Poll of the Day > You ever thought about just what the hell a ghoul is?

(+) Yeah! (+)

For the longest time I thought a ghoul was just some unspecified horror-type monster, like whatever's not a vampire, zombie, demon, etc. Then I realized that people use it as more of a catch-all, so it can include all those monsters that I thought were specifically not ghouls.

But I looked it up just now, and apparently it's actually Middle Eastern in origin? I've always thought of it as a Western thing, but I guess the West does their own (inconsistent) take on it. Apparently it was originally meant to refer to a specific monster, but it still leaves me wondering how you would depict a singular ghoul, without it being described as something else. The image I see most consistently seems to be something like a skinless, hairless zombie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8PPBX6BUY0
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I've always thought of a ghoul as a living cannibal that may delve into necromancy or other 'necro' related things.

Heck, there have even been movies that made ghouls mostly female and seductive.

The book Ghouls by Edward Lee kind of sealed the deal for my imagining of what a ghoul was.

A ghoul is a corpse that has been possessed by a revenant
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duh
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So it turns out

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoul

A ghoul is also a desert-dwelling, shapeshifting, demon that can assume the guise of an animal, especially a hyena. It lures unwary people into the desert wastes or abandoned places to slay and devour them. The creature also preys on young children, drinks blood, steals coins, and eats the dead, then taking the form of the person most recently eaten.

Lmao basically it is a magic zombie that might just rob you
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From everything that I've seen, a ghoul is undead and craves human flesh. But it isn't mindless like a zombie. How they are created or where they come from has never been consistent from the various stories that I've seen them in. Sometimes it's a demon who possessed an evil person after they did some sort of ritual or performed some horrible deed. Sometimes it's a person who evolved it a ghoul after killing and eating people over a period of time. Sometimes it's an evil spirit who was summoned by one way or another and given a physical form through various means.
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I always imagine something similar to the librarian ghost from ghostbusters.
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Obligatory "a ghoul is a human that was exposed to a severe amount of nuclear radiation that has not only given them a very long life, but has also stripped away a large amount of surface tissue" post.

I think all the different answers people are giving are proof that ghouls are stupid and my confusion was justified

DorkLink posted...

ghouls are stupid

Wow do you want your coins stolen?
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Arguably, what a GHOUL is depends on the context, but if you're talking about what a ghoul is based on in real-world terms (in the same way zombies come from voodoo), then the "ghul" has a very specific derivation, yes.

For me it kind of helped that Lovecraft always tended to use the more traditional version of the creature in his stories, at a time when the only other times I'd ever heard the word used was either as a Final Fantasy monster or as the servant of a vampire in Vampire: the Masquerade.

Genies (or djinn) are a similar sort of deal, where the original nature of the thing has grown way different in most people's minds via various shows and movies presenting a much different version from the original real world concept.

Hell, for that matter, nearly everything most people know about vampires and werewolves is blatantly wrong as well, and rooted almost entirely in Victorian Era literature or black-and-white horror movies (and like 90% of all current werewolf mythology comes from a SINGLE movie).


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Mead posted...

DorkLink posted...

ghouls are stupid

Wow do you want your coins stolen?

BREAK YO SELF FOOL! Give me yo goddamn denari!
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