These notorious Roman emperors became ghostly legends

The family of Caligula, Agrippina the Younger, and Nero—descendants of the deified Augustus, Rome’s first emperor—left an indelible mark on history and legend. Their reigns were drenched in political intrigue and violence, actions that ancient historians often deemed un-Roman, even unnatural. Pliny the Elder once described them as “firebrands hurled among the human race,” figures whose lives—and deaths—continue to echo through time. From vengeful spirits to haunting apparitions, these ghost stories about some of Rome’s most infamous rulers still captivate nearly two millennia later.

Caligula: The god emperor’s restless shade

Caligula, the first Roman emperor to declare himself a god during his lifetime, claimed to commune with Jupiter (the king of the Roman gods) and boasted of having intercourse with the moon. His growing megalomania and disdain for the Roman populace were notorious, once lamenting that the city didn’t have “a single neck” for him to sever. 

(Was Caligula mad—or just misunderstood?)

But Caligula’s divine ambitions met a brutal end. According to ancient historian Cassius Dio, in his final moments, Caligula learned: “He had but one neck,” while Rome had “many hands”—a reference to the collective power of the people and his assassins. Stabbed repeatedly, his killers allegedly mutilated his corpse, thrusting “their swords through his privates,” while one sensationalist account said they “tasted of his flesh.”

After his murder, his remains were hastily cremated on a makeshift pyre and thrown into a shallow grave. It wasn’t long before his spirit reportedly began to haunt the Palatine Hill, where his murder took place. Night after night, eerie specters plagued the gardens where he was laid to rest, with no evening passing without some “fearsome apparition.”

Agrippina the Younger: The vengeful mother

Before his assassination, Caligula had exiled his sister Agrippina to the Pontiane Islands, where he sent her ominous letters reminding her that he not only possessed islands for his enemies but “swords as well.” Despite this, Agrippina returned to Rome to give her brother a proper burial—perhaps a political maneuver, but also an attempt to quiet his malevolent spirit due to the improper burial.

She also married the next emperor, Claudius, who happened to be her uncle, an act that “even back then was not okay,” says Debbie Felton, author of Haunted Greece and Rome.

Agrippina was “ruthlessly ambitious,” says Felton. As the sister, niece, wife, and mother of emperors, her influence over Rome was unparalleled.

(Roman Empress Agrippina was a master strategist. She paid the price for it.)

But, her quest for power turned deadly. On the day her son Nero was born, historian Tacitus shared a prophecy about Agrippina that Nero would one day rule Rome—and kill her. Undaunted, Agrippina declared, “Let him kill me, provided he rules”.

When Nero ascended to the throne as a teenager, Agrippina “occupied a position of power totally unprecedented for a woman,” says Anthony Barrett, author of Agrippina: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire. But as he grew older, Nero began to resent her influence.

His attempts to murder his mother became the stuff of legend—first by poison, then by rigging a ceiling to collapse on her while she slept. When both efforts failed, Nero invited Agrippina to a feast and sent her away on a boat designed to break apart at sea.

However, Agrippina, who had become a strong swimmer during her island exile, swam away to safety. One of her female servants wasn’t so lucky. She cried out that she was Agrippina so the sailors would be more eager to rescue her. Instead, they bashed her head in with oars.

Finally, assassins tracked Agrippina down at her villa. Her last words were chilling: “Smite my womb!” she ordered, demanding they strike the womb that had borne the son who betrayed her.

After her death, mysterious wails were heard near her tomb, and visions of torch-wielding Furies reportedly haunted Nero. Plagued by guilt and paranoia, he even attempted to contact his mother’s ghost through a séance, seeking forgiveness from beyond the grave.

Nero: The cursed emperor

Nero’s spiral into madness accelerated after his mother’s death. He showed little interest in ruling, preferring singing and acting in the theater, activities that would have been “a mark of infamy” to the ancient Romans and the kind of “unusual aspiration which may have led ancient historians to portray him as a master of pretense even off the stage,” says Shadi Bartsch, a classics professor at the University of Chicago.

Soon, allies began deserting Nero in droves. One night, he awoke to find his palace empty. Marked for death by the Senate, who had declared him a public enemy, Nero fled the city. Faced with the prospect of being stripped and beaten to death, he chose suicide, plunging a dagger into his throat.

(Some historians are rethinking Nero's dark legacy.)

But death did little to diminish Nero’s presence in Roman memory. Early Christians, persecuted under his reign, cast him as the Antichrist—a figure who would return to spark the final battle between good and evil, as foretold in the Book of Revelation.

Nero’s ghost was said to haunt medieval Rome as well. According to legend, a walnut tree near the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo became the epicenter of demonic activity, where demons were said to emerge and terrorize pilgrims. According to legend, a magnificent walnut tree stood near the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, where Beneath the tree, it was said, lay the skeleton of Nero. Pope Paschal II had the tree chopped down to rid Rome of his spirit and Nero’s bones cast into the Tiber River.

“You’d think with all the torture and assassinations and other murders, there would be plenty of ghosts flitting about” in ancient Rome, says Felton, but ghost stories about famous people weren’t common. She says that “these three notorious family members” haunted the Romans, fits with their “especially lurid lives.”