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Ghosts to Plato were polluted souls trapped by the mortal world. They're visible because they're impure.

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Plato warned that a polluted soul couldn't leave the mortal world smoothly.

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Plato described how philosophy contemplates the original state of the soul and aimed to release the soul from the confines of the body.

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Plato viewed philosophy as a way of purifying and releasing evil from the soul to train or prepare it for death.

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Souls are like the freed prisoners of the Allegory of the Cave. They can see the world as it really is, even if those chained to the physical world of the cave can't see it.

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Plato believed we are limited by our physical perceptions, and the soul lies in the unseen reality.

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It's hard to overstate that Plato felt that the body was a prison the soul could only be freed from through death, even if death shouldn't be brought early by your own hand.

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Not only was the soul divine to Plato, but it was unchanging and constant by nature.

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The human body was clearly mortal by contrast with the divine soul, and is a weight chained to the soul according to Plato.

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The soul was divine to Plato, and it belonged amongst gods.

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Plato saw philosophy as a shield for the soul against evil.

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This image shows the body as a prison for the soul inside, just as Plato viewed it. This was central to his debate about the nature of the soul while living on Earth as a mortal being.

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After death, Plato argued that the soul would, if unpolluted by attachment to trivial physical matters, make her way to the afterlife safely.

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Plato said that the soul certainly lived before birth.

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The body was to Plato an instrument of perception to the soul, only giving impressions of true forms as perceived in the physical world.

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Plato believed the soul was invisible; it would only be visible if it were to be polluted by attachment to the body it were trapped in.

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Knowledge was to Plato an important aspect of preserving the true nature of the soul.

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With the return of the freed prisoner to the cave: "Now if once again, along with those who had remained shackled there, the freed person had to engage in the business of asserting and maintaining opinions about the shadows -- while his eyes are still weak and before they have readjusted, an adjustment that would require quite a bit of time -- would he not then be exposed to ridicule down there? And would they not let him know that he had gone up but only in order to come back down into the cave with his eyes ruined -- and thus it certainly does not pay to go up." (The Allegory of the Cave)

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As the freed prisoner adjusts to the outside world: "He would first and most easily be able to look at shadows and after that the images of people and the rest of things as they are reflected in water...Later, however, he would be able to view (3) the things themselves [the beings, instead of the dim reflections]. But within the range of such things, he might well contemplate what there is in the heavenly dome, and this dome itself, more easily during the night by looking at the light of the stars and the moon, [more easily, that is to say,] than by looking at the sun and its glare during the day." (The Allegory of the Cave)

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"That soul, I say, herself invisible, departs to the invisible world to the divine and immortal and rational: thither arriving, she lives in bliss and is released from the error and folly of men, their fears and wild passions and all other human ills, and forever dwells, as they say of the initiated, in company with the gods." (Phaedo, paragraph 147)

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"[Referring to the soul,] when returning into herself she reflects; then she passes into the realm of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred." (Phaedo, paragraph 129)

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"They will not walk in the ways of the blind: and when philosophy offers them purification and release from evil, they feel that they ought not to resist her influence..." (Phaedo, paragraph 168)

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"The soul resembles the divine and the body the mortal." (Phaedo, paragraph 138)

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"Has the reality of them ever been perceived by you through the bodily organs? or rather, is not the nearest approach to the knowledge of their several natures made by him who so orders his intellectual vision as to have the most exact conception of the essence of that which he considers?" (Phaedo, paragraph 84)