Rebecca: You're still here.
Phantom Greg: Because you're still thinking about me.
Phantom Greg: Because you're still thinking about me.
Bob was once a part of Alice's life. Then something happened — he died; he moved away; they had a falling out. Now Alice has been having visions of Bob standing in the room with her. Symbolically, this represents his continued presence in her thoughts, the fact that she hasn't moved on and metabolized this loss yet.
On one end, Bob may be a literal hallucination. On the other end, this may be a visual representation of Alice merely thinking about Bob a lot, making him an Imagine Spot or a visual representation of a thought process. If Bob is dead, he might be a ghost. Many examples fall in an ambiguous space in between these, not definitively one or the other.
The key feature of this trope is Bob's symbolic significance. He was a real person who Alice knew, who is not in her life any longer. He's here now in this incarnation because he's a loose end; Alice didn't get closure with him, or she hasn't moved on from this loss yet. If it's not an expression of that, it's the supertrope Dead Person Conversation instead.
If the fact that it's imaginary is revealed at some point, then it overlaps with "They're Not Real" Reveal, Daydream Surprise, or Dead All Along. If Bob is dead and Alice killed him, it can overlap with Haunting the Guilty.
Banish the Mourning Apparition is a subtrope where Alice moves on, and denotes this by sending the apparition of Bob away.
If Bob has some real autonomy and isn't just what Alice imagines him to be, see Spirit Advisor or Living Memory instead. If there never was a real Bob and he's always been exclusively in Alice's imagination, that's Imaginary Friend. For an apparition thematically linked to mourning that is not a representation of the lost person, see Our Banshees Are Louder.
Examples:
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Advertising
- New Zealand's "Ghost chips" Drunk Driving PSA has it Played for Laughs. A teenage boy sees that his friend, George, is drunk at a house party and he ponders about telling him not to drive home. In his thoughts, he believes that if he dies, he'll not only have to hang out with his family and do puzzles with them, but George will haunt him, taunting him with his "ghost chips" as small children make fun of him.
Anime & Manga
- Fairy Tail: When Lucy calls out her father Jude for his involvement with Phantom Lord, Jude briefly sees a vision of his deceased wife Layla standing next to Lucy, which is symbolic of the fact he never got over her death.
- Played with in Oshi no Ko. Aqua and Ruby occasionally encounter apparitions of their past lives, giving voice to feelings carrying over from those lives that continue to trouble them. Aqua's apparitions also sometimes take the form of his younger self at the age when his mother died.
Comic Books
- Aquaman (1994) Annual #4 is a tie-in to the Ghosts crossover event where the dead came back for a night to haunt the living, and two of the main characters deal with this trope in different ways.
- Garth and Tula have a conversation about life and death, and Garth declines an offer to join her in the afterlife. Tula is happy he refused as it means he's finally started to move on from her memory.
- Arthur sees Arthur Jr., who keeps asking him "Why?" throughout the entire night. He finds out just as the ghosts begin to fade that what his son wanted was a hug, and embraces Arthur Jr. and apologizes for never having the chance to say how much he loves him just before he disappears.
- Funeral For A Friend: Jonathan Kent, guilt-ridden because Clark died before him and he couldn't protect him as a father should, hallucinates seeing Clark at different points of his life — tending to a prized cow, playing with a toy cow and the aftermath of rescuing the experimental aeroshuttle. This culminates in a Near-Death Experience dream following a heart attack where Jon goes into the afterlife to rescue Clark from crossing over, though that bit is left up in the air if this actually happened as Clark does come back from the dead, but not through those means.
- Injustice 2: While a prisoner of Oa, Hal is haunted by a specter of Guy Gardner, whom he killed after Sinestro tricked him into thinking Guy had turned evil before the first game. The specter constantly snarks at how much of a Fallen Hero Hal has become while also acting as a Spirit Advisor whenever Hal is confronted by trauma. Once Hal comes to terms with himself and helps to repel the onslaught of the Red Lantern Starro spores, the specter "makes peace" with him and fades away.
