History Main / GhostlyGoals

* In E.W. Hildick's ''Literature/GhostSquad'' series of juvenile mysteries, most ghosts are Type A, although the goals in question aren't necessarily specific ones; the ghost may just be too concerned about a person, place, or thing to leave it behind. Type B ghosts are called "Malevs", and several of them are antagonists in various books.

** The same for the Hulu series ''{{Series/Deadbeat}}'', starring ''Series/DeadLast'''s Tyler Labine in a different role.

* ''Franchise/ANightmareOnElmStreet'': Freddy Krueger was originally a mix of both types, but after killing the children of everyone involved in his death, became strictly Type 2.

* The various ghosts in ''Literature/WyrdSisters'' are unable to move on until their unfinished business has been resolved. In the case of Verence, this means getting revenge on Felmet and seeing his son on the throne. It's implied that most of the others have been haunting the castle for so long they've ''forgotten'' what their unfinished business is. And it's probably mostly getting revenge on a murderer who's actually one of the other ghosts, so it's all a bit pointless.

* The titular Jedi Ghost of ''Literature/GalaxyOfFear: Ghost of the Jedi'' appears for some time to be type B. Only Tash can see or hear him, and he sends her painful GET OUT messages. [[spoiler: Actually he's type A. He was killed by Darth Vader and the library he guarded was burned; since then an evil scientist has set up a trap there, and the ghost, who feels too much like a failure to pass on, can't help them, though he still tries.]] Tash, being Force-Sensitive, is the first person to be able to detect him, but she's [[HowDoIShotWeb not good with the Force yet]], so it's all vague. When she finds her calm place he's able to communicate specifically and in detail with her.

* Literature/TheDresdenFiles book ''Literature/GravePeril'' has a variation with the Nightmare; a ghost so powerful that Bob (a spirit of intellect who's pretty strong himself,) is terrified of it, and the border between the living and dead had to be disturbed by torturing ''other'' seriously dangerous and powerful ghosts simply to make it possible for the mighty Nightmare to cross over. It becomes clear fairly early on that it wants revenge on the (good people) responsible for its (richly deserved) end, making its goals a combination of both types of this trope; they are focussed and directed (Type A) but are directed at good people and take the form of protracted and deliberate sadism with a lot of RevengeByProxy and collateral damage along the way (Type B). However, we later discover that [[spoiler: the imprisoned evil sorceror whose ghost it is committed suicide in a pre-planned ritual precisely to create a ghost that would take revenge on those who imprisoned him. Considering most dangerous ghosts in fiction simply want to take revenge for what killed them, the fact that the man actually killed himself to take revenge gives an idea of the sort of malice and cruelty the Nightmare shows]].
* In ''Literature/TheGirlFromTheWell'', the ghosts of murder victims are tethered to their murderer until he dies. This leads to some becoming vengeful spirits of murder, forsaking their own chance at passing on in order to grant release to other bound souls.
* ''Literature/FamilySkeletonMysteries'': Sid's is apparently to be there for Georgia, since she needed him and still does.
* ''Literature/TheMediator'': Ghosts in general in this series are stuck in a state of AndIMustScream and are unable to move on, unless they contact a mediator to help them fulfill their goals. These usually involve passing on a message of some sort, while others are considerably more hostile in what they want.
* ''Literature/BruceCovillesBookOf'':
** ''Bruce Coville's Book of Ghosts'': Squire Beal in ''The Pooka'' is doomed to remain a wandering spirit until he can free the title character of its chains (or rather, have someone else do it) and bring it back to its late master.
** ''Literature/BruceCovillesBookOf Ghosts II'':
*** [[DiscussedTrope Discussed]] in ''George Pinkerton and the Bedtime Ghost''. The titular character and his (self-appointed) assistant decide that the mysterious child spirit haunting a family's house must have some form of unfinished business, but they can't imagine what a small girl could possibly want so much that she won't move on. It turns out that she died before her parents could finish reading her ''Literature/TheWonderfulWizardOfOz'', and she refuses to enter the next life until she finds out what happens.
*** ''Call Me Ghost'' is about a spirit who can't remember what happened to him. With some help from the owner of the house he haunts and the woman's niece, they eventually discover that he suffocated to death in an unfinished secret room in the basement. Finding his bones and laying them to rest is the key to freeing him from the earthly plane.
* ''Literature/WhenTheAngelsLeftTheOldCountry'': The rebbe's ghost needs Uriel to tell his family of his passing so they can say Kaddish for him within a month of his death, or he'll turn into a dybbuk. [[spoiler:Uriel waits too long for Little Ash on Ellis Island, and the rebbe becomes a dybbuk as predicted.]]

