Ghoul

With Halloween drawing ever closer, you might be hearing a lot more than is usual about ghosts and ghouls – two apparitions which represent the dead.

But, like coffins and caskets, it turns out the pair aren’t actually the same.

This is despite the fact that, like a lot of us, I’d grown up using the terms interchangeably: if it looked like Casper, I believed both terms applied.

There is, however, quite a gory distinction.

What’s the difference between a ghost and a ghoul?

Per Merriam-Webster, a ghost is “the soul of a dead person believed to be an inhabitant of the unseen world or to appear to the living in bodily likeness”.

It’s the kind of thing Halloween outfits involving blankets and cut-out eye holes are based on.

Ghouls, on the other hand, are defined by the same dictionary as being “a........

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