Fan Works
- Discussed in Being Dead Ain't Easy. After Joey Wheeler dies, he comes back as a ghost and haunts Kaiba, who never reacts to anything Joey says. Turns out that Kaiba could see Joey all along; he just refused to interact with the 'guilt hallucination'. Additionally, some of them were actual hallucinations since Joey wasn't always around Kaiba when he saw him, especially in dreams.
- Fragments of Chaldea: Played heartbreakingly straight during this story’s adaptation of Singularity Seven: Redemption From Sin. Gilgamesh repeatedly ends up spotting the image of his dear friend Enkidu, representing the grief he continues to feel over his death. He is tormented by his emotions over the event and seeing his friend’s image throughout the arc, until the end, where Gilgamesh was prepared to bid Enkidu farewell, only to learn that this time they’re real.
Films — Animation
- Ladybug & Cat Noir: The Movie: Early in the movie, Gabriel looks at a dress that he made for his late wife Emilie before her death, and has a vision of her urging him to stop fussing over the dress and come to bed, with recalls ruefully how he told her they had all the time in the world.
Films — Live-Action
- Adrift (2018): Tami and Richard are sailing a boat across the Pacific when they're hit by a horrible storm. Tami is completely alone in the middle of the ocean on a damaged boat, injured, and her fiance was just killed. She psychologically cannot handle this, and so she hallucinates Richard in order to cope enough to survive. Near the end, she is finally ready to let him go.
- The Chumscrubber: Near the ending of the movie, Crystal enters Dean's room and finds him in a delirium, talking with his dead friend Troy who had hung himself a few days before.
- Midsommar: Whenever she's tripping, Dani sees brief glimpses of her sister, Teri, reflecting her severe trauma over Teri's murder-suicide (which killed their parents and left Dani completely alone) at the beginning of the film. When she's crowned May Queen at the climax of the movie, she passes Teri and her parents in the crowd. She tries to go after them but they pass her by.
- Romeo is Bleeding: Jack is told his wife is a dead woman, though he cannot verify this since they are separated. The last time he saw her was when they said goodbye to each other at the airport. She might be in some other country, but also might not be alive anymore, as she does not come to meet him at the stipulated time and place. He waits for her and even sees her — but then she is shown to be a daydream, a hallucination.
- Sleepless in Seattle: Sam is a widower and still trying to get over his former wife Maggie and move on. One day when he's lying on the couch in a half-asleep stupor he sees an illusion of her and they talk.
- Truly, Madly, Deeply: Nina is mourning the premature death of her boyfriend Jamie when he appears to her as a ghost. She is delighted and they start to continue their relationship as it was. Eventually, though, she realizes that Jamie came back specifically to help her get over him by tarnishing her idealized memory of him so that she can move on.
- The Twilight Saga: In the second movie, New Moon, Edward has departed and intends not to return in the interest of keeping Bella safe. Bella proceeds to imagine ghostly apparitions of him, especially when she's doing something dangerous. It's an obvious indication of how much trouble she is having in trying to get over her feelings for him.
- Yardie: Main character D (short for Dennis) regularly sees his older brother Jerry Dread appearing beside him. Jerry was tragically murdered at a concert he was hosting to try to bring peace between the two leaders of gangs. Because a traumatised and angry D disrupted the 9-day funeral held for his brother afterwards, unable to say goodbye to him, D believes that Jerry has now become a duppy, unable to move on to the afterlife until D avenges him by killing his murderer, Clancy Hibbert. Yvonne, D's wife, instead thinks that Jerry is just a hallucination her husband's suffering from due to guilt and grief, but overall, the narrative appears to agree with D, because after he kills Clancy and King Fox, the real mastermind behind Jerry's murder, albeit accidentally, Jerry walks away and D never sees him again.
