The Haunted House at Athens

Pliny’s Letter to Sura

Among the surviving correspondence of Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, known to history as Pliny the Younger, is a remarkable letter addressed to his friend Lucius Licinius Sura, a senator and confidant of the emperor Trajan. Composed around AD 100 and preserved as Letter 27 of Book VII of Pliny’s published correspondence, the letter takes up an explicit question: do ghosts exist as real beings with their own form, or are they only the products of fear acting upon a credulous mind?

Pliny answers by recounting three stories. The first concerns the philosopher Curtius Rufus and a vision of the goddess of Africa. The second, the most elaborate, concerns a haunted house in Athens. The third concerns hair mysteriously cut from sleeping slaves in Pliny’s own household. The Athenian story is by far the most detailed, and it has remained the locus classicus of haunted-house literature in the Western tradition.

The Empty House and Its Visitor

There was at Athens, Pliny writes, a spacious and commodious house. It bore a bad name. In the dead of night the sound of clanking iron, distant at first, then growing nearer, would be heard echoing through the rooms. Presently there appeared the figure of an old man, emaciated, filthy, with a long beard and dishevelled hair. His feet were laden with shackles and his hands chained at the wrists, and as he advanced he shook them and made the iron clatter.

The inhabitants, Pliny continues, lay awake all night through fear. From sleeplessness they sickened. From sickness they died, or from terror they fled. The house was abandoned and posted for rent or sale at a price absurdly low.

Athenodorus Takes the Lease

The philosopher Athenodorus Cananites, a Stoic of Tarsus and a known historical figure who taught the future emperor Augustus, came to Athens. Reading the placard, he was puzzled by the price. He inquired and was told the truth. He took the lease nonetheless.

On the first night, Athenodorus had his writing materials brought into the front room. He dismissed his slaves and applied himself to study, that his mind, occupied, would not invent terrors of its own. For some hours all was quiet. Then, faint at first, came the sound of clanking iron. Athenodorus, by his own subsequent account, did not raise his eyes from his page. The sound came nearer. He continued writing. The sound came into the room. Now he looked up.

The figure stood before him exactly as it had been described, a wasted old man in chains. The apparition beckoned him to follow with one finger. Athenodorus signalled with his hand for the spectre to wait, and returned to his page. The figure rattled its chains over his head. Athenodorus rose, took his lamp, and followed.

The spectre proceeded slowly, as though weighed down by its iron. It led him through the house to the courtyard. There it vanished. Athenodorus, alone in the dark, marked the spot by gathering grass and leaves into a small pile.

The Bones in the Courtyard

In the morning Athenodorus went to the magistrates. He requested that the spot be excavated. The earth was opened, and at a depth he found a skeleton bound in chains. The bones were collected, the chains removed by the magistrates, and the remains given a proper burial at public expense. From that night onward the house was quiet, and the apparition was seen no more.

Pliny presents the story without overt commentary, but the framing of his letter, with its explicit question to Sura about whether ghosts have real form, makes clear that he regarded the Athenodorus account as evidence in favour of the affirmative. He was not unique in this view. The episode resembles in striking detail a number of other ancient ghost reports, including those preserved by Plautus and Lucian, suggesting either a stable underlying tradition of haunting phenomena or a stable literary template into which such reports were fitted.

For more on the residual haunting pattern, in which a spectre appears repeatedly in the same location performing similar actions, see our broader treatment of this category of phenomenon. The Athenodorus story is also the founding example of what would become a perennial trope: the resolute investigator who sits up alone in the haunted house to confront its tenant. See our entries on psychical research for the long descent of this method.

The Reality of Athenodorus

Unlike many figures in ancient ghost narratives, Athenodorus Cananites is independently attested. He appears in the writings of Strabo, Cicero, and Diogenes Laertius, who all confirm his historical existence as a Stoic philosopher who served as tutor and counsellor to Octavian before retiring to his native Tarsus. His chronological placement, in the late first century BCE, is roughly a century before Pliny’s letter, suggesting that the story had circulated in philosophical circles for several generations before reaching Pliny in written form.

Whether Athenodorus actually rented a house in Athens and exhumed a chained skeleton, or whether the story attached itself to his name as a suitably authoritative witness for an older tradition, cannot now be resolved. What matters for the history of the paranormal is that an educated Roman senator, writing in the early second century to another educated Roman senator, treated the account as worth preserving and as evidence on a serious philosophical question.

The Long Echo

Pliny’s letter became, through its preservation in the manuscript tradition, the foundation document of the Western haunting genre. Shakespeare, who knew Pliny in translation, drew on its themes in Hamlet. The classic ghost stories of M. R. James, written in the nineteenth century, return repeatedly to its template: the academic researcher, the disturbed object, the figure that beckons. The chained spectre of Athens stands at the head of a tradition that is now nearly two thousand years long.

Sources

• Pliny the Younger, Epistulae VII.27.
• Lucian of Samosata, Philopseudes 30-31.
• Plautus, Mostellaria (the Haunted House comedy), prologue and act II.
• Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook (Oxford, 2002).
• Debbie Felton, Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity (Texas, 1999).