* ''Literature/JustAfterSunset'': "The Things They Left Behind" has a variation. The protagonist, an office worker named Scott, is surprised to find random knickknacks--a conch shell, a whoopee cushion, a ceramic statue of [[Literature/AlicesAdventuresInWonderland Alice sitting on a mushroom]], etc.--appearing around his apartment, and recognizes them as belonging to his coworkers. It's gradually revealed that Scott worked in the World Trade Center and took September 11, 2001 off by playing sick, and faces tremendous SurvivorsGuilt as a result: all of the other employees in his office died, and he thinks the objects are there as punishment. However, Scott ultimately realizes that what his coworkers' spirits truly want is for him to return the items to their friends and families, which provides the ghosts, their loved ones, and Scott himself a sense of closure.
* Some ghosts in ''Literature/LockwoodAndCo'' vanish after a goal is completed - [[spoiler:Annabelle Ward after killing her murderer]], the old man in the apartment after leading his family to his hidden fortune, the witch's ghost after her confession is found. Lucy's theory is that most ghosts have some unfinished goal, but they're so dangerous that waiting around to find that out really isn't practical.

* ''Camoflage'' by Stan Ridgeway is a GhostStory about a PFC in Veitnam who runs into a man [[KnownOnlyByTheirNickname nicknamed]] "Camoflage" who helps him fight his way out of an ambush and escorts him to his camp, along the way demonstrating [[ImmuneToBullets an immunity to bullets]] and an ability to swat them away. It turns out that "Camoflage" had died the night previous, and his DyingWish was to have run a rescue op.

* ''Series/AreYouAfraidOfTheDark'' featured this a few times.
** ''The Tale of the Shiny Red Bicycle'' reveals Ricky's ghost was unable to pass on because [[spoiler: he wanted to repay Mike for trying to save him from falling into the raging canal. Warning him about the danger Mike's younger brother is in on the same bridge he died on allows him to repay the favour and say a final farewell to his best friend.]]
** Discussed by Megan, right before ''The Tale of the Walking Shadow.'' The ghost in this story initially appears malevolent but [[spoiler: only wants to complete his role as Macbeth, which he was unable to do due to dying on stage.]]
** ''The Tale of the Frozen Ghost'' has the ghostly boy [[spoiler: searching for his jacket. When the protagonists return it to him, he reveals the key to where a robber he foiled hid some stolen money.]]
** The ghostly girl in ''The Tale of the Lonely Ghost'' [[spoiler: only wants to be reunited with her mother, who just so happens to be the nanny employed by the protagonist's aunt.]]

* ''Series/GhostWhisperer'' - Mostly the first group; the latter only appear in arcs.
* ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'' - A mix of both.

* ''Series/{{Smallville}}'' - The ghost of a girl buried in the walls was unable to pass on until [[UnfinishedBusiness she killed her murderer]].
* Happens in the ''Series/{{Charmed|1998}}'' episode "Dead Man Dating", when Piper falls for the ghost of a handsome Chinese-American man. She and the sisters must help him with two goals: punish his murderer and retrieve his (the dude's) lifeless body before the Chinese spirits of the dead come for his soul. They succeed, and after a tearful goodbye the girls watch him cross the bridge to the afterlife.
** In "Ex Libris" a classmate of Phoebe's is killed by a demon. Once the demon is defeated everyone is surprised to find that Charlene's ghost isn't moving on as they expected. It turns out she was meant to stick around a little longer to help resolve Prue's B-plot by scaring a local store owner into admitting that he murdered another young woman. Once the man confesses, Charlene is finally able to move on.

* ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959'' introduces us to a character named Dane. He appears in the episode "Dead Man's Shoes" or rather when someone puts Dane's shoes on, they become possessed by his ghost and aren't aware of any of their own actions. An unwitting homeless man steals the shoes off of a dead body in an alley and becomes Dane. He eventually heads to a bar and asks for Tequila with a cube of sugar in it. His drink of choice. In doing so he captures the attention of a crime boss (Particularly the one who killed him after deciding he didn't want a partner anymore) and asks to speak with him in private. After a short conversation, "Dane" ends up gunned down. He [[VillainousVow makes it clear that he'll keep coming back until he's killed the Crime Boss]] and dies. Asked who the stranger was, The boss nearly says it was Dane but stops himself and has the body dumped in an alley, where another homeless man stops [[{{Bookends}} to admire the nice shoes...]]

* ''Series/{{Friends}}'': One of [[CloudCuckooLander Phoebe's]] massage clients dies on her table and Phoebe becomes convinced the woman's spirit is possessing her. She speaks to the woman's husband to find out if she had any UnfinishedBusiness that Phoebe could try and take care of. The only thing the husband can think of, besides hitting on Phoebe, is that his wife wanted to "see everything". Phoebe attempts to fulfill this by going to different tourist spots but nothing works until she attends Carol and Susan's wedding. As the officiant begins the ceremony Phoebe cries out in the old woman's voice "now I've seen everything!" before slumping and declaring the woman has finally gone.

