I know that there are a few characters in modern fiction who are the child of a living person and a ghost who was already one at the time of the child’s conception (usually the mother is the living person and the father the ghost, but there is that Clive Barker novel…), but that’s not what I’m looking for.
Instead I want to know, is there any culture’s mythology/folklore that includes a human-ghost hybrid? It seems like there ought to be, considering you have things like half-vampires with a human parent and a vampire parent in Balkan folklore, but I’ve spent a lot of time looking for mention of such a creature and have come up empty.
Would a banshee fit the bill? They’re kinda fairies (that are nearly always presented in human form) but also kinda ghosts.
Otherwise I’m not exactly sure what you mean. I’d have thought a ghost-human hybrid could only be from one ghost parent and one living parent, and you’ve ruled that out.
So apparently not only was Jesus the son of a ghost, but what with the ghost coming on Mary, he was apparently the miraculous result of a pearl necklace.
While I posted that original answer facetiously, it does highlight a problem with the question. Real mythologies aren’t arranged like a D&D monstrous manual. There isn’t any line between ghost, zombie, lich, demon, faerie, dryad and so forth. Indeed. with the animist and transmigration aspect of most religions, it doesn’t even make any sense to impose such lines. A spirit that dies in many religions is *expected *to haunt an area that it was attached to in life. IOW hauntings. Locations and objects were expected to be inhabited by a non-corporeal spirit. Ancestors were expected hang around and watch over the family and so forth. There wasn’t any hard-and-fast line between these supernatural entities. Your dead father inhabited the shrine in the garden, but so did the nature spirits. They were they same thing, except when they were not. And nature spirits were the same as gnomes, except when they were not. And an evil gnome was a goblin, except when it was a demon.
There was never any clearly defined line between any of these entities. Ghosts, genius loci, gnomes, goblins, demons. They were all poorly defined and interchangeable.
Even western mythology vampires, for example, were originally described as blood sucking ghosts. Although they traditionally inhabited the corpse, the idea of them being actual walking corpses that rose from the coffin every night is a very modern invention and may have even been invented by Stoker. Similarly, traditional western ghosts were forever forming physical bodies and getting up to mischief.
This presents a problem with answering the question. Because ghosts in traditional mythologies are so ill-defined, we tend to re-define them when we translate them. If a ghost produces a child, we have a tendency to translate that as “vampire” or “goblin”, whereas the original tellers of the tale wouldn’t even understand the distinction. All mythological figures could become non-corporeal and/or invisible at will, they were all spirits of something, they all inhabited the spirit realm/fairyland and so forth. The distinctions were never clear to the tellers and they weren’t really relevant.
Incubi and succubi are said to be demonic carriers of human seeds, able to impregnate women and able to be impregnated by men, and other variations of that.
Not exactly a ghost (unless you describe vampires as “blood drinking ghosts”, as has been done), but a dhampire is the offspring of a vampire and a human, although the term has been used to mean other things by recent authors:
That’s what I was referencing towards the end of the OP.
Man, this is disappointing. There are fae/mythological just about everything according to lore, from horse-sized cats to monsters that can’t bow least they spill water out of their heads to trickster gods who take the form of raccoons, but not a half-ghost? Considering how specific mythological beings can be, it just seems improbable that no known culture has a term for such a thing.
Well, people were quite clear on the concept of “dead, non-solid bodies don’t make babies”. Once they’re solid they get other names: zombies, revenants, vampires… Same for a variety of mythological spirits known to have children with humans, they’re alive and they get other names: dones d’aigua, fae, nymphs, dryads, satyrs…
I haven’t ruled it out, I just don’t want examples from modern fiction, like Danny Phantom or the Sims 3, rather than folklore or mythology.