Ghosts, supposedly, are spirits of the dead who haunt the living, are external to the living, and may or may not be related to the living, as in the case of the typical “haunted house” plot where people buy a haunted house they didn't know was haunted. But “ghosts” in great literature are mostly metaphorical/symbolic, representing a haunting from within by the consequences of one's own bad ideas or mistakes that come back to haunt one in the form of harmful actions that grow worse as time goes on. In Henrik Ibsen's great play Ghosts, the ghosts are more specifically identified by Mrs. Alving in a long speech but summed up thusly to Pastor Manders, a man she once left her dissolute husband for but only to be sent back to her husband for reasons of social propriety: “I almost think we are all of us ghosts, Pastor Manders....
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