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According to traditional belief, a ghost is the soul or spirit of
a deceased person, taken to be capable of appearing in visible form or otherwise
manifesting itself to the living. Descriptions of the apparition
of ghosts vary widely: the mode of manifestation can range from an invisible
presence to translucent or wispy shapes, to realistic, life-like visions. The
deliberate attempt to contact the spirit of a deceased person is known as necromancy, or in spiritism as a
séance.
The belief in manifestations of the spirits of the dead is widespread, dating
back to animism or ancestor worship in pre-literate cultures.
Certain religious practices—funeral rites, exorcisms, and some practices of spiritualism and ritual magic—are specifically
designed to appease the spirits of the dead. Ghosts are generally described as
solitary essences that haunt particular locations, objects, or
people with which they were associated in life, though stories of phantom
armies, ghost trains, phantom ships,
and even ghost animals have also been recounted. The English word ghost continues Old English gást, from a
hypothetical Common Germanic *gaistoz. It is common
to West
Germanic, but lacking in North and East Germanic (the equivalent word in Gothic is ahma,
Old Norse has andi m.,
önd f.). The pre-Germanic form would have been *ghoisdo-s,
apparently from a root denoting "fury, anger" reflected in Old Norse
geisa "to rage". The Germanic word is recorded as masculine only, but
likely continues a neuter s-stem. The original meaning of the Germanic
word would thus have been an animating principle of the mind, in particular capable of excitation and fury
(compare óðr). In Germanic paganism,
"Germanic Mercury", and the later Odin, was at the same time the conductor of
the dead and the "lord of fury" leading the Wild Hunt.
Besides denoting the human spirit or soul, both of the living and the
deceased, the Old English word is used as a synonym of Latin spiritus also in the meaning of "breath, blast" from
the earliest (9th century) attestations. It could also denote any good or evil
spirit, i.e. angels and demons; the Anglo-Saxon gospel refers to the demonic
possession of Matthew 12:43 as se unclæna gast. Also from the Old
English period, the word could denote the spirit of God, viz. the "Holy Ghost".
The now prevailing sense of "the soul of a deceased person, spoken of as
appearing in a visible form" only emerges in Middle English (14th century). The modern noun
does, however, retain a wider field of application, extending on one hand to
soul, spirit", vital principle, mind or psyche, the seat of feeling, thought and
moral judgement; on the other hand used figuratively of any shadowy outline,
fuzzy or unsubstantial image, in optics, photography and cinematography
especially a flare, secondary image or spurious signal.
The synonym spook is a Dutch loanword, akin to
Low German spôk (of
uncertain etymology); it entered the English language via the United States in the
19th century. Alternate words in modern usage include spectre (from Latin
spectrum), the Scottish wraith (of obscure origin), phantom
(via French ultimately from Greek phantasma, compare fantasy)
and apparition. The term shade in classical mythology translates Greek
σκιά, or Latin
umbra, in reference to the
notion of spirits in the Greek underworld. "Haint" is a synonym for
ghost used in regional English of the southern United States,
and the "haint tale" is a common feature of southern oral and literary
tradition. The term poltergeist is a German word,
literally a "noisy ghost", for a spirit said to manifest itself by invisibly
moving and influencing objects.
Wraith is a Scottish dialectal
word for "ghost, spectre, apparition". It came to be used in Scottish
Romanticist literature, and acquired the more general or figurative sense of
"portent, omen". In 18th- to 19th-century
Scottish literature, it was also applied to aquatic spirits. The word has no
commonly accepted etymology; OED notes "of obscure origin" only. An association with the
verb writhe was the etymology
favored by J. R. R.
Tolkien. Tolkien's use of
the word in the naming of the creatures known as the Ringwraiths has influenced later usage in fantasy literature.
A revenant is a deceased person
returning from the dead to haunt the living, either as a disembodied ghost or
alternatively as an animated ("undead")
corpse. Also related is the concept of a fetch, the visible ghost or spirit of a person
yet alive.
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