Ghost Stories: The Hidden Meaning Behind The Mysterious Hero

The third chapter again addresses the issues of fatherhood. Mike Priddle’s lack of particular care for his wife and focus on work results in his wife dying and the birth of an inhuman child, ending in his own suicide. Again, it’s a father-child relationship that focuses on ignorance, abandonment, and pain, the only experience Goodman has of his own family.

This strained thematic vain doesn’t necessarily explain how Goodman ended up where he has though, which is condemned to his room at Christchurch hospital. Whilst the scenes we see continuously reflect Goodman’s subconscious and the family guilt we know has been seeded from a young age - what if, by some extension, Goodman is the very father he never wanted to be? Has he become a version of his own dad?

The continuous references to getting back to his wife and children, which others assume he must have, would then hold a different weight. Instead of this falling into conversation as a false assumption about a man that has devoted his life to debunking pseudoscience but actually remains alone, it instead indicates that perhaps Goodman had a family that he lost - and much the same as Priddle, took his own life to deal with the problem.

These problematic father figures become duplicitous in nature then, revealing the difficulty Goodman has had in reconciling his own relationship with his dad, as well as his relationship AS a dad. If we take Priddle’s story as the one closest to our protagonist, as he turns out to be the guide through his realisation that the stories he’s researching aren’t all that they seem, then Goodman’s self-consciousness as a father becomes apparent. Inattentive, distracted, and almost uninterested in his child - the thought of his baby is actually monstrous, something he turned the boy into from his lack of familial connection.

It’s likely that Goodman lost his wife. Tony’s wife is dead, Priddle’s wife is dead, and Simon’s mother presumably is killed and replaced by a demonic force. It’s also likely his child was either ill or born with disabilities, as the various representations of children, not all pleasant, allude to. Tony’s child is ill, Priddle’s child is inhuman, and Simon is mentally broken by the end of his ordeal.

But how does this link with his suicide, and Callahan’s death? Considering the guilt is something Goodman will have carried his own life, the theory stands that upon creating his own family and learning the pain of loss from his own experience, the weight got too much to bear. Losing his wife and struggling with a disabled child, who we can assume also passes away (from the lack of family mentioned in Goodman’s story as well as his projected anxieties about fatherhood), will have hit very close to home with the crimes of his past.