11 Of The Strangest Monsters In Roman Mythology

According to folklore, ancient Rome was stalked by many different ghosts. There were the lares, good spirits who didn't cause much trouble. So, too, were the manes, at least further back in Roman history. Later writers got them confused with the ghosts of individual humans or general ancestor figures, while others maintained that the term

According to folklore, ancient Rome was stalked by many different ghosts. There were the lares, good spirits who didn't cause much trouble. So, too, were the manes, at least further back in Roman history. Later writers got them confused with the ghosts of individual humans or general ancestor figures, while others maintained that the term was a catch-all for spirits who hadn't made their alignment on the good-to-evil scale clear.

Then, there were the lemures. These were ancient Roman spirits who meant business — and their business was none too good. Some said that these frightful spirits were simply evil and existed to torment humans. Others, like the poet Ovid, supposed that the lemures were manes or ancestors gone bad because no one had been properly attending to their memory or they had unfinished business. Other Roman writers only took the opportunity to deride the whole idea of scary ghosts and anyone who believed in them. The idea was powerful enough that the spooky eyes and night calls of the Madagascar-based prosimians we call lemurs inspired the name.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the lemures had to do with how the Romans attempted to please them during the Lemuria festival. Held on three non-consecutive days in May, this festival saw ancient Romans scrambling to appease family spirits by untying knots, walking barefoot, and tossing black beans about the house. Ovid claimed that this last trick was meant to distract the formless, vengeful lemures away from the living.

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