Grateful dead (or grateful ghost) is both a motif and a group of related folktales present in many cultures throughout the world.
The most common story involves a traveler who encounters a corpse of someone who never received a proper burial, typically stemming from an unpaid debt. The traveler then either pays off the dead person's debt or pays for burial. The traveler is later rewarded or has his life saved by a person or animal who is actually the soul of the dead person; the grateful dead is a form of the donor.[2][3] The grateful dead spirit may take many different physical forms including that of a guardian angel, animal, or fellow traveler.[4] The traveler's encounter with the deceased comes near the end of the traveler's journey.[4]
An ancient Egyptian text explains the principle of reciprocity in which the deceased calls for a blessing on the person who remembers his name and helps him into a happy afterlife:
But if there be a man, any one whomsoever, who beholdeth this writing and causeth my soul and my name to become established among those who are blessed, let it be done for him likewise after his final arriving (at the end of life's voyage) in recompense for what was done by him for me, Osiris.[16]
Scholarship also recognizes the presence of the motif in the biblical Book of Tobit.[17][18][19][7][20][21] According to professor Dov Noy, the biblical story is the first register of the tale type in Hebrew literature.[22]