Also, when specific holidays come up, there is an expectation for specific stories to go with them. A week from now is Halloween (quickly becoming bigger than Christmas, here in the States), So maybe I could explore the story of Baba Yaga for that...
And this morning, I remembered a ghost story from a collection of Katherine Briggs' British Folktales anthology, called "Sammle's Ghost." Sammle dies, and he has to go meet with the king of the worms, And the king of the worms tells him that his spirit can't leave this earth and go on to the next dimension until after the worms have digested every last bit of his earthly body. And in the course of gathering up his body's ashes, it's revealed that, in life, he had to have an arm amputated, so he has to go fetch the preserved arm that the doctor kept in his office after the surgery.
And there's no big deal made of that fact... no notion that going about with only one arm was any great tragedy, but it just meant there was a bit of a complication in transitioning to the Afterlife. So I may post that story sometime this week, because it certainly does suggest that ghosts, like pirates, are often missing some parts (because if they managed to get through this life with all of their parts intact, they'd have moved on by now...).