魂

Right 鬼 — the indexing radical, the ghost-spirit picture itself. 鬼 originally drew a person with a frightening mask, the spirit-of-the-dead. As radical it anchors the supernatural family: 魄 (corporeal soul), 魅 (charm/specter), 魁 (chief). 魂 is the cloud-soul, the lighter ethereal half, paired in classical thought with 魄 the body-bound soul.

Left 云 supplies the sound (yún → hún, y/h velar drift) and a fitting semantic flavor — souls were imagined as cloudlike, drifting and intangible. The character 魂 captures that ethereal floating-spirit image directly: a cloud + a ghost. Phonetic family: 运 (transport), 雲 (cloud, traditional).