The belief that the dead can return to haunt and harm the living has long been an element of fiction. Ghost stories are at least as old as the Bible: in the Old Testament, King Saul calls up the ghost of Samuel to foretell the outcome of a battle. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the ghost of the slain king provides the information from which Hamlet plots revenge for his father’s murder. One of the masters of the modern ghost story was Ambrose Bierce, some of whose stories were collected in Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce (1964). A variation on the ghost theme is the haunted house, about which hundreds of stories have been written.

     In this paragraph, “slain” means（）.