in Antiquity, spirits or hobgoblins, restless ghosts of departed persons, who return to terrify and torment the living.

These are the same with larvae, which, according to the ancients, wandered throughout the world frightening good people, and plaguing the bad. For this reason, lemuria or feasts were instituted at Rome to appease the manes of the defunct.

Apuleius explains the ancient notion of manes. The souls of men released from the bonds of the body, and freed from performing their corporeal functions, become a kind of demons or genii, who were formerly called lemures. Of these lemures, those that were kind to their families were called larves familiares; but those who, for their crimes, were condemned to wander continually, without meeting with any place of rest, terrifying good men, and vexing the bad, were vulgarly called larvae.

An ancient commentator on Horace mentions, that the Romans wrote lemures for remures, a word formed from Remus, who was killed by his brother Romulus, and who returned to the earth to torment him. But Apuleius observes, that, in the ancient Latin tongue, lemures signifies the soul of a man separated from the body by death.