haunting

Pluralhauntings

1. 1
   adjective

   Remaining in the mind and difficult to put out of one's thoughts.

   Like a face glimpsed in a crowd that you find yourself picturing days later.

   The documentary's final scene was so haunting that the audience sat in silence.

   Critics praised the novel's haunting portrait of postwar grief.

   Similarunforgettable, memorable, evocative, poignant, moving

   Oppositeforgettable, unmemorable

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A single instance of a ghost's presence in a place, or a spirit's continued occupation of where it appears.

   Like a stain that keeps coming back no matter how often a room is cleaned.

   Investigators documented the haunting over several cold, restless nights.

   Local legend describes a haunting that has troubled the inn for centuries.

   Similarvisitation, apparition

   Note

   A countable noun for the event itself, which is why it takes an article and a plural: a haunting, reports of hauntings. In C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce (1945), a speaker explains it as ghosts returning to assert ownership of a house that once belonged to them. He calls this "what's called a Haunting," capital and all, as if naming a recognized phenomenon. The gerund in "the haunting of a house" names the activity instead.

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle of haunt.

   Rumors of a curse are haunting the village this winter.

   She spent years haunting the libraries in search of the lost manuscript.

   Note

   The verb form behind both of its neighbors: the -ing of haunt, which nearly always takes a direct object. A ghost haunts a house, a scholar haunts the libraries, a worry haunts a sleepless mind. That object is the quickest test: the 'unforgettable' adjective takes none and can be graded (more haunting), while the ghostly occurrence counts as a noun, with the plural hauntings.

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