The “Brown Lady” of Raynham Hall, Norfolk, England; 1936 image of a ghostly figure on a staircase; likely created by the photographers as a hoax using a double exposure, possibly of a photo of a Virgin Mary statue superimposed on that of the staircase
30 October 2020
The Present-Day English word ghost comes from the Old English gast, which carried most of the meanings that the word does today. For instance, gast could refer to the apparition of a dead person, which is perhaps the most common sense of the word today. The Old English Martyrology, a collection of some 230 saints’ lives written in the Mercian dialect has this entry for the feast day of St. Emiliana, 5 January:
On ðone fiftan dæg þæs monðes bið Sancte Emelianan tid ðære fæmnan, þæt wæs Sancte Gregorius faðe, ðæs þe us fulwiht onsænde. Hire ætywde on nihtlicre gesyhðe hire swyster gast ond cwæþ to hire: “Butan þe ic dede þone halgan dæg æt Drihtnes acennisse, ac ic do mid þe ðone halgan dæg æt Drihtnes ætywnesse, þæt is se Drihtnes halga twelfta dæg, Drihtnes fullwihtes dæg.”
(On the fifth day of the month is the feast of Saint Emiliana, the paternal aunt of Saint Gregory, who sent us baptism. Her sister’s ghost manifested to her in a nocturnal vision and said to her, I celebrated the holy day of the Lord’s birth without you, but I will celebrate with you the holy day of the Lord’s epiphany, that is the Lord’s holy twelfth day, the day of the Lord’s baptism.)
Presumably Emiliana died the next day, perhaps of fright, for having your dead sister appear to you and tell you that you’re going to die in a few days is a rather spooky occurrence.
But gast had other senses, many of them akin to the senses of the Latin spiritus, meaning breath, soul, spirit. And spirit may be the modern word with the range of meanings closest to that of the Old English gast. In the poem Andreas, gast is used to refer to the breath or spirit of life in a passage in which God has made and then commands a creature of stone:
Ða se Þeoden bebead þryð-weorc faran,
stan on stræte of stede-wange,
ond forð gan fold-weg tredan,
grene grundas, Godes ærendu
larum lædan on þa leod-merce
to Channaneum, cyninges worde,
beodan Habrahame mid his eaforum twæm
of eorð-scræfe æreest fremman,
lætan land-reste, leoðo gadrigean,
gaste onfon ond geogoðhade,
ed-niwinga andweard cuman,
frode fyrn-weotan, folce gecyðan,
hwylcne hie God mihtum ongiten hæfdon.
(Then the Lord commanded that mighty work to go, stone on the street, from that place, and go forth, to tread the earth, the green ground, to carry God’s message as taught by the king’s words into the people’s-land of the Canaanites, to command Abraham, with his two sons, to perform a rising from the grave, to leave their tombs, to gather their limbs, to receive their ghosts and youthfulness, appear present once more, those wise ancient-counselors, to preach to the people what sort of God they had perceived through his might.)
Old English even had the idiomatic phrase give up the ghost, meaning to die, that is still used in Present-Day English. The Old English translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People found in Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 279 contains this passage about the death of Aidan of Lindisfarne:
& þa gelamp hit þæt se halga bisceop hine onhylde to anre þære studa, utan to þære cyricean geseted wæs þære cyricean to wraþe, & þær þa his gast ageaf
(And it happened that the holy bishop leaned on a post there outside the church that was set there to support the church and there he gave up his ghost)
Bede’s original Latin uses spiritum uitae exhalaret ultimum (finally he exhaled the breath of life).
Gast could also be used to refer to God, especially the third part of the Christian Trinity, the Holy Spirit, which is still often called the Holy Ghost in Present-Day English. From Ælfric’s homily Feria IIII de fide catholica:
Ælmihtig God is se fæder. ælmihtig God is se sunu ælmihtig God is se halga gast
(Almighy God is the Father; almighty God is the Son; almighty God is the Holy Ghost.)
And gast could refer to the soul or essential element of a person. Again, from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History:
Forþon þrim gemetum bið gefylled gwhilc syn, þæt is, ærest þurh scynnesse, & þurh lustfullnesse, & þurh geðafunge. Seo scynis bið þurh deoful, seo lustfulnes bið þurh lichoman, seo geðafung þurh gast.
(Because each sin is fulfilled in three ways, that is, first through incitement, and through lustfulness, and through consent. The incitement is through the devil; the lustfulness is through the body; the consent is through the ghost.)
Bede’s original Latin reads consensus per spiritum (consent through the spirit).
But there are senses of ghost today that did not exist in Old English. For example, there is the verb to ghost, meaning to cut off contact with a person, to suddenly stop returning their calls and texts. This sense is in place by 2010, when it’s recorded in Urbandictionary.com.
Ghost
To avoid someone until they get the picture and stop contacting you.
The mother fucker is annoying yo. I’m guna have to ghost him until he gets the point.
The example sentence given by Urbandictionary is fictional, but here is one from 20 June 2015 on the website Jezebel.com:
According to the rumor mill Charlize Theron broke her engagement with Sean Penn by ghosting (aka, the act of never returning calls, text messages, or e-mails). “Charlize wasn’t responding to his calls and texts,” a presumable person told Us Weekly. “She just cut it off.” Ghosting might be the shittiest breakup method, but generally a person worthy of ghosting has really done something really, truly terrible. It’s worth noting again that Theron did it to Sean Penn, which might alone be a worthy reason.
If Bede or Ælfric had cell phones, maybe they would have ghosted people too, but then again maybe not. After all, it’s hard to avoid people when you live in a monastic community.
Sources:
Ælfric. “Feria IIII de fide catholica.” (“Holy Day 4: About the Catholic Faith”). Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, the First Series. Peter Clemoes, ed. Early English Text Society, S.S. 17. Oxford UP, 1997, 336.33–34.
Andreas. In Clayton, Mary, ed. Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, DOML 27. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013, lines 773–785, 234–237.
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, 3.17, 264 and 1.27, 100.
Bede. The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, part 1. Thomas Miller, ed. Early English Text Society, O.S. 95. London: Oxford UP, 1890, 86.25–28.
Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. gast, gæst.
Edwards, Stassa. “Charlize Theron Broke Up With Sean Penn by Ghosting Him.” Jezebel.com, 20 June 2015.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. ghost n., ghost v.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. ghost n., ghost, v.
Rauer, Christine. The Old English Martyrology. Anglo-Saxon Texts 10. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013, 42.
Urbandictionary.com, 6 October 2010, s.v. ghost.
Photo credit: Hubert Provand and Shira Indre, 19 September 1936, originally published in Country Life, 26 December 1936.