The Egyptians have one, the Tibetans have one, Catholics do too. There's several called the American Book of the dead; Everyone should have one, so here it is folks:
Bills Book O’ the Dead (Built more on the Tibetan model because their pantheon is less confusing) :
OK you wake up dead. Right off you find the stuff you depended on is gone. No circadian cycles, no physical stuff for memory prompts. Meaning is squishy, you cast around for a clue. Neurons and hormones continue to fire for a couple of days, but they become unreliable. You have a big background of memory that without stimulation, automatically shifts into fantasy mode, like when you dream.
You’re disoriented so you try to figure what’s next and how to deal with it. According to the Tibetan model, you’ve entered the Bardo. The Tibetan book says there’s several layers of this, but Bills model says they're all the same thing: You want to know how to get by so you imagine various forms of authority and interact with them. Bills model and the Tibetan model both come to the same conclusion on that: They’re all bullshit & you don’t owe them anything.
The Tibetan models first Bardo is usually the "lowest" it’s where gorillas chase you across a desert or hellish creatures claim you owe them your soul, stuff like that. It’s bullshit so just ignore them. The next bardo is better because the monsters are nicer and try to buy you, or something like that. Then it’s old friends & family telling you to come with them because there’s nothing here (or something like that). Next is Rock Stars or important heroes welcoming you (etc), Then Super beings like Jesus or Krishna or Buddha doing that same stuff, depending on your prior belief & experience. These higher ones are really attractive but the info they give you is unverifiable so it's the same thing: bullshit.
The Tibetan version says if you get past them all you attain the Great Liberation and are free from rebirth. Practically speaking, that seems like it'd be pretty hard to do because living things like entertainment, and we know it's all temporary and expect to wake up any minute to do it all again. Basically rebirth.
This could seem like a grim situation but it resolves itself naturally, it's just not that hard. For at least a Billion years living things have reached their expiration date and resolved into something else* (with the exception of some Cnidarians that physically regress themselves to a juvenile stage and start over (rebirth without the messy part). They don't have a brain, but they’re essentially physically immortal). *The “something else” I just referred to doesn't contain the neurons and memories of its previous learned stuff, it's more like the way living plants grow out of previously living (aka composted) plants. Even there though, soil fungus conserves proteins and amino acid chains from stuff it absorbs, so some information remains.
The "effects" that remain come from associations that a being makes to orient itself in some way (like recognizing your house in a dream), and establishing it as a reference (Home!) so it can independently pull the being to that point of orientation. I'm guessing that effect can have a greater or lesser attraction, because some memories are fleeting and some go back to childhood. Here's the point: That effect can be independent of the original stream of association (like a doppelgänger1), and exist in association with things or places.
Traditional societies tend to keep their ghosts in places with a traumatic history because that's where peoples imagination go to give energy to those remnant effects. They could probably do it anywhere but it takes a meditative atmosphere that day to day living doesn't allow, and of course, some dude in a full Lotus to tell you what the spirits want.
Belated addendum:
Oh Boy! Dying Brains Silence Themselves in a Dark Wave of 'Spreading Depression' (livescience.com) Might be emotional preconception. Just change the description to something less fear biased.
1:
I knew a guy with a doppelgänger in Sausalito, He could announce himself with a sort of reverberation a minute or 2 before he showed up so we knew to get out more beer. He said he'd just envision his arrival and it happened by itself, it was unintentional. He could repress it if he wanted, but he liked the respect it brought (wow! Magic). Strangers seldom noticed. So it probably is with vagrant memories, we just don't notice, so they aren't reinforced and they evaporate. Sometimes that's good, sometimes not, usually it doesn't matter, there's more where those came from.
