Ghost

Ghost is a broad English-language category for an apparition, voice, presence, or disturbance interpreted as the surviving spirit of a dead person. Beliefs about the dead differ profoundly across cultures, religions, and periods; “ghost” is therefore a useful index term, not a universal explanation. Experiences may include sensed presence, dreams, sounds, visual figures, or place-based stories.

Accounts of returning dead appear in ancient texts and continue through medieval religious writing, early modern pamphlets, Spiritualism, psychical research, and contemporary legend. Psychology and medicine also study bereavement visions, sleep-related experiences, expectation, memory, and environmental cues without treating them as evidence of survival after death.

Fiction often gives ghosts visible bodies, stable motives, and solvable rules. Folklore is less tidy: an experience may be brief, ambiguous, comforting, frightening, or known only through repeated story.

• Owen Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
• Society for Psychical Research, “Apparitions,” reference overview.
• Jacqueline D. Woolley, “The Development of Beliefs About Direct Mental–Physical Causality in Imagination, Magic, and Religion,” 2000, contextual research on supernatural belief.