Someone to watch over me.

When Dickens' ghost of Chrismas future makes a haunted house call, it's really a tiding of comfort and joy. So says Patrick McCormick, who points out that great lessons--and great love--have an uncanny power to reach beyond the grave.

ONE OF LIFE'S MORE AMUSING LITTLE IRONIES MUST certainly be that the most popular ghost story of all time is not a Halloween tale but A Christmas Carol. Even for Catholics old enough to remember when the third person of the Trinity was known as the "Holy Ghost," it sometimes feels a bit odd to be reading about Scrooge's three "spirits" and Matthew's three Magi on the same night. Shades of the gospel according to Stephen King.

But maybe the connection isn't so strange. After all, Dickens' tale of a wealthy miser warned off by three shadowy specters reads like the sequel of a "ghost story" Jesus tells in Luke 16:19-31. In the parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus, two men who had been separated in life--by the indifference of the first and the desperate poverty of the second--die and are dispatched to their very different "rewards." From his torment in Hades the ghost of the rich man cries out to Abraham, begging that someone be sent back from the dead to warn his wealthy brothers about the fate awaiting greedy souls. Abraham responds that even a visit from beyond the grave will not soften the hearts of those misers who have ignored Moses and the prophets.

But Dickens, it would seem, is not so sure. And so in A Christmas Carol three phantoms (four, if you count Marley's ghost) are dispatched to Ebenezer's bedside, offering him one last chance for repentance and redemption, one last opportunity to celebrate a real Christmas.

Contemporary ghost stories have lost a bit of the religious flavor and social vision of Luke and Dickens. Except for a couple of slumming angels (like Denzel Washington in The Preacher's Wife and Nicholas Cage in City of Angels), the specters haunting our modern cinema don't seem to be sent from God and aren't usually concerned about getting their hosts to share their wealth with the poor. In fact, in last year's highly forgettable Meet Joe Black, Anthony Hopkins played a charming multibillionaire whose equally suave escort from the other side never once suggests that it might be harder for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Instead, the debonair phantom actually helps Hopkins prevent a very unfriendly corporate takeover while celebrating a birthday bash that would have embarrassed Malcolm Forbes, Sr. Oh, the times, it would seem, are a changin'.

Still, aside from the grisly and gruesome tales of Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Wes Craven, most modern ghost stories do seem to focus on the need for redemption, or at least on the need to work out the unfinished (or mangled) business of our lives. Sometimes it's the ghosts who need one last growth spurt. Sometimes it's their hosts. Often it's both.

Field of Dreams, which would have to be one of the most popular ghost stories of recent memory, offers a second chance at redemption to both the dead and the living. In this 1989 sports fantasy, Kevin Costner is an Iowa farmer whose former cornfield has become a piece of heaven for the lost souls of baseball, while the film's final scene (which has generated more water than Niagara Falls) provides an opportunity for Costner's character to be reconciled with his long-lost dad.

A year later, Ghost, which turned out to be that summer's surprise blockbuster, cast Patrick Swayze as a recently departed stockbroker who can't move "into the light" until he has resolved the mystery of his own murder and found the courage to tell Demi Moore's character that he loves her. They are joined by Whoopi Goldberg as the unlikely, unwilling, and unbelieving medium who ultimately helps Swayze finish his homework.

The same sorts of things are going on in the equally sentimental 1993 film Heart and Souls, where Alfre Woodard and Charles Grodin are two of a phantom foursome who need help accomplishing one last task before catching the bus to heaven. Here Robert Downey, Jr. is the earthbound friend whose body allows them to complete their ghostly assignments and whose heart learns an important lesson about love and taking risks.

Love lessons are also at the heart of two other ghost movies. In the 1991 British romantic comedy Truly Madly Deeply, it's not the ghost who's stuck. Juliet Stevenson is a devastated widow who can't manage to get on with her life, and Alan Rickman plays the charming (but not so easy to live with) ghost husband who comes back to keep her company. The solution appears idyllic at first, but love, it would seem, can't stay in the past, and Stevenson's character eventually has to ask Rickman's to move on.

The lesson is a bit different in this year's Curtain Call, a comedy in which commitment-shy James Spader discovers he has rented a brownstone haunted by a couple of battling vaudevillians (Michael Caine and Maggie Smith) whose marriage has been on the rocks since the Hindenburg went down. Still, both Spader and his polter-guests ultimately learn a thing or two about real love, enabling him to cross over into the land of matrimonial bliss and them to enter that great twinkling ballroom in the sky.

In the two dark thriller ghost stories eating up the box office this fall, the ghosts are a bit scarier--and not nearly as romantic as Swayze or Rickman. But they still need help from their mortal friends. The Sixth Sense has Bruce Willis as a child psychiatrist looking for some redemption in his work and marriage and Haley Joel Osment as a frightened little boy being asked to help lost spirits straighten out their affairs. Here, again, the living and the dead are of use to each other.

Meanwhile, in Stirs of Echoes Kevin Bacon plays a blue-collar dad who's suddenly getting some not-so-polite requests from beyond the grave and who has to help a young girl identify and catch her killers. What he discovers along the way is that his little boy has been hearing and helping the dead for a while. "They're baaack!"

Even though we were warned off Ouija boards and seances as kids, these ghost stories seem very "Catholic" to me. Watching these movies I can't help but think that their plots have more in common with Dante's The Divine Comedy and C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce than Shelley's Frankenstein or Stoker's Dracula. For in the majority of these tales, the souls of basically decent folks have gone on to (or gotten stuck in) an intermediary place between earth and heaven, and they often enough need the help of us mere mortals to achieve some reconciliation or redemption before they can pass into the light or through the pearly gates. In some of the stories these frustrated souls are even able to teach the living a lesson or two about love or forgiveness, or help us avoid their mistakes.

Any way you slice it, that sounds a lot like the Catholic doctrines of purgatory and the Mystical Body of Christ. For centuries Catholics have believed that the "communion of saints" includes the living and the dead: those of us on earth, the saints in heaven, and the suffering souls in purgatory. We've believed that prayers offered for and from the dead are heard by God. As a child in Catholic school I remember spending time on All Souls' Day (November 2) praying for the folks in purgatory (and hoping some day some little tyke would be praying for me). Certainly nearly every Catholic has at one point asked for help from a saint or relative who has already gone over to the other side.

We usually think of ghost stories as scary, but there is something deeply consoling in these narratives about souls in transit. Like the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, these tales remind us that our loved ones are not gone, that our prayers and love for them are not futile, and that lots of somebodies over there are watching over us. How frightening can that be?

By PATRICK MCCORMICK, an associate professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.