Catholic ghosts

Regarding foreign ghosts [ FT347:74]: it’s always been my take that there are far fewer ghost stories in Catholic countries than in Protestant ones, angels or demons being the preferred explanation – but it’s clearly a grey area... One of my punk poems back in the 1980s ended: “The past flies out of the marble / wherever you happen to strike it / but there are no ghosts in Italy / and that’s the way they like it”. I was prompted by a friend’s observation, while living near Rome, that she had heard of an abandoned country villa with a reputation for being haunted, and how very unusual that was. Janet Wilson Bristol