The opía, Taíno spirits of the dead
Friar Ramón Pané, sent by Columbus to live among the Taíno of Hispaniola, recorded that the dead (opía) walk at night, eat guava, and can be known because they have no navel.
1498 CE · 19.22, -70.53 · status: legend
The account
Pané's 'Account of the Antiquities of the Indians', written around 1498 near the fort of Concepción de La Vega, is the first ethnography written in the Americas. He reported that the opía might lie with the living in the dark, that a person touching a stranger's belly could find no navel and know it was a ghost, and that the dead lived by day in Coaybay, ruled by Maquetaurie Guayaba.
The sceptical view
Pané's original is lost and survives only through an Italian translation in Ferdinand Columbus's biography of his father, so the details pass through several hands.