In this /c/, we call home
Everyone hail to the pumpkin song!
All year round!
Yes. Depending on the fiction, if the ghost isn't a soul but instead a psychic/spiritual remnant, both can happen and the soul can have gone to the afterlife too. You can do a lot with fiction.
Story pitch: Soul gets to leave hell for one night to convince someone to put down their zombie corpse so their ghost will demanifest and they can finally go to a better afterlife.
One of the characters in the βwhat we do in the shadowsβ show is a vampire whose ghost inhabits a doll.
Love this idea.
If the zombie's body still has some link to the soul such that it could see and react to the ghost, they could make an extremely awkward yet dangerous team.
"Come over this way, buddy! Brains over here!"
"Brainsh?" Shuffle, shuffle.
"Yup, see?" The ghost points triumphantly at a hamster cage. "Lots of juicy little brains to eat!"
"Awww... Tired of mowsh brainsh! WANT HOOMAN BRAINSH!"
Zombie takes another vicious swipe at the ghost but finds only air.
"Why can no eat you brainsh again?"
"As I've explained all evening, I'm ethereal, not really here, sorry, friend. It's mouse or nothing."
The zombie's shoulders slump in disappointment, but he turns to the hamster cage. The hamsters peer back, vaguely uneasy.
"C'mere cute liddle mowshes..."
Clang, squeak, munch, munch, munch.
There's a Wattpad Novel, "Running with Scissor", where the mc's body and soul are separated by some sort of spell and he has to recover his body before midnight or the spell becomes permanent. It's pretty good absurdist humour reminescent of The Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.
"ooooveerrruuuulllleeeed"
/eats brains
Running out of movie ideas? Just crowdsource from the public!
Yeah, that's what they do now. Adaptations and remakes, Hollywood's last resort.
Don't forget straight up sequels to 30-year old movies. Nostalgia grabs.
If the zombie retains memory/personality, then I'd say that if a soul exists in the setting, that it is still in the body or has been returned to the body. Therefore no separate ghosts.
If the zombie exists only as a husk to be used as a puppet by some other intelligence or entity, then I'd say ghosts of those people make sense.
Why is the soul in the mind?
I recognize the weird state that would exist where the mind is fully copied into the ghost, having two entities with the same mind.
I still think that would be interesting fiction though.
Why is the soul in the mind?
Or the body. I think the main thing is that a single entity only has a single animus, another word for a soul.
So a necromancer may lend a body a "false" animus to animate it, while the "real" animus (or soul, if you will) is in a spirit form.
P-zombie-zombie
Shit, in NWoD you could have a ghost, an undead, and a trapped soul all of the same person at one time. The ghost and the undead could have the same mind while the soul could be sewed onto some other blighter and have a completely different mind.
They definitely could in D&D lore. You die. Your soul goes to whatever plane of existence. Your body gets left behind and a necromancer raises it as a zombie for menial labor. Your soul comes back as a ghost to complain to a party of adventurers about how a necromancer has defiled your body and you wish to put an end to it. The bard says something stupid like "well it doesn't sound like you were using it anymore. You know what they say: one man's trash is another man's treasure."
I'm going to say yes. In order to become a zombie a body must be dead, and generally the soul becomes a ghost after death. Zombies aren't related to the person they were, they're just a corpse that's been animated.
Unless they're the original Romero zombie, which are corpses animated by souls from an overflowing Hell, which might imply they went back to their original body.
I don't believe there is objective official lore on the cosmology of Romero. (Romero seems distinctly uninterested in that sort of approach to storytelling). I know it says so on the poster of Dawn Of The Dead, but that seems more like poetic ominous taglining which exists outside the movie itself. Everything inside the movie is speculation by characters who don't have answers.
I don't think the above issue really matters too much, though. I'd say that if we accept that souls exist in the Romero zombie universe, then the fact that zombies can retain memories and habits from their lives shows the soul is retained.
I'd say, as a baseline, any setting where zombies can retain some of their personality/memories means that if a soul exists, it is in the body and shouldn't be able to become a ghost.
I can accept a setting where zombies only exist as reanimated husks being puppeted in some way as also having ghosts of those people.
How about a setting where emotions are part of the soul but the body can keep memories?
So a zombie like that could recite stuff and respond, but would otherwise be instinct/reflex driven since there's nothing in it that makes it want stuff, it just looks for food. It wouldn't react to anything you say unless you convince it that it has to listen to get fed
Sure anyone could make any setting. If the creator explicitly make that split, then that's how it is. I just don't think most settings intentionally make such a split.
This is literally my experience of ADHD
I saw a short horror film about this exact scenario a few months ago.
I just spent some time on the festival site trying to find it but I don't remember what it was called. The festival organizer is a friend, I'll send him a message.
For there be divers sorts of deathβsome wherein the body remaineth; and in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit. This commonly occurreth only in solitude (such is God's will) and, none seeing the end, we say that man is lost, or gone on a long journeyβwhich indeed he hath; but sometimes it hath happened in the sight of many, as abundant testimony showeth. In one kind of death the spirit also dieth, and this it hath been known to do while yet the body was in vigor for many years. Sometimes, as is veritably attested, it dieth with the body, but after a season is raised up again in that place where the body did decay.
Kingdom Hearts
Edit: looking at the other comments I'm glad I'm not the only one with that brainrot.
I want an anime of this. haha.
"The Unwanted Undead Adventurer" is a pretty close approximation of this.
It'd be great; the main plot will be the ghost possessing his zombie body, so now he's the only intelligent, reasonable zombie in a zombie apocalypse world. Obviously the living are going to be skeptical, and there'll be issues with him occasionally losing control of the body...this has the makings of a great anime
Then eventually the original zombie body is too decayed and he's pissed he has to start switching bodies, probably because it takes so long to get used to each and get control
Does it count if the ghost is bound to a suit of armour and the zombie is animated by some random lab animal's soul..?
This honestly fits the prompt almost perfectly
mc chris has an album about this