The Origin of the word Ghost
is curious.
“The first significance of the word, as well as ‘spirit,’ is breath, or wind.” It is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and is from gust, the wind. Hence, a gust of wind. The Irish word goath, wind, comes nearer to the modern English pronunciation, and shows how easily it could have been corrupted to ghost.
It is easy to imagine the good old Saxon ladies, sitting around the evening fireside, and just as one of them has finished some marvellous story of that superstitious age, they are startled by a sudden blast of wind, sweeping around the gabled cottage, and her listeners exclaim, in suppressed breath,—
“Hark! There’s a fearful gust!”
The transit from gust to ghost is easily done. The clothes spread upon the bushes without, or pinned to the lines, flapping in the night air, are seen through the shutterless windows, and they become the object of attraction. The effect supersedes the cause, and the clothes become the gust, goath, or ghost! The clothes, necessarily, must be white, or they could not be seen in the night time! Hence a ghost is always clothed in white. Therefore the wind (gust) is no longer the ghost, but any white object seen moving in the night air.
“HARK! THERE’S A FEARFUL GUST!”
“But I am a wandering ghost—
I am an idle breath,
That the sweets of the things now lost
Are haunting unto death.
Pity me out in the cold,
Never to rest any more,
Because of my share in the purple and gold,
Lost from the world’s great store.
“I whirl through empty space,
A hapless, hurried ghost;
For me there is no place—
I’m weary, wandering, lost.
Safe from the night and cold,
All else is sheltered—all,
From the sheep at rest in the fold,
To the black wasp on the wall.”