In Mesopotamian mythology, the demon described as the restless spirit of a dead person is the edimmu.
Edimmu were understood as ghosts of people who had not been buried properly or whose dead received inadequate attention from the living. In Mesopotamian religious thinking, the dead still required care: relatives provided food and drink through funerary offerings. When those obligations were neglected, a dead person’s spirit could become dangerous and return to trouble the living.
The edimmu was classified as a type of utukku and was associated with possession, disease, misfortune, and harmful behavior. Some descriptions make it nearly incorporeal, like a wind spirit that could drain the vitality of sleeping people. Ritual offerings, libations, proper burial, and incantations by specialist exorcists were among the imagined ways to appease or remove it.
Edimmu is sometimes confused with the broader Mesopotamian concept of the ghost, known in Sumerian as gidim and in Akkadian as eṭemmu. The edimmu is more specifically the threatening or unrestful form of the dead, especially when burial or family rites had failed.