The first time I gave any thought whatsoever to the Holy Spirit wasn't until a college Bible study. Only then did I realize that my home church never even mentioned the Spirit outside of the last line of the Doxology we sang every Sunday morning following the passing of the offering plates: "praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost".
If I had given any thought to the matter as a child, it was only how "ghost" was a strange word to associate with God's Spirit!
If Google can be trusted, the Tyndale Bible was the first to translate the Greek pneuma hagion as "Holy Ghost". That was in 1526 and in that day the Old English gast, meaning spirit or soul, had morphed into ghost.
So ghost originally had a much broader meaning, without any of today's baggage of being the spooky, ethereal, and shadowy soul of a dead human, out only to haunt the living.
A truly unfortunate evolution of an important word!
Unfortunately, even though the word ghost changed drastically over the centuries, the descriptor of "Holy Ghost" for the Third Person of the Trinity continues to hang about the Church, thanks to old hymns and the King James Bible, which largely copied Tyndale's practice in this case.
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