AThis line occurs a number of times in the novel, and is left maddeningly vague. It seems to share meaning with another quote from the book, wherein a sleepwalking Alma says to Don what he initially takes to be "I saw a ghost" but eventually concludes was actually 'You are a ghost," which he considers to be 'the unhappy perception at the heart of every ghost story.' (This scene also occurs within the film, but without that line of dialogue, when Don and Alma are vacationing at a beach house.) The implication could be that humans are transient beings doomed to eventually share the fate of the ghost, or that ghosts and those they haunt are reflections of one another. Beyond that, the author imparts no specific meaning to either statement.In Danse Macabre, horror writer Stephen King (who collaborated with Ghost Story author Peter Straub on The Talisman) suggested, "What is the ghost, after all, that it should frighten us so, but our own face?"
AAs with the above question, this is a matter of a plot thread being drastically shortened from the book version, but not removed entirely. The film describes the brothers as escapees from an insane asylum who end up squatting in Eva Galli's old house, having been given "permission from the owner." The elder brother Gregory later claims that Eva, whom he describes as "our benefactor," has promised to make them immortal. In contrast, the book version of Gregory had accepted that gift of immortality decades earlier, and his younger brother, to whom a young Sears James was a schoolteacher, soon followed, despite Sears' attempts to save him. Gregory was a major nemesis in the novel, as opposed to the film, where he appears in a scant three scenes and has no supernatural powers.Curiously, the film never deals with the fate of Fenny, who is never seen again after killing Sears. In the first draft of the script, dated December 3, 1980, the film ended with a scene of the young boy, now alone after Gregory's death, prowling around the headstones of Milburn's cemetery, his whimpering amongst the headstones evoking the story that Sears tells at the beginning of the film.