Do you believe in ghosts? In this prompt by Marian Elizabeth, the speaking character does not believe in them, but is open to changing their minds if a ghost decides to haunt them, maybe.
Although you can easily find the link in the image, I am not including it here, because the site does not seem to belong to the person who wrote the prompt anymore. Now that we have that out of the way, let us continue.
As for me, I don’t believe in ghosts, not as the departed souls of human beings at any rate. Whether there are ghosts that are something else entirely, I am unsure, but I do not believe, for example, that my dead loved ones are still hanging around here on earth.
That does not mean I am adverse to using them in a story environment. They are quite interesting to use in that manner. In fact more than one of my stories is focused on ghosts, one of them from The Rules of Never even being titled, Ghost.
In that story most of the main characters are dead. As a result of events in the story some of the dead return to life while others are able to move on and still others are still stuck as ghosts, though I will not mention which ones in case you are reading this after that story is available to read, but before you have read it.
The idea of someone who has died and been unable to move on is incredibly sad to me. I wouldn’t want that for anyone. It’s a great story element, but as an actual reality it would be horrible.
Given the wording of the prompt, this doesn’t even have to be in a story world with ghosts. It could just be two characters where one believes in ghosts and the other doesn’t. Or it could be a story world where there are ghosts and the one talking doesn’t realize this, but is open to the possibility.
And actually, we don’t know how many people were involved in the conversation. It could be a bunch of people talking about ghosts and haunting and this one person either pipes up and says this or is asked their opinion and gives it to them. Lots of potential for use in a lot of different genres which is nice. There are some prompts that absolutely don’t work in more than one or two genres.
Do you have ghosts in your story world? Even if you don’t do you have characters in it that believe in ghosts? Is there a character in your story world that you can see saying this?