Why Do Ghosts Need Weapons?

My wife left for a two week tour of Singapore and the Bigman is in California for a couple of weeks so I have two weeks in an empty house with nothing to do but work on the house and watch old horror movies.

A few thoughts on the genre, do weapons make ghosts any scarier or add anything to movies? I suppose a ghost with a shotgun or a some sort of ranged attack would make it slightly more dangerous, but three of the movies I recently watched included ghosts with shovels, axes, or pickaxes. Seriously, a ghost a with a pick axe.

I suppose the special effects guys need something to make the story a little more gory, but there has to be a less lazy way to write a story.

If I sitting at the kitchen table and ghost comes out of my fridge, I'm not going to sit there and say, "Honey, don't worry, it's unarmed." Hand held weapon or not, I'm throwing the spice rack and silverware at the ghost, spraying it with the fire extinguisher on my way out the nearest exit.

One more thing before I get into specific movies, enough with people fist fighting ghosts. They can walk through walls, telekinetically throw stuff and seal rooms, but they can't take a slow right hook from a random accountant?