Accelerated expansion and the Goldstone ghost

A vacuum instability due to a massless ghost in a hidden sector can lead to an effective equation of state for dark energy that changes smoothly from $w=-3\mathrm{/}2$ at large redshifts, to $w\approx -1.2$ today, to $w=-1$ in the future. We discuss how this ghost can be the Goldstone boson of Lorentz symmetry breaking, and we find that this breaking in the hidden sector should occur at a scale below $\sim$10 KeV. The normal particles that are produced along with the ghosts are then predominantly neutrinos.