Ghost

Historical Background
Ghost is the generic word for a non-corporeal spirit which is the manifestation of a dead person or animal. Ghosts exist across several mythologies and various peoples and possibly pre-date written history. The word ghost is the Old English rendering of what the Latin word spiritus meant, referring to the disembodied spirit of a deceased person. The modern compound words using ghost, such as ghost town, ghost writing, did not originate until the 19th and 20th centuries.