In Beloved the ghost is both the lonely, angry unnamed child of Sethe's and Sethe's and Paul D's haunting past as slaves. Maybe like Beloved suggests ghost are the things and decisions that haunt us not the actual spirits of the dead.
Or maybe the dead are so much easier to be haunted by than the past. After all Sethe refuses to move from the haunted house and she cannot forget her disturbing past.
Personally I believe a ghost is what people believe it to be. For each person a ghost is different. For Denver, Sethe's daughter, a ghost is an angry, lonely baby. For Paul D a ghost is his past on the plantation, and for Sethe a ghost is the hurt, anguish, and all the stuff that happened to her between her past and her present. Anyway, each person defines a ghosts differently but all the different ghosts exist within one little house.
I totally agree that a ghost is what each individual person believes it to be. Ghosts are things from the past that come back to haunt us. This doesn't necessarily have to be a dead person; it can be a memory, a person, a thought, a place, or anything else you have tried to forget.
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