the.com/wight

means An old word for a living creature or person, which fantasy fiction later hijacked to mean a ghostly or undead being.

from From Old English 'wiht,' meaning a creature, thing, or being — related to Old High German 'wiht' and distantly to the modern German 'nicht' (nothing), by way of phrases like 'no wiht' meaning 'no creature/thing at all.' It simply meant any living being, human or otherwise, for centuries. The eerie, undead sense is a much later fantasy-literature twist — Tolkien's barrow-wights being the famous turning point — that narrowed a word for 'any creature' down to 'specifically the creepy dead ones.'