Ghost Story Classification System Collapses After Experts Cannot Agree Whether Aunt Edna Counts

The International Society for Spectral Folklore announced Friday that it is suspending its 30-year effort to create a definitive classification system for ghost stories, after a single submitted narrative about a figure known as 'Aunt Edna' proved impossible to categorize. The story, collected from a family in rural Somerset, describes a woman who died in 1973 and whose presence is still felt in the family home. However, the details of her haunting do not conform to any recognized ghost story type. 'She doesn't rattle chains, she doesn't appear at midnight, she doesn't deliver warnings,' said classifier Dr. Alastair Revenant. 'She mostly just sort of stands in the kitchen doorway looking disappointed. Which, according to the family, is exactly what she did when she was alive.' The classification difficulty centers on whether Aunt Edna's postmortem behavior constitutes a haunting or simply a continuation of her established personality. 'If a ghost does exactly what the living person did, is it a ghost story or a biography?' asked Dr. Revenant, gesturing at a whiteboard covered in crossed-out category labels. 'She judged the family's cooking when alive. She judges it now. The only difference is she's translucent.' The dispute has fractured the society into three camps: those who classify Edna as a Type 7 Domestic Revenant, those who insist she is a Type 12 Residual Personality Impression, and a rogue faction that argues she is 'not a ghost at all but simply an aunt who refuses to leave, which is a fundamentally different folklore category.' The family has asked the society to stop studying their aunt. 'She's been dead fifty years and she's still causing arguments,' said nephew Giles Worthington. 'Honestly, that's the most Aunt Edna thing possible.'