OK, stop me if you’ve heard this ghost story before. A man dies but returns from the grave to haunt his family until they find him a girlfriend. It lacks the punch of “that’s when they saw there was a hook hanging from the car door.” But this story scared the togas off of people 3,500 years ago.
Archeologists at the British Museum found a stone tablet from Babylon that tells the world’s first-known ghost story, The Guardian reported. Dr. Irving Finkel, the curator of the Middle Eastern department at the British Museum, interpreted the carvings.
“It’s obviously a male ghost, and he’s miserable,” he told the newspaper. “You can imagine a tall, thin, bearded ghost hanging about the house did get on people’s nerves. The final analysis was that what this ghost needed was a lover.
“You can’t help but imagine what happened before. ‘Oh God, Uncle Henry’s back.’ Maybe Uncle Henry’s lost three wives. Something that everybody knew was that the way to get rid of the old bugger was to marry him off. It’s not fanciful to read this into it. It’s a kind of an explicit message. There’s very high-quality writing there and immaculate draughtsmanship.
“That somebody thinks they can get rid of a ghost by giving them a bedfellow is quite comic.”
There is a “the call was coming from inside the house” angle to this scary old tale, though, because this ghost had been hiding in plain sight for years. The 3,500-year-old artifact had gone unnoticed in the museum’s basement until recently. That’s because the carvings don’t look like much of anything at first glance. But under the right light, Finkel said, researchers finally realized they should be scared.
“You’d probably never give it a second thought because the area where the drawings are looks like it’s got no writing,” he said. “But when you examine it and hold it under a lamp, those figures leap out at you across time in the most startling way.”
Speaking of Sleeping With Ghosts …
Popstar Kesha claimed in 2012 that she had sex with a ghost, and now she’s getting her own Discovery+ show about the paranormal. The 34-year-old announced on Instagram recently that she would star in Conjuring Kesha, a series that investigates the unknown.
“I’m SO BEYOND excited!!!!!!!,” she wrote on the post. “I want to SEE things that I can’t explain, I’m looking at YOU, universe, to expand my brain and beliefs !!! … I’ll be embarking on a veryyy creepy and cosmic journey.”
She’s already been doing this on her podcast, “Kesha and the Creepies,” for the past year. But this new show will give her a budget to investigate “haunted” sites rather than just talk about them.
She said she has loved studying the paranormal for her entire life. And she even once had “sexy time” with a ghost. Though, she doesn’t know who it was.
“I don’t know his name,” she said, according to Entertainment Weekly. “He was a ghost! I’m very open to it.”
Old Uncle Henry from Babylon awaits your call, Kesha.
