The word ghost once meant breath, and before that probably meant fury
Nearly one American in five says they have seen a ghost, according to a 2009 Pew survey. The word they use has a strange past: Old English gast meant breath or spirit, and linguists trace it further back to a root meaning anger. Haunting apparitions only took over the word in the fourteenth century.
In folklore a ghost is the spirit of a dead person or animal thought able to appear to the living, anything from an unseen presence to a wispy shape to a lifelike figure. Belief in such spirits is ancient, rooted in animism and ancestor worship, and many cultures separate benign ancestral spirits from restless, malicious ones. Rituals such as China's Ghost Festival or the Western All Souls' Day feed the dead, while other customs aim to banish them; bodies in many burial mounds were ritually tied before interment, a practice still found in rural Anatolia.
The English word descends from Proto-Germanic gaistaz and is a sibling of German Geist. Linguists connect it to a pre-Germanic form linked with Sanskrit words for anger and an Avestan word for terrible. Early Old English writers used gast for the breath of God and for angels and demons, which is why the Holy Ghost bears the name. Only in Middle English did it settle on the visible soul of a dead person. Spook came from Dutch via nineteenth-century America, poltergeist is German for noisy ghost, and Tolkien linked the obscure Scots word wraith to writhe.
Anthropologists suggest the idea of ghosts as misty stuff grew from breath itself, the life inside a person, visible as white vapour on cold days. The same analogy stretched Latin spiritus and Greek pneuma to mean soul. Ancient art such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead shows the dead looking exactly as in life, clothes included.
Science offers no support. Ghosts cannot be tested or falsified, and ghost hunting is classed as pseudoscience. Researchers have instead linked sightings to degenerative brain disease such as Alzheimer's, to rare side effects of drugs like zolpidem and diphenhydramine, and in older reports to carbon monoxide poisoning.
Source: Ghost
