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Creature Feature: Spirits/Ghosts, Loretober Day Eighteen!

Added 2025-10-18 21:00:11 +0000 UTC

Yesterday we talked about the hearth mother religion, so now let's talk about a common creature many humans, regardless of religion, believe in: Ghosts!

Since the dawn of time, humans have believed that people could still walk among the living after their death. How and why a particular spirit stays in the mortal realm rather than moving on is unique to each culture and society.

For followers of the Hearth Mother (most humans that live in northern Dracentra), ghosts are thought to be the lost souls of humans who were not able to be properly burned after death. Stuck in the mortal realm, these souls were never able to return to the hearth mother to be remade and are seen as melancholy, existential beings, used in stories in order to encourage children to lead virtuous lives, or else be subjected to eternal wandering, eventually fading away until they experience True Death, nonexistence.

In the south, ghosts have more variety. Some human cultures have a more positive view of ghosts, seeing them as wise ancestors visiting the living in order to bestow generational knowledge. Others see ghosts as uniformly malicious, purposefully staying behind in the mortal realm to enact revenge, or due to unfinished business that keeps them from moving on. While Hearth Mother followers imagine ghosts to be completely incorporeal, southern spirits are much more physical, able to move things around, speak, and even potentially kill a living person.

Of course there are also claimed sightings of spirits that are not human, but are instead spectral beasts or monsters that usually are more frightening than dangerous. These types of spirits are more common in harpy stories than human ones, and are used to teach young harpies that even if you can't see or hear a threat in the forest, it's important to stay vigilant.