Folklore
- The Brothers Grimm's "The Shroud" (Das Totenhemdchen): A mother's son dies and she mourns for him non-stop until the ghost of her son appears and tells her to stop since he's making his little shroud wet from her tears.
Literature
- The Wandering Inn: During Volume 10 Erin "Summer" Solstice does this to themself deliberately as a form of psychological Self-Harm out of guilt, using their skills to conjure statues out of the people they believe died for them to haunt them. However instead of being angry, they are Helpful Hallucination's who tell their invoker to stop and seek help from their nearby companion.
- We Were Liars: In the climax, Cadence realizes her friends all died in the fire they set and the friends she's been talking to all summer are either hallucinations or their ghosts, who have been trying to help her move on.
Live-Action TV
- The Boys (2019): After his girlfriend Robin's sudden accidental death, Hughie starts seeing guilt-induced apparitions of her as he starts getting closer to Annie throughout Season 1. Once he finally accepts that he's moving on and begins a relationship with Annie, the apparitions stop.
- Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: In episode 2.04, Rebecca's sometimes-boyfriend Greg leaves and moves across the country. After he's gone, she continues to imagine him everywhere, embodied in scenes where the actor is in the same room as her, speaking to her. At the end of the episode, she concludes that she needs to move on. She summons him, as a figment of her imagination, and tells him to leave. He does.
Rebecca: Hey. You're still here.
Greg: Because you're still thinking about me. - Dawson's Creek: Andie has routine visions of her dead oldest brother Tim, who died in a car accident years earlier and whose death more or less tore their already fragile family apart. While their already distant father walked out on the family for good, their mother's preexisting mental illness only magnified until she was hospitalized in an institution.
- Desperate Housewives: Edie's new husband in Season 5, Dave, still sees his late wife and daughter, whom he lost in a car accident five years ago. His visions of them not speaking are a way to show how much he is still not over their death and harbors hatred towards Mike for killing them (even accidentally). The moment that his late wife, Lila, starts speaking (encouraging him to kill MJ and Susan to punish Mike) marks an escalation from grief-filled revenge to full vengeance. At the end of the season, he sees them in his room at the mental hospital to reflect that he's not over his grief.
- Doctor Who: Throughout "Heaven Sent", the Doctor imagines several interactions between himself and his companion Clara in the TARDIS, describing his current situation and detailing his thought processes about how best to handle it. These sequences are very clearly happening in the Doctor's head, due to taking place in a different setting and Clara having died in the previous episode.
- Farscape: In "The Choice", Aeryn is grieving for Crichton on Valdon, and repeatedly envisions Crichton staying with her in the Hell Hotel as she struggles to come to terms with what happened. However, despite numerous hopes that Valdon's mystics might be able to bring Crichton back from the dead, she ultimately concludes that she'll never see him again, and tells the imaginary Crichton to leave. Cutting Back to Reality reveals that she's alone in her hotel room.
- After General Hospital's Emily was murdered, her devastated fiancé Nicholas began having hallucinations of her. It turns out to be due to a brain tumor. He refuses to be operated on even though he knows he could die otherwise because he can't bear to let her go and wants to be Together in Death, but ironically, it's the hallucination that urges him to go ahead with the procedure. Afterwards, she comes to see one last time to bid him farewell.
- Hannibal: Will Graham sees Beverly while processing her death, to the point where he envisions her at the crime scene encouraging him to use his skills to investigate it.
- Interview with the Vampire (2022): Season 1 ends with Louis de Pointe du Lac killing his vampire companion Lestat de Lioncourt, with whom he had a Destructive Romance, but who he was nonetheless deeply in love with. In season 2, Louis is trying to put the past behind him and start a new life, but he is haunted by guilt for what he did to his ex-lover. Louis sees Hallucinations of Lestat; this apparition flirts with Louis, threatens him, harasses him while on dates with his new Love Interest, and generally drives him crazy. In episode 11, Louis banishes the vision and tries to move on. By episode 14, the apparition is back again because Louis hasn't really moved on, despite his best attempts.
- Loving (1983). While wrongfully imprisoned for murdering his girlfriend Stacy, Buck has a vivid dream about her.
- Monarch of the Glen: Soon after Hector's death, Molly paints a picture of him, but cannot work out what is missing from the picture. Later, Archie sees an apparition of him, which provides the answer: the Glenbogle Rose, which he was wearing.
- NCIS:
- "Kill Ari, Pt. 1": The NCIS team mourns the death of Caitlin Todd, and each of them imagines Kate appearing in front of them to console them.
- "Swan Song": The episode is told via flashbacks, with the Framing Device being Gibbs discussing the episode's events with Mike Franks. At the end of the episode, it's revealed that Franks is lying on the mortuary slab next to Gibbs, having been murdered by the Port-to-Port Killer, and Gibbs was imagining the conversation as a means of processing his grief.
- Pose:
- "Never Knew Love Like This Before": Candy is found dead after a beating and the Houses mourn her death. Several of them imagine her at her funeral, offering her final goodbyes, and the episode ends with an Imagine Spot in which she gets a final dance number.
- "Love's in Need of Love Today": Pray Tell lands in the hospital thanks to some ill-advised "home cures" for HIV. While there, he experiences hallucinations of his abusive stepfather and Candy, who tell him that they're going to keep haunting him until he reckons with his painful past, the harm that he did to others, and his own mortality.
- "Life's a Beach": Elektra admits to her daughters that when Candy died, she threw herself into planning the funeral, and thus still hasn't really processed Candy's death, and that their current trip to the shore is her way of giving herself space to grieve. The episode ends with them returning to the city, and she sees Candy waving goodbye to her, symbolizing that she's finally come to peace with her daughter's death.
- Scrubs:
- "My Screw Up": Dr. Cox and Ben hang out and talk about his leukemia — only for the episode to end at his funeral. It's revealed that Ben was dead the whole time and this was Dr. Cox processing the death.
- "My Long Goodbye": Carla hallucinates Nurse Laverne's spirit after she is gravely injured in a car accident, believing that she will pull through despite other Sacred Heart staff members saying their goodbyes. After CT scans show her brain dead and her family elects to take her off life support, Laverne's spirit tells Carla to let go, which she does, causing her to disappear.
- Sharp Objects: Camille is haunted by these throughout the series, with her sister Marian, who died when they were children and her roommate in in-patient rehab Alice, who committed suicide appearing around Wind Gap and Camille's mother's house. Both apparitions appear to be manifestations of Camille's guilt, two younger sisters, who she could not save.
- Stargate Atlantis: At the end of the episode "Sunday", after Carson Beckett is killed in an explosion, Rodney is at the end of one of Atlantis' piers when Carson strolls up and asks how the funeral went. They have a brief conversation, where Rodney says Carson was the best friend he ever had. Carson offers a few words of encouragement, then Rodney says, "Bye, Carson." Carson then fades away, leaving Rodney standing alone.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In the episode "Hard Time", O'Brien is arrested by aliens. Their method of punishment is trapping the prisoner's mind in a mental simulation of prison and letting them experience years of incarceration in a few real-world minutes. Part of O'Brien's experience is a fellow prisoner named Ee'char. One day O'Brien snaps and kills Ee'char, he feels guilt about this. Upon waking up and returning to the station he suffers from PTSD and hallucinations of Ee-char talking to him. He can't start the road to recovery until he forgives himself for the murder. When he does, Ee-char fades away.
- Yellowjackets:
- After Jackie's death at the end of Season 1, Shauna continues seeing her, talking to her, and even continues putting makeup on her corpse and doing her hair, imagining that it's the real Jackie. Only the burning (and consumption) of Jackie's body brings some awareness to Shauna that Jackie is dead.
