Russian Ghosts

By Rhetta Akamatsu

Traditionally, Russian belief in life after death has centered more on vampires or other creatures of the night than on ghosts. Orthodox Russian Christian belief holds that there is a 40-day period after death in which the soul stays near its eartly home. During the first few days of this period, in very rare cases, the dead might revive but not as a normal human. These revived corpses would become monsters harrassing the living, or vampires who devoured humans and livestock.

When "undead" beings do become ghosts in Russian folklore and oral history, it is for the same reason we see in nearly every culture: they have died young or in a violent fashion,such as murder, suicide, or accident. In fact, in times not long past, many Russians believed that any person who died before he or she reached old age had died an "unnatural" death and could not enter heaven until the proper amount of time had passed to reach the age they should have died. No matter how good or bad that person had been in life, after death their souls had to hover near the place that they died, and might be observed walking among the living in their vicinity. The ghosts of suicides were especially feared, as were those who were accused of witchcraft. Today, the fear of suicides returning as ghosts is the only "unnatural" death that still causes fear in most Russians.

In Russian belief today, it is much more common for ghosts to come visiting in dreams, which may be prophetic or not, than in actual visual or audio encounters. Sleep is seen as a kind of state between this world and the next, so that it is easier to encounter the dead in dreams than in waking.