Ghosts

The definition follows from the framework rather than importing anything from folklore. An animus is life contained within a membrane for the use of an individual or group. Decoupling separates the five elements of a person. If an animus is decoupled but has not dispersed, something persists that is neither a living person nor nothing, and that is what the word names. The second sentence gives the reason it might not disperse. An imbalance is unresolved, either a credit never returned or a debt never paid, and the cluster of interactions holds together around the imbalance. This is exactly Marsh's account of debt applied past death, and it matches what the traditions already say. The living are frequently thought to have died in a state of unbalanced debt or credit and often seem to be seeking absolution or vengeance, and researchers such as Edith Fiore have described guilt as a factor in keeping spirits earthbound. The descriptions she cites of hauntings, spirits attached to places, living persons, addictive substances and physical life in general, compulsively preoccupied with earth life, consumed with their needs and lacking real care for others, read in her vocabulary as a description of an endoself rather than of a ghost. Festivals such as Samhain and the Mexican Day of the Dead exist to reconcile debt and credit for earthbound spirits through prayer and offerings, which on this account is a settlement rather than a superstition.

Anthropology treats ghost beliefs as near universal and reads them functionally, with the anthropology of death after Robert Hertz describing unquiet dead as those whose funerary process was incomplete, and the recurring cross-cultural theme of unfinished business or improper burial producing hauntings. Psychology accounts for apparitions through bereavement hallucinations, which are common and not pathological, and through agency detection. Marsh takes the cross-cultural pattern as data rather than as belief to be explained away, and her contribution is to identify the common element the traditions share, an unresolved imbalance, and derive it from the same ledger she applies to living relationships rather than from a theory of the afterlife.