In Hollywood ghost stories, the spirits are nearly always malevolent. For dramatic purposes, the vengeful ghosts are intent on causing harm to the living, either by attacking them physically or scaring them so badly that they want to jump out a window.

The reality is that ghost and haunting phenomena are harmless... for the most part. Residual haunting - the kind that are seem to be recordings on the environment - simply play themselves out. True spirits, or intelligent haunting, are either those who manifest to relay a message or are trapped entities who may not know they are dead. Very rarely, however, they do attack people.