Spirits or spiritual beings conceived as having survived bodily death and manifesting themselves to the living. They are also called spooks, specters, shades, haunts, phantoms, or wraiths. Ghosts may appear as living monsters (metaphysical giants themselves, the offspring of Uranus, or heaven, and Gaia, or Earth). Atlas, who carries Earth on his back, and Chronos, or time, an ogre often depicted devouring his own children, are portrayed as gigantic in Greek legend. The Greeks, along with the Native Americans of the Great Plains and the Scandinavians, believed that giants were the first race to inhabit Earth.