Pliny the Younger asks a friend: do ghosts actually exist?
Pliny – Letters – Book 7 Letter 27 (On Ghosts)
In this letter, Pliny the Younger asks his friend Sura whether specters are real or just the products of frightened minds. He offers three accounts: a prophecy delivered by a supernatural figure to Curtius Rufus, a haunted house in Athens where the philosopher Athenodorus calmly followed a chained phantom to a buried skeleton, and a strange case in which his own servants' hair was cut at night during Domitian's reign. He wants a firm verdict, not a balanced debate.
I am extremely desirous therefore to know your sentiments concerning spectres, whether you believe they actually exist and have their own proper shapes and a measure of divinity, or are only the false impressions of a terrified imagination?