Instead of making myself useful the other evening, I watched two episodes of "America's Most Haunted Places" during which I discovered that ghosts haunt not only decrepit castles and ruined monasteries in Europe but also can be found by the boatload at inns and guest houses around the USA.

Who knew?

And since I've already admitted to sitting in front of the TV, open-mouthed and glassy-eyed as a trout, I might as well admit that I've also been reading some ghost stories written by women. It makes it a little bit easier to confess this in print because I'm reviewing these stories -- by Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, Fay Weldon and Margaret Atwood -- for a course I hope to teach next year.

I noticed that most ghost stories written by women have, as their leads, female ghosts; I also noticed that it seems to be female ghosts haunting those B&Bs; and old hotels. Why is there such a difference between how women and men are haunted by a sense of the past, not to mention the differences between how boy ghosts and girl ghosts actually do the haunting?

Unlike the ghost of Jacob Marley, "dead as a doornail," who appears to Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol," the ghosts of women tend not to walk the earth for penance. They don't come around, for example "wearing the chains they forged in life," as is the case with Scrooge's former partner. Instead, female spirits seem to sense that something has escaped them during their lifetimes. They come back, not to frighten those they left behind, but to console them.

Girl ghosts can be found in kitchens, laundry rooms, flee markets and hospitals (where they appear as pretty young nurses still trying to care for their long-lost patients, or sad specters of those long-lost patients who rang for a nurse, but whose bell was never heard -- I've heard a lot of ghost stories from people who work in hospitals).

Girl ghosts return to those places they inhabited in life, not so much the creatures of midnight walks or foggy moors, but as less vibrant versions of the same women who occupy those places today. It's as if the wall between the living and dead has thinned and become permeable. It seems boy ghosts come back to avenge or revenge what happened to them while alive; girl ghosts return because they feel that having been denied the chance to fully participate in life, they are determined to get their money's worth after they die.

Weldon's novel "Remember Me" makes this point perfectly. The main character Madeline was ineffectual and ignored even by those she loved best during her natural life, but once dead becomes determined to make her history known to other women and men: "Alive, it seems, Madeline was nothing to the heavenly female host; dead ... she proves a point." Madeline refuses, after death to "lie still, forget, say [her] goodbyes, and go." With a combination of spite and compassion mixed, Madeline becomes a far more powerful spirit than she ever was as a woman.

For some girl ghosts, their lifelong obsession with the niceties of their appearance becomes a much more profound anxiety, after they're dead, concerning whether they will be able to appear at all. They no longer worry about whether they look good, but whether anybody will be able to see them.

Occasionally, a shade will hang around simply to annoy. A whiner in life will keep the same MO after she shuffles off this mortal coil. She will move things around on your shelves and prevent you from finding your stamps, your keys, or your favorite pen. She has her own way of organizing the house and will become petulant if you get in her way.

But what I've learned from the clips on television and the stories from these books is that girl ghosts seem to be lonely. Unable to forge relationships intimate enough, real enough, to satisfy their need for companionship while alive, they hang around looking for conversation.

The reason for their return is quite simply a wish for company and a profound longing for friendship. Frankly, I always suspected that Casper the Friendly Ghost was actually female. Hoping to remain (or more tragically, to become) friends, lovers, wives, helpmates, teachers, mothers, and the historians of their own lives, their ultimate concern is not the nature of death, but the liveliness of their connection to others.

Guess girls just want to have fun -- now and always.

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