Athenodorus and the haunted house in Athens
Pliny the Younger (Letters 7.27) tells of a house in Athens haunted by an old man in chains, rented cheaply by the philosopher Athenodorus, who followed the ghost and found bones buried in the courtyard.
100 CE · 37.98, 23.72 · status: legend
The account
The apparition rattled its chains every night until no one would live there. Athenodorus kept writing while it beckoned, then followed it to a spot where it vanished. Digging there the next day uncovered a chained skeleton; after a proper burial the haunting stopped. Pliny tells the story as one he is inclined to believe, in a letter asking whether ghosts exist.
The sceptical view
It is a literary anecdote set long before Pliny wrote; it established the template of the chained ghost demanding burial that recurs in later European ghost stories.