Roman ghosts in the nineteenth century

 I've been down an internet rabbit hole on this one - I was reading Irving Finkel's The first ghosts about ghosts in early Mesopotamian culture.

In passing Finkel discusses how deeply embedded in our culture stories about ghosts or encounters with ghosts are and I was reminded of the story of the Roman soldiers appearing in the Treasurer's House in York.

For no reason other than it was raining, I wondered about nineteenth century newspaper accounts of encounters with Roman Ghosts and turned to Welsh Newspapers online.

Interestingly, there are none.

Sure, there are plenty of articles about ghosts and encounters with ghosts, but none with Roman ghosts.

Trove is much the same if you search over the long nineteenth century, say 1800-1914.

Yet if you search the Google Books corpus with the Ngram viewer you get a small number of hits

(click to view)

but random sampling some of the links suggests that very few if any items link to stories about encounters with Roman ghosts.

It's not as if people didn't tell ghost stories - a young Charlotte Bronte was reprimanded at school for scaring the purple pussy cats out of her room mates by telling ghost stories after dark, but despite both the interest and familiarity with the classics in the nineteenth century, and the popularity of gothic novels in the first half of the nineteenth century, Roman ghosts seem not to feature ...