apparition
noun

- a ghost or ghostlike image of a person

- a remarkable or unexpected appearance of someone or something

- the spirit of a dead person appearing in a form that can be seen

- something you believe, imagine, or dream you see, esp. the form of a person; ghost

Dictionary dot com / The Cambridge Dictionary / The American Dictionary

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WORD ORIGIN

“Apparition” meaning “supernatural appearance or manifestation”, appeared in the early 15th century from Anglo-French aparicion, Old French aparoison with reference to the Epiphany (the revealing of the Christ child to the Wise Men), and from the Late Latin apparitionem “an appearance”.

The meaning of an unexpected or startling ghost-like appearance is recorded from around 1600.

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THE GREY APPARITION

Engineer Vic Tandy once sought to demystify a “haunting” in his Coventry laboratory. Paranormal episodes were characterised by a feeling of unease and vague glimpses of a grey apparition. Tandy soon found his ghost: it was a newly installed extractor fan which, he found, was generating infrasound at a frequency of 18.9 Hz.

A similar story is told of a team headed by French robotics researcher Dr Vladimir Gavreau which traced inexplicable bouts of nausea to a faulty motor-driven ventilator. The 19 Hz frequency can generate visual disturbances (by vibrating the eyeball), create a psychological sense of unease, and produce the sensation of a drop in temperature (often associated with spectral manifestations).

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SYNONYMS

- a ghost or ghostlike image, sometimes of a person:

APPARITION, appearance, banshee, beastie, being, black beast, bogey, bogey(man), bug-a-boo, bump in the night, chimera, daemon, demon, devil, djinni, elf, elfin, ethereal being, evil spirit, fabulous creature, faerie, faery, fairy, fantasm, genie, ghost, ghoul, ghoulie, gnome, goblin, gremlin, haunt, haunter, hellhound, hobgoblin, ignis fatuus, incorporeal being, incubus, jinnee, kobold, leprechaun, manifestation, materialisation, mischievous goblin, monster, mythical creature, naiad, nix, nixie, nymph, Oceanid, ogre, phantasm, phantasma, phantom, pixie, poltergeist, presence, puck, revenant, soul, spectre, spirit, spook, sprite, succubus, supernatural being, sylph, troll, vampire, visitant, warlock, werewolf, will-o’-the-wisp, witch, wraith, zombie

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SMUGGLE OWAD into an English conversation, say something like:

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