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I don’t celebrate Halloween (much preferring the following day, All Saints Day) but I do have a soft spot for a well told ghost story.
My favourite is Charles Dickens’
A Christmas Carol (with
The Muppet Christmas Carol being my favourite adaptation). I like the redemption theme with this marvellous story and that ghosts are used to bring about a change of heart in Scrooge. Ghosts don’t always have to be scary (though there are dark moments in that book which The Muppets, to their credit, don’t shy away from).
I like ghost stories which make me think. One of mine was where a character hadn’t realised they were a ghost, were wondering where their family was, and needed another ghost to show them the truth.
I like stories which encourage empathy for characters and see no reason why ghost stories can’t contribute but, as with any tale, the ghost has to be in the “cast” of characters for a good reason. Usually ghosts have unfinished business to attend to and that is obviously where the scary side of them can come in, but what if the ghost wants to help someone, left it too late to do so in life etc. Jacob Marley is a case in point there.
I’ve long had a soft spot for shows which had ghosts as characters. These included the children’s shows,
Rentaghost and
The Ghosts of Motley Hall. Moving up the age range, I adored
Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and its theme tune is one of the best TV tunes. I didn’t mind the remake with Reeves and Mortimer. It was a tribute to the original.
More recently I loved the show Ghosts, which the Horrible Histories team were behind. All of these needed the ghosts for the stories to make sense. Sometimes they could be poignant too. Ghosts managed to achieve that and gave many laughs too. There was a good underlying storyline too for the entire series as well as the individual episode stories. Thought this was so well done.
I’ve sometimes used ghost characters to help the living, with the latter not realising until towards the end who it was who helped them. It was the help needed which was the story focus and the living character not needing to know anything else until later. Would they have accepted the help had they known just who was giving it at the start? I think not.
So ghosts need their motivations too then. Readers still need to see where they’re coming from so to speak!
But then no story, whatever its length or genre, will keep me reading if I’m not convinced by the characters. No matter how fantastical or other worldly they are, I still have to believe in them.
Motivations are key for me here. Even when a character appears to do something for the sake of it, there will be something behind that and I will want to find out just what that something is.
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