Definition of "haint"

Looking from juror to juror and seeking out the smug faces of the witnesses who'd testified against him, he repeated his threat. "Those who say I kilt anybody are liars," he proclaimed. "And each of you will be hainted every day for the rest of your life. Then the devil will have ye."

1988, Randy Russell, Janet Barnett, “Dead Dan's Shadow on the Wall”, in Mountain Ghost Stories and Curious Tales of Western North Carolina, page 5

After he killed him, Ed came back and he didn't have no head and he hainted [haunted] Ole Master until he died himself — getting in his way all the time — Ole Ed would be right there with him.

2003, Winson Hudson, Derrick Bell, Constance Curry, Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter, page 17

“I just don't think it happened that way,” he argued. “Otherwise, the ghost wouldn't still be hainting the tree.”

2003, W. Bruce Wingo, There Grows a Crooked Tree‎, page 92

"Ain't you scared of haints?"

1960 July 11, Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa., New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, part 2, page 254

I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms.

1987, Toni Morrison, Beloved, page 18

It didn't take long for word to spread that there was a "haint" in the graveyard. A haint is what the old-timers called a ghost.

2005, Eulie Rowan, “The Four-Legged Haint”, in The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs, Simon and Schuster, page 106

My dead grandpa's haint floated above my bed one night when I was a young'un and scared me so bad I busted the bedroom door down tryin' to get out that room so fast.

2009, Mary Monroe, God Still Don't Like Ugly‎, page 211