Please bear with me a moment as I try to articulate what I’m looking for in a movie/tv/book plot.
We’ve probably all seen movies where the big plot twist is that the character is a ghost all along, and someone else is just capable of seeing dead people. I bet you’ve thought of at least two already.
What I’m looking for is literally the opposite of that: an unreliable narrator talks about a ghost throughout the story, but it turns out that the person they’re describing is in fact alive.
However, I’m not interested in movies where the main character is tricked into thinking a house is haunted when it’s really a live person causing their issues. So, not those movies with Naomi Watts, Morgana O’Reilly, and/or Lauren Cohan to name a few discovering the things bumping in the night are alive, okay?
Instead I’m looking for the reveal of the aliveness to be after we the reader/viewer are mislead by the main character, not revealed to be alive after the main character is mislead about the situation.
There’s a bit in BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER when our heroes start to suspect Giles is a ghost, because — well, there is a ghostly evil entity around, and it can look like anyone who’s died, and what proof do they have that Giles is still alive? Sure, he’s apparently been mentoring the girls who have Slayer potential; but, now that you mention it, it’s always someone else around him who happens to be opening a door or carrying stuff or whatever. And he never hugs or shakes hands or whatever either!
This, of course, turns out to be incorrect. “Now wait a minute: you think I’m evil if I bring a group of girls on a camping trip, and don’t touch them?"
Something with a delusional narrator would be what you looking for, maybe? The narrator of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” doesn’t see ghosts, but definitely believes in things that aren’t true (but in that book, the reader never thinks the Chief is right about what he sees).
There’s that South Park episode where the kids decide they’ve had enough of Cartman and decide to ignore him, leading him to believe he’s become invisible and must have died and become a ghost. Butters isn’t in on this, so when he greets Cartman, Cartman thinks only Butters can see him and the rather credulous Butters soon assumes this to be the case as well when nobody else reacts to Cartman’s presence.
I thought of this immediately too. But note, you need to specify that this happens in the BOOK only, and NOT in the movie with Jack Nicholson. In the movie, Chief Bromden in not the narrator and is only a minor character, and his role as a totally psychotic unreliable narrator is completely lost – IMO, a major departure and failing of the movie compared to the book.
In the book, Bromden doesn’t merely believe some things that aren’t true, he has massive psychotic delusions and hallucinations, which he as narrator reports as fact. (Contrary to what Andy L says, it did take me a few pages into the book to figure that out. But that must have been massive naiveté on my part at the time, as Bromden’s narrative is so ludicrous right from the start.)
One movie with a vaguely similar sort of plot is Safety Not Guaranteed. It’s about a man building a time machine in order to go back in time to prevent the death of his girlfriend. Late in the movie you learn that the woman in question was never his girlfriend and in fact is still alive. In the last few seconds of the film you learn whether it’s a real time machine or just part of his delusions.
There is one of those Dresden Files novels by Butcher where the main character/narrator thinks he’s a ghost, but at the end he was just astrally travelling while in a coma, or something like that. He is unreliable not in the sense that the narrator is lying to you, rather that he genuinely was tricked into thinking he was dead, so the reader does too.
ETA it’s part of a long series of fantasy novels, though, not something to pick up to read by itself
Thanks. I never saw the movie (and as I read the book a third of a century ago, I may be misremembering how quickly I caught on to Bromden’s delusions - the one I remember most clearly (and may be misremembering) is that he sees a red mark on a coffee cup after Nurse Ratched drinks from it, and rather than concluding that it’s lipstick, he concludes that the cup must be red-hot, and thus Ratched must be a robot since she didn’t get burned by a red-hot cup).
Lee Hollis’s story Death By Haunted House in the compilation The Haunted House Murder. She thinks she’s seeing a ghost, but it’s really the owner’s wife, who is undergoing chemotherapy for leukemia.
And yet ironically after establishing this foundation in the original series that ghosts aren’t actually real, the later series The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo just casually accepted that they, y’know… are.