* An odd blend of these two is [[StringyHairedGhostGirl Samara]] from ''Literature/TheRing''. She creates a tape that kills viewers in seven days unless it's shown to others not to [[spoiler:get justice, but just because she wants to be heard... and kill people]].
** In the novels, she wants to: [[spoiler:use the tape to impregnate ovulating women to create a clone army of herself that eventually takes over the world. From then on, she's able to use her hermaphroditism to reproduce asexually and make the entire human race into duplicates of her]].
** Additionally: while the Japanese sequel (and prequel) imply that Sadako is in it entirely for revenge, the American sequel ''Film/TheRingTwo'' suggests that, since [[spoiler:Rachel is the only one who sought her out and listened to her (and, briefly, sympathized with her) Samara sees her as her new Mommy, and goes as far as possessing Rachel's son Aiden (himself a very, very CreepyChild) to fulfill her needs. It's implied that letting Samara stay with Rachel could have stopped the Curse, if not for Samara's deadly opposition to being taken away from her]].

* ''Series/{{Being Human|UK}}'': Annie's main goal in the aftermath of her death is to drive away anyone who tries to move into her house. But then George and Mitchell move in and, being more than human themselves, can see her and treat her as a third flatmate. She spends the rest of the season trying to find out why she's still in the world. And making cups of tea.
** The [[Series/BeingHumanUS American remake]] has Sally simply trying to figure out how she died. During the first season she subconsciously tends towards Type A, although she does try to veer into Type B territory to take revenge on her murderer but can't find it in herself to follow through with anything.

* An odd blend of these two is [[StringyHairedGhostGirl Samara]] from ''Film/TheRing''. She creates a tape that kills viewers in seven days unless it's shown to others not to [[spoiler: get justice, but just because she wants to be heard. And kill people.]]
** And in the novels she wants to: [[spoiler: use the tape to impregnate ovulating women to create a clone army of herself that eventually takes over the world. From then on, she's able to use her hermaphroditism to reproduce asexually and make the entire human race into duplicates of her. ]]

* The titular [[CuteGhostGirl Spooky]] of ''VideoGame/SpookysJumpScareMansion'' eventually reveals her motivations for creating her house of ghouls at the climax of the game: [[spoiler:she wants to scare ''everyone'' by any and all means necessary, ostensibly because [[EvilIsPetty because she hates being called "cute".]]]] ''The Doll House'' elaborates with further context: [[spoiler:Spooky was originally an ordinary, innocent girl who simply liked to scare people for fun and struggled to be taken seriously due to her cuteness, until one Halloween, [[GoneHorriblyRight she unknowingly scared someone with violent PTSD]], who shot and killed her in a blind panic. Her current ghost form [[CameBackWrong is evidently a mangling of these motivations, overriding anything originally moral or innocent about her in life]].]]

* ''ComicBook/ThroughTheWoods'', an anthology of horror comics, has a story called "A Lady's Hands are Cold", where a young woman put into an ArrangedMarriage with a rich man hears a ghost singing sadly at night in the manor and soon learns that [[TheBluebeard her husband murdered his first wife, cut her body into pieces, and has hidden them throughout the mansion]]. One day while her husband is out, she goes through the manor, finds all the pieces of first wife, and reassembles them, tying the pieces together with ribbons. At that point the first wife acts like a RevenantZombie and reveals that she was a LoveMartyr for the husband who is still obsessed with him, and seeing the young woman standing there in dresses and jewels that were once hers, the reanimated first wife seems to assume the girl is [[BlameTheParamour at least partially responsible]] for [[MurderTheHypotenuse the husband killing her]], and attacks the second wife. Only after the second wife just barely manages to escape and flees the manor does the first wife instead turn her anger and desire for vengeance on the husband who killed her.
* ''ComicBook/WonderWomanBlackAndGold'': "Beyond the Horizon" has Diana helping lay to rest the ghost of a young girl who died in the late-1880s. She and her siblings had been held hostage on the ship and had gradually died off while she desperately tried to find a way back home. She only rests and returns to her form as a young girl rather than a sea monster when Diana comforts her and tells her she kept her baby brother alive long enough that he was rescued and brought home.

* In the ''Literature/BetsyTheVampireQueen'' series by Mary-Janice Davidson, the title character can see ghosts, who have a rather wide variety of goals. The first one she met, a little girl, wanted to be with her mommy (a vampire, [[spoiler:who willingly killed herself on finding her daughter's ghost]]). Others are rather more comedic - one just wanted her son not to name his unborn daughter after her.

