Haunt

HAUNT is, it seems to me, a suitably sticky word for October, undoubtedly the spookiest of months. As the nights draw in they do so charged with the anticipation of All Hallows Eve – a holy day that, much like the study of etymology itself, invites a return to all manner of pasts… remainders empowered by a whole cast of spirits, ghosts, spells and incantations.

However – long before such occult associations – to haunt is thought to have taken prevenient form in the Proto-Germanic *haimatjaną, meaning to house or bring home (itself speculatively derived from *haimaz, meaning village or home) and to hāmettenne, in Old English, meaning to provide a home or bring something back to it. Perhaps giving early indication of its unsavoury connotations, an example of this term’s use emerges from Æthelstan’s Grately Code, a C10th document concerning thievery and treachery to lords, in which is written:

“Ond we cwædon be þam hlafordleasan mannum, ðe man nan ryht ætbegytan ne mæg, þæt man beode ðære mægþe, ðæt hi hine to folcryhte gehamette, him hlaford finden on folcgemote. gif hi hine ðonne begytan nyllen, oððe ne mægen to þam andagan, ðonne beo he syþþan flyma, hine lecge for ðeof se þe him tocume…”

“And we spoke concerning the lordless men, from whom one cannot obtain justice, that one should bid their family, so that they bring him home [gehamette] to face justice, and find him a lord in the public assembly. And if they then will not, or cannot, bring him on the appointed day, then he will afterwards be an outlaw, and he who comes upon him may kill him as a thief…”

So from the first, to be lordless – and therefore in need of a home, of hāmettende – was one step from thiefdom, as good as undead! Such criminal or subhuman connotations continued into Middle English, in which the more familiar form of haunten came to identify – as a noun – the resting places of animals, such as birds and fowls; as in John Trevisa’s C14th translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De proprietatibus rerum:

“Many briddes and foules haunten þat place, and þere-fore þer ben many foulers þat liggen and setten nettes” [Many birds and fowls haunt that place, and therefore there are many fowlers that cast and set nets.]

And so from this point, as is common of English words – and particularly of those coined via translation from Old French – this verb-noun pair ‘haunt’ catalysed all sorts of meanings and connotations; at once the habit or practice of doing something, as well as the habitat, the place to which one returns. For example, Henry Lovelich, in his C15th translation of the The History of the Holy Grail, develops ‘haunts’ hellish undercurrents:

That dirk blak hows signefyeth helle, To wheche place Al Miscreaunt Atte the day of dom schal ben here haunt.

And elsewhere, in a C15th translation of the Secretum Secretorum the ‘Secret of Secrets’ attributed to Aristotle (but more-likely written in C10th Arabic) one reads – licentiously – of the best medicine for ‘dronkenesse’ in the haunt of women:

“...and how that syknesse grewys on hym þat abstenys hym fro surfaytes of mete and drynke, and fro haunte of women & greet trauaill.

Indeed, sex and old haunts are intimately bound (so to speak). For example, in a C15th edition of “Arthour and Merlin”, the young wizard’s mysterious conception entails the enchantment and seduction of three unwed sisters:

Of whom y spac tofor ȝou alle - Þo he nam lickenisse of man & com him to an old wiman & bihete hir ȝiftes & grete fe To wende to þis sostren þre & þe heldest to bichaunte ȝong mannes loue for to haunte.

And tempting as well are the connections between haunte and bichaunte (or rather, enchaunten), a word which calls up the power of language, from its Old French roots in enchanter or chant. At the turn of the C16th, Shakespeare, in A Lover’s Complaint, develops these senses, writing of the bewitching qualities of a similar ‘ȝong mannes’:

That he did in the general bosom reign Of young, of old, and sexes both enchanted, To dwell with him in thoughts, or to remain In personal duty, following where he haunted. Consents bewitched, ere he desire, have granted, And dialogued for him what he would say, Asked their own wills, and made their wills obey.

To haunt (or be haunted), and to visit a haunt was then, by the C17th, either explicitly or associatively dangerous for both soul and body alike. Again, in Shakespeare’s Richard III, we hear of the haunting danger of beauty, of – as the OED have it – ‘unseen or immaterial visitants’:

Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleep To undertake the death of all the world

And in The Faerie Queene – written in 1590 by Edmund Spenser – of spectral, wild monsters:

That yonder in that faithfull wilderneſſe Huge monſters haunt, and many dangers dwell

Already here we can see the loose edges of ‘haunt’ being ironed out, and it is over the course of the Georgian and Victorian eras that we see the contemporary image of the term being more fully developed. Hannah Brand’s Adelina of 1789, for example, reads like some kind of spooky bingo sheet:

That Cousin of mine is as plagueful as a Ghost in a haunted house.

What, pray tell, is more frightening than one's own relations!

But really, in truth, who can surpass the haunted hyperbole of Marx? The man who, in some strange way, brought the term back to its political, economic, juridical roots? Who brought the whole Dickensian lexicon of the undead into the driest of economic analyses? Who took the word and made it a slogan? A cheer:

A spectre is haunting…!

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout