Ghosts
GHOSTS. In western Germanic languages words similar to the modern English ghost and the German Geist seem to be derived from roots indicating fury, wounding, or tearing in pieces. The spelling with gh in English appeared first in a work printed by William Caxton in the fifteenth century, influenced probably by a similar Flemish form. The term ghost has been used in various ways, to mean soul, spirit, breath, the immaterial part of man, moral nature, a good spirit, an evil spirit, and, in liturgical and dogmatic language, to designate the spirit of God as the "Holy Ghost." It has chiefly signified the soul of a deceased person appearing in a visible form, and hence has given rise to such phrases as a ghost walking, raising a ghost, or laying a ghost. It may be called "an apparition" or "a specter." In any case, the prevailing modern sense is that of a dead person manifesting its presence visibly to the living.
Other words are used to describe comparable phenomena, but with some differences. A fetch is, like the German Doppelgänger, the apparition of a living person. A wraith is an apparition or specter of a dead person or an immaterial appearance of someone living forewarning his own death.
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