Songfacts®:

• Ashley Nicolette Frangipane is a New Jersey-reared singer-songwriter, whose performing moniker, Halsey, is both an anagram of her first name and the name of a street in Brooklyn that is meaningful to her. This is a track from her debut EP, Room 93. It was later included on Halsey's debut album Badlands.
• Halsey says that the first line, "I'm searching for something that I can't reach," sets the stage for what the song is about. "It's about looking for something in someone that you can't find," she said. "This concept of a ghost - of a person who still holds a physical body but their ghost in them is gone."
• Room 93 is a collection of songs about a hotel room, and feeling isolated. Halsey explained to Rolling Stone: "For me, writing about hotels is like writing about being in a parallel universe. The sense of voyeurism, and the sense of removedness, and there are all these people silently above you and next to you. It's so bizarre. Room 93 is about having relationships with people that would otherwise not exist out of hotel rooms."
  
  "Relationships are tested by environmental factors and how you handle an emergency, being insulted, being lost and being disappointed. In a hotel room, it's a sterile environment. There's nothing really to challenge you, so you can be whoever you want or whatever you want."
• This was one of the first songs Halsey ever wrote in an actual studio environment and it became an early signature song for her. She recalled on a Spotify track-by-track commentary for Room 93: "I wrote it with my friend Dylan Scott, whose in a band called 'Young Rising Sons.' I just started The Halsey project, I had no idea what I was doing and I was writing like, acoustic songs before this."
  
  "We sat down and we started like, messing with sounds and we wanted like these, 'church-y, scary, shimmery sounds' - the words I used. Most people when you're like, 'Hey, I want shimmery sounds,' are like, 'What?' but he knew right away. So we came up with 'Ghost' and it ended up just being like my signature. It was like how I knew what the Halsey project was gonna sound like."