But, of course, there is an exception. Ghosts, the most basic of horror beasts, scare the seven circles of hell right out of me. I don't even believe in ghosts, but there's just something about them that gets to me.
I believe that all fantastic horror creatures are tied to some real-life fear. Zombies are really plagues, werewolves are reflections of our own inner demons, even the giant ants in Them! or the titular creature in Godzilla symbolize mankind's fear of science. (The monsters were created by nuclear and atomic weapon testing, respectively.) Some people would suggest that ghosts channel a fear of death, but I believe that they channel our fear of the unknown.
The part of Poltergeist that always stuck with me is not the iconic "They're here" scene, but the part near the end, *SPOILER!* after the house was supposedly clean, when the clown doll comes to life anyway. Taninga (the medium that was supposed to fix the whole haunting thing) clearly knew what she was doing and how ghosts worked, at least as much as anyone in the movie did, and seemed convinced that that the house was safe. She was the expert... but she was wrong. *SPOILER OVER!*
Of course, the tropes associated with a haunting are well-known. Weird stuff happens, it gets weirder (whether this is out of necessity or choice on the ghost's part isn't always clear), and before long an exorcist is in your house telling you who died and how and what they're gonna do about it. (Not all ghost stories follow this formula, but enough do to make a formula in the first place.) But there's no silver bullet, no wooden stake. Sometimes a ghost is exorcised through a ritual only slightly less mysterious than the floating furniture. Ghosts can walk through walls, they can float, they are invisible, they can sometimes be near-omniscient--the biggest limitation seems to be that they can't leave the house, and something about that just seems more like a psychological limitation than a physical one.
I guess that maybe that's why ghosts scare me so much--they're so incomprehensible. Their abilities, their weaknesses, and their actions always seem to exist a little bit outside our own sphere of understanding. They seem like pure emotion--a creature with near-limitless power but little reason. Ghosts scare me not only because they can do anything, but because they don't. There's no physical logic to a ghost, and no psychological logic, either.
