A collection of ghost words for our haunted world:

Ghost Hotels: “The “ghost hotel” nomenclature refers to an entire apartment building which is functionally a hotel because most or all units are short-term rentals instead of tenant-occupied.”

Ghost Network Healthcare: “…he, like millions of Americans, was trapped in a “ghost network.” As some of those people have discovered, the providers listed in an insurer’s network have either retired or died. Many other providers have stopped accepting insurance — often because the companies made it excessively difficult for them to do so. Some just aren’t taking new patients. Insurers are often slow to remove them from directories, if they do so at all. It adds up to a bait and switch by insurance companies that leads customers to believe there are more options for care than actually exist.”

Ghost Network Television: “Now MTV is a ghost. Its average prime-time audience of 256,000 people in 2023 was down from 807,000 in 2014, the Nielsen company said. One recent evening MTV aired reruns of “Ridiculousness” from 5 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.”

Ghost Kitchen: “A virtual restaurant, also known as a ghost kitchen, cloud kitchen or dark kitchen, is a food service business that serves customers exclusively by delivery and pick-up based on phone and online ordering. Virtual restaurants are stand-alone businesses that either operate out of an existing restaurant’s kitchen or from a separate kitchen set-up away from a restaurant.”

Ghost Knowledge: “Most fields have a problem with ‘ghost knowledge’, hard-won practical understanding that is mostly passed on verbally between practitioners and not written down anywhere public. At least in programming some chunk of it makes it into forum posts. It’s normally hidden in the depths of big threads, but that’s better than nothing.”

See also: American Suburbs Are a Horror Movie and We’re the Protagonists “That’s how I feel when I walk through the bare, people-less parking lots of my neighborhood to get to the grocery store. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen other pedestrians while making this trip. If not for the moving cars nearby, it would be like walking through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s an isolating experience, one that makes me feel very small and vulnerable.”