Unlike witches, ghosts don't serve many purposes in fiction. They fall into one of two categories. Ghosts are either evil and responsible for the misfortunes befalling the protagonists. Or, they're victims and the only way they can be free and "move on" is for the protagonists to learn what happened to them and either right a specific wrong or let the world know their story. Today, let's talk about the common plots and storylines that ghosts tend to have.
Get Out of My House!
This one is pretty straight forward. Everyone's seen or at least knows about this one. The ghost just wants to be left alone. He or she died in the house the main characters just moved into, disturbing it's rest. The story goes as follows: the ghost tries to make the new inhabitants leave, they don't succeed, the protagonists call a priest, a paranormal investigator or some other "expert" to make the ghosts leave. The ghost is usually defeated by said expert, but there's enough leeway to justify a sequel.
Evil, Evil, Evil
This ghost doesn't want to be left alone. It wants to cause mayhem. These are the ghosts that either draw people into the place that they haunt. Sometimes, it's to trap more people in the building, and create more ghosts. Other times, getting someone to enter the creepy, abandoned house might allow them to possess living, so they can be an even bigger menace. Sometimes, they were evil in life, and they're not going to let something as trivial as dying stop them. Other times, they died so traumatically that they become vengeful spirits and need to kill. They were good once, but now, they've been twisted into something else.
"Tell The World"
These ghosts can't move on to the afterlife. Maybe they died violently and can't work through the trauma of that. Maybe they've got unfinished business they need to complete. Maybe the only way they can move on is for the truth of their death to come to light. The movie The Sixth Sense is based on this premise, although we don't know how central it is to the plot at first. In one of the later sequels/spin-offs of The Ring it's implied that Samara created the deadly tape so that her story can be shared, but that was later retconned. This category is where a lot of films featuring ghosts that aren't horror fit. Like Ghost or pretty much every kids movie with ghosts.
What's your opinion about ghosts in media?
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