Ghost possesses a large range of synonyms: spirit, sprite, spectre, geist, revenant, poltergeist, visitant, gespenst, phantom, phantasm, spook, shade, dopplegänger, wraith, to name a few distinctly European examples.

Ralph Noyes from the Society of Psychical Research (SPR) argues that each term chooses to emphasise either a particular characteristic of the ghost or a common hypothesis about what it is.

"Among the persistent hypotheses which language reflects are that the ghost is something which returns (Revenant); which returns deliberately (Visitant); which sometimes returns often to a particular place or person (the Haunting Ghost); and which on occasion returns malignly (Poltergeist, Zombie). Underlying all such words is the tradition, persistent in common belief in all societies, that something in the nature of intelligence and personality survives bodily death." (Noyes in Buse and Scott, 1999, p. 245-6)

Ultimately, Noyes and other members of the Society are not interested in these types of ghosts because the words used to describe them seem to tell us, a priori, what ghosts are. Adopting what he describes as a 'phenomenological' approach, Noyes main interest lies in trying to describe and document people's actual encounters with ghosts.

More favoured by Noyes are words that emphasise the visual characteristics of ghosts, such as spectre and apparition.

"'Spectre' is a word with a network of associations. It clearly has its root in the Latin spectare, to see, to perceive, to look at. It relates to 'aspect', 'prospect', 'spectator', and all such words which have to do with the faculty of sight. It includes 'spectrum' among its relatives, the term used by Newton when he first used his prism in 1665 to cause a ray of sunlight to exhibit its seven-fold constituents." (Noyes in Buse and Scott, 1999, p. 248)

Noyes, like many interested in psychical research, is keen to align himself with the ontological certainties of science, arguing that an interest in the paranormal is no more unusual than an interest in the properties of rainbows (Noyes, p.250).

But what Noyes, and others like him, can't avoid is that ghosts have an imaginative force in popular culture that outstrips any concern for their actual existence. He concedes,

"It is an interesting paradox that the common perception of the ghost as a human who has survived death usually fails to bring the comfort which might be expected from such remarkably Good News. Ghosts are almost invariably feared, even when their intentions seem benign." (Noyes in Buse and Scott, 1999, p. 246)

Perhaps this is because ghosts are believed to want to communicate with us. Their imaginative force lies less in what we may see in them than in what they may have to say to us.