- In her modern-day iteration, adult Shauna continues seeing Jackie, which is especially triggered by anything involving Adam (as Shauna slept with Jackie's boyfriend Jeff behind her back, ultimately getting pregnant by him). Shauna sees Jackie mostly to dole out Tough Love and also to blame her for what happened.
- Season 2 reveals that adult Lottie (now going by Charlotte) still sees Laura Lee, who encouraged her to believe in her powers (and whose death, it's implied, she could have avoided if she had believed her visions as Laura Lee encouraged her to do). When Travis hangs himself at Charlotte's compound, she is distracted by seeing Laura Lee walk towards her, and then she screams and turns into a dark monster.
- You (2018):
- Season 1 ends with Joe strangling to death his love interest Beck. At the beginning of Season 2, Joe moves to California to try and start over. He meets a new love interest, Love, almost immediately. He then sees his an imagery apparition of Beck, who walks up to him and removes the scarf from around her neck revealing the bruises underneath. Doubles as Haunting the Guilty.
- Episode 3.06 sees Love — an Angsty Surviving Twin — texting her late brother Forty. When she's drunk, she hallucinations/imagines him appearing to her. They talk, she cries and spills her guts to him, and they do Headbutt of Love. He appears to her while she's drunk and taking a bath, and the symbolism of twins in a bath together harkens back to them bathed together as children — going back to the past.
- Young Sheldon: In the episode "Funeral", Sheldon spends the days between his father's death and his funeral having several Imagine Spots, imagining different things he could've said to his dad as he left in the morning on the day he died, and how his dad would've responded to each one. The first is reciting Spock's farewell from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
- White Collar: In "Au Revoir" in the One Year Later epilogue, after Neal's supposed death taking down the Pink Panthers, Peter sees a flash of Neal's face in the window and discusses constantly seeing him out of the corner of his eye, while Mozzie mentions hearing him in the roar of a subway going by. Mozzie diagnoses Peter as being in the bargaining stage of grief, while he himself is in depression, showing they are both still processing the loss. However, Mozzie may or may not have been lying since it's implied he figured out Neal faked his death.
Music
- Trisha Yearwood: In "On a Bus to St. Cloud," the singer keeps seeing her deceased friend wherever she goes, as she comes to terms with what is heavily implied to be their suicide.
On a bus to St. Cloud, Minnesota
I thought I saw you there
With the snow falling down
Around like a silent prayer
And once on a street in New York City
With the jazz and the sin in the air
And once on a cold LA freeway
Going nowhere
And it's strange but it's true
I was sure it was you
Just a face in the crowd
On a bus to St. Cloud...
Theatre
- Cross Road: When Niccolo hears of the death of his mother, he imagines her singing the song that she always sang to him. In the combination Death Song and Grief Song, it becomes a duet, as he reaches out to her and she ascends the Stairway to Heaven — which, he laments, he will never do because of his Deal with the Devil.
- Next to Normal: Gabe is Diana's psychotic hallucination of what her real son would have been had he not died as a toddler, deluding herself into believing he's still alive. He also symbolizes unresolved trauma, as he impacts those who otherwise can't see him. While Diana initially forgets Gabe's existence after having ECT, he still lingers in the background unseen, saying he'll always have a part in the family's lives. Diana's memories and delusions of Gabe return, forcing her to leave Dan so she can focus on caring for herself. The end of Dan's arc actually involves him acknowledging that he sees Gabe too, symbolizing that grief can only be resolved through first acknowledging it exists.
- RENT: In the song "What You Own", Roger mentions seeing his ex-girlfriend Mimi everywhere, even though he moved across the country to get away, since he is still trying to process his lingering feelings for her. When he finally acknowledges his love for her, he is able to finally get past his songwriter's block and return home. The 2005 film actually shows Roger seeing her in a crowd during this sequence.
