the.com/ghost
a story your brain tells when the house creaks and you're alone
means the spirit of a dead person imagined to appear to the living, often as a faint or shadowy figure; also, more loosely, any lingering trace or echo of something absent
from From Old English gast, meaning spirit, soul, or breath — the same word that lives on in the religious 'Holy Ghost.' It traces back to Proto-Germanic *gaistaz and is related to the German Geist (spirit, mind). The silent 'h,' oddly, was a later import — likely borrowed from Flemish or Dutch spelling habits during the early days of English printing, sneaking into a word that had survived a thousand years without it.
- word origin
- from Old English gast, meaning breath or spirit
- carbon monoxide
- the gas causes hauntings: hallucinations, dread, phantom footsteps
- holy ghost
- older Bibles used ghost where modern ones say spirit
- pepper's ghost
- an 1860s mirror trick still fooling theme parks today
- infrasound
- low frequencies trigger unease people mistake for spirits
ghost in the shell — 1995 anime film by mamoru oshii about a cyborg counterintelligence agent
ghost protocol — mission impossible film franchise installment released in 2011
ghost writer — 1999 politiken prize winning novel by søren kierkegaard concept, popularized in modern publishing