* ''Literature/GhostsOfTheTitanic'': When [[TheProtagonist Kevin Messenger]] and his family come to the Seaton Estate at Shearwater Point in Nova Scotia, Kevin starts seeing a Type A ghost who constantly asks "Where's Michael?", "What has become of my precious boy?", "Does he weep for me in the green-black deep?", "Does he walk on land, searching for me?", "How will he know me?", and says "Well may you sleep, robber of the dead, thief of a lost boy's past...". Said ghost haunted Angus Seaton since he took the purse of a dead woman from the Titanic. Said ghost then took to haunting Kevin, and only Kevin, in the present. [[spoiler:Turns out, the ghost is a woman named Annie [=McConnell=], who was the mother of a baby named Michael. When the Titanic sunk, the two got separated, and Annie drowned not knowing if Michael survived or not. Kevin helps her figure out that Michael survived and was adopted by the Messenger family, and grew up to be the father of Kevin's father. The haunting stops once Kevin figures all of it out.]]

* The children's ghosts in ''VideoGame/FiveNightsAtFreddys'' are trying to avenge their death by the Purple Man...though they'll kill any other night guard that's working at the pizzerias in the mean time. [[spoiler: The fifth night mini-game in [[VideoGame/FiveNightsAtFreddys3 3]] shows they they were able to extract revenge on their true killer, and thus move on to the afterlife. Though by doing this, they ironically make their murderer ''the exact same thing they were.'']]

* In {{Manga/Fuuka}}, [[spoiler:Fuuka Akitsuki doesn’t pass on until she is able to fulfill her and Yuu’s goal of preforming at the Budokan together with their band]].

* In ''Film/CrimsonPeak'', the first ghost Edith sees is her mother, shortly after her death. This one is of the benevolent variety, attempting to warn her about Crimson Peak. It fails because Edith doesn't know what "Crimson Peak" refers to until after she and her new husband have arrived at the eponymous manor. The ghosts she encounters within the manor are of the [[spoiler: benevolent]] variety: they are the spirits of [[spoiler: the previous victims of the Sharpe siblings]] and their purpose is to [[spoiler: warn Edith of their murderous intentions and prevent them from claiming any more victims]]. They accomplish their purpose, and the ending implies that they will depart for the afterlife, along with the ghost of [[spoiler: the [[RedemptionEqualsDeath redeemed]] Thomas Sharpe]].

* ''Manga/HikaruNoGo'': Hikaru's possessor and later mentor, Sai, is a ghost who has a goal to keep playing Go, and more precisely reach the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms Divine Move]](a.k.a The Hand of God).

** Discussed by Megan, right before ''The Tale of the Walking Shadow.'' The ghost in this story initially appears malevolent but [[spoiler: only wants to complete his role as MacBeth, which he was unable to do due to dying on stage.]]

* In ''Website/SCPFoundation'' [[http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1337 SCP-1337]] is mismanaged from being a Type A into a Type B. The ghost of a murdered woman [[BewareOfHitchhikingGhosts repeatedly hitchhiked]] to her graveyard and left behind a possession the driver would feel compelled to return to her parents, which would then vanish. Rather than trying to find out how to set her to rest, they just told her parents they were trying to and had SCP agents patrol the small area where she was active so they'd be the ones picking her up. Then the researcher in charge of the project decided that [[{{Jerkass}} killing her parents, demolishing her old house, and destroying her grave marker]] would leave her without anywhere to go, and remove the relatively minor inconvenience caused by her activities. Unsurprisingly, this instead resulted in one royally pissed off ghost, who after [[KarmicDeath butchering the researcher responsible]], expanded her range and shifted from harmlessly hitching rides to killing people who didn't stop for her.

* In ''Wiki/SCPFoundation'' [[http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1337 SCP-1337]] is mismanaged from being a Type A into a Type B. The ghost of a murdered woman [[BewareOfHitchhikingGhosts repeatedly hitchhiked]] to her graveyard and left behind a possession the driver would feel compelled to return to her parents, which would then vanish. Rather than trying to find out how to set her to rest, they just told her parents they were trying to and had SCP agents patrol the small area where she was active so they'd be the ones picking her up. Then the researcher in charge of the project decided that [[{{Jerkass}} killing her parents, demolishing her old house, and destroying her grave marker]] would leave her without anywhere to go, and remove the relatively minor inconvenience caused by her activities. Unsurprisingly, this instead resulted in one royally pissed off ghost, who after [[KarmicDeath butchering the researcher responsible]], expanded her range and shifted from harmlessly hitching rides to killing people who didn't stop for her.