Video Games
- Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag: In the final cutscene, Edward's gaze falls upon a table where some of his crew are drinking, but instead of his men, he sees the faces of every pirate friend and rival he has lost throughout the game: Stede Bonnet, Benjamin Hornigold, Charles Vane, James Kidd, Edward Thatch, and even Jack Rackham. Being the last remnant of their doomed pirate republic, Edward is nevertheless able to move on after this, leaving the pirate's life behind and starting a new chapter.
Visual Novels
- Your Turn to Die: Following his death at the end of Chapter 1, Sara repeatedly sees a malevolent hallucination of her best friend Joe, as she is unable to let go of his death. The hallucination goes away by Chapter 2's own end, although Multiple Endings determine whether Sara's further traumatized into completely forgetting about Joe, or gets proper closure with him so she can move on.
Webcomics
- Cirque Royale: After Kingston Klownikov's parents, Charles Sr. and Claudette Sr., died in a bombing of a Peace Gala, he kept seeing visions of them staring at him in the dark
. The "ghosts" didn't interact with him at all or talk, just stared at him; they kept him awake and showed up when he was particularly stressed or having flashbacks. His preacher grandfather told him his parents were spirits watching over him, but they started showing up so frequently Kingston couldn't sleep. His friends spent the night watching over him and realized Kingston had his mother’s ability to manipulate light — so the "ghosts" were actually a projection out of his mind. He stops believing in ghosts after that.
- Shinka: The Last Eevee: In the remake, Nick frequently sees visions of his dead mother, Laurel, causing his friends to doubt his mental health at times. After temporarily losing the Everstone pendant he inherited from her he stops seeing her until he gets it back, and then Luna confirms that the pendant is haunted by her ghost. He later gives it to his father so they can catch up.
Web Videos
- Waffle by Stacy Eduarte at the UCLA Animation Workshop shows a little bunny girl awakening one morning. She decides to make a waffle for breakfast, supervised by her mother. Mistakes were made, but nothing serious. The girl portions herself one quarter of the waffle, and her mother the other three quarters. It's not until the father comes into the room that we realize the mother was never there; the little girl was projecting her deceased mother the whole time. This student film is made in memoriam to Stacy's own departed mother.
- Gridiron Heights: In the 2020 Halloween Special "The Haunting of Tannehill House'', a group of young players, most notably Minkah Fitzpatrick find themselves haunted by the apparition of Ryan Tannehill (among other injured quarterbacks, but Tannehill is the relevant one here) When Tannehill's apparition addresses Minkah by name, he remembers via flashback that they both were on the 2018 Miami Dolphins, victimized by Adam Gase's coaching ineptitude, and that Tannehill advised him to leave the Dolphins. Minkah then celebrates the fact that the Steelers are still somehow undefeated, dispatching of Tannehill's ghost with a thrown football.
Fitzpatrick: He was a victim of Gase, just like me!
Tannehill: So many wasted years! - Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Mr Popo is shown hallucinating Kami three episodes after the latter was absorbed into Piccolo. Goku even notes that he really seems out of it at the time.
Western Animation
- Hazbin Hotel: At the start of season two, Lute goes absolutely insane after Adam is killed. She was already bloodthirsty before, but now she starts declaring that she will commit genocide of Hell. Lute hallucinates Adam, who is more sinister than the real thing. At least the real Adam was tangible enough to take a hit, his villainy was mostly confined to being a violent douchebag, and even he was unnerved at Lute's Black-and-White Insanity. Now, with the way he echoes Lute's simmering bloodlust, it gives him an air of an unfathomable kind of terror.
- The Penguins of Madagascar: Played with in on one episode. The penguins are shocked that Mort — usually as a Sweet Tooth — only ate half of his popsicle. They end up thinking he's dead and hallucinating his ghost.
- Primal (2019): The caveman protagonist sees his dead wife and children (who were devoured by horned Tyrannosaurī Rexēs) in a hallucination during the first episode. This ends up giving the caveman, who had been contemplating whether to jump off a cliff and kill himself or not prior to this point, the will to continue.
