though ghosts appear in several of Shakespeare’s plays (such as “Macbeth” and “Julius Caesar”), King Hamlet, often referred to simply as ‘Ghost’, is among the better known of the Bard’s ghosts and plays an integral part in “Hamlet.” His son, Prince Hamlet may be the central character in the play named after him, but without his father’s ghost, there would be no story.
