 On the standard Russellian analysis, we get something like a claim that John wants that there be a unique ghost in his attic and that it stop making so much noise. Let’s set aside the uniqueness claim for the moment and just focus on the existence claim; is it really the case that John wants there to be a ghost in the attic at all? Notice that it won’t do to try and extract the existence claim from the propositional attitude environment, for then we get an actual existence claim, which is definitely not what we want.