A Ghost Story.

What exactly is the Ghost in a "A Rose for Emily"?
Is it the Northern Man whose skeleton rests in Emily's bed?
Is it Miss Emily herself? A member of this community that they'd rather forget, because she makes them uncomfortable.
The story is interesting because it can be read both ways.
Some people want to say that this is a comment on the relationship between the North and the South post-Civil War. To me that seems like a bit of a stretch. It seems to me more likely that a Northerner was an easier person to get lost without anyone noticing or saying anything. If it had been a member of the community who had suddenly gone missing, people would have more questions. But if an outsider gets into a situation and then just suddenly disappears people are less likely to talk and less likely to put the clues together.
Faulkner said that the story started with the image of the silver hair on the pillow. That may have been the first thing that he wrote but it seems unlikely that the piece of hair is the real focus of this story. The real focus of this story is the people of the town.
The people talk about Miss Emily constantly, whether saying good things or offering pity, or spreading gossip. This is a aspect of small-town life that is inescapable.
The truly interesting story though is the fact that the town let her get away with it. This is an interesting side of history. Many criminologist believe that some of the great "unsolved" crimes would have been easier solved today because people would have looked at the females as likely suspects. In history, murder is dominated by men killing other men, but it is likely that women committed murder more often but were simply not suspected. The men spread the lye around the place because they couldn't confront a woman about the smell that came from her house. They even recognize the smell as something dead, but can not fathom that Miss Emily could have killed the Northern man.