How well do you know these scary words?

Not all Hallowe’en stories are frightful. As word-guru site Merriam-Webster.com tells it, the history behind a few October-themed words isn’t even that Halloween-y.

Well, not all of them anyway.

Haunt (visit often). While today’s definition involves ghostly inhabitation, until the 1500s to “haunt” simply meant to habitually hang out — much as Bakery by the Lake is one of my favorite haunts. After 1500, it slowly began to include a disquieting effect — a problem coming back to haunt you. (Perhaps some welcomes began to wear out.)

Ghost (core intelligence; vital spark). “Ghost” goes back at least a thousand years, referring to the essence of something. We still say “give up the ghost,” meaning to reveal the punchline or secret.

Ghost was once spelled gast — the root of aghast, which does mean a more apropos “struck with terror” or “shocked,” so that may be how we got to those modern disembodied souls. The German word for ghost is geist, from zeitgeist, which literally means “spirit of time.”

Vampire. Vampire legends are ancient, dating earlier than the oft-credited Balkan legends in the 1400s and as far back as Ancient Greece (under other names and not necessarily undead, but still blood-sucking). The word “vampire” derives from the Serbian vampir, entering English by the 1700s.

Banshee (fairy). This Gaelic term meaning “woman of fairyland” is nothing like Tinkerbell. Banshees are female spirits whose screechy wailing foretells a death. You still hear the idiom “scream like a banshee” or “wail like a banshee,” although how we’d know defies explanation, as hopefully no one has actually heard one.

Goblin (playful or mischievous sprite). Goblins are hard to pin down. Milton used the word poetically in “Paradise Lost” as a synonym for an ugly death. Today a goblin is “an ugly or grotesque sprite sometimes conceived as evil and malicious, and sometimes as merely playful and mischievous.” It derives from a Greek word meaning “rogue.”

Hobgoblin, a less threatening sort of spirit, in part comes from a Middle English nickname for “Robert” or “Robin,” referring to a rustic country dweller. A metaphor (one hopes) from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay, “Self-Reliance” comes to mind:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Wraith (a likeness). Wraiths and ghosts are oft confused; the difference is that a wraith originally referred to the exact likeness of a living person, seen as an apparition just before that person’s death — a spectral premonition.

Today, wraith has become synonymous with revenant — a person’s ghost who returns after a long absence. Sometimes wraith is used to refer to a living person, as a synonym of doppelgänger, or the “spirit double” of a living person (often an evil twin, although that wasn’t the original meaning).

If you’re still confused, you’re not alone.

Ghoul (a grave thief). Ghoul is a latecomer to English, borrowed from the Arabic “ghul” (“to seize”) in the 1700s and introduced to western literature by the French translation of Arabian Nights. Originally ghoul meant “a legendary evil being held to rob graves and feed on corpses.”

Better keep those door-knocking ghouls well-fed on candy tomorrow night.

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Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. Email: sholeh@cdapress.com