Halloween in the Vaults: These Ghosts Are not Normal
By Tim Gihring
October 1, 2025—Artists are generally carefree, of sunny disposition, rarely given to dark or macabre thoughts. I don’t know if you knew that.
But a few of them, at least, have created these fantastic images of ghosts found in Mia’s collection. While some are more stereotypically Halloweeny than you’d expect to find in an art museum, others take an unusual twist. What they get up to in the vaults we’ll never know.
Richard Holzschuh’s drawing inserts a kind of normalcy—it’s daytime, no one’s up to anything spooky—into a typical graveyard scene.
This classic townspeople chase scene by Pierre-Félix Wiesener, circa 1850, was an illustration for Gottfried Burger’s ballad “Lenore.”
This Japanese color woodblock print from the mid-19th century is called “Two Ghosts from the Famous Ghosts Series”—and there are a lot of famous ghosts in Japan.
“The Lantern Ghost, Iwa,” a color woodblock print from 1831 or ’32. Katsushika Hokusai (Japan, Asia), c. 1831–1832
Another Richard Holzschuh drawing, called “Disconsolate Ghost (no one in the village was scared of him).” Poor guy.
Get Into the Spirit at Mia
Join us on the eve of Halloween (costumes encouraged, not required) for a theatrical evening you’ll remember for the next 100 years.
Tickets are now available for The Object LIVE on October 30, 7-8 p.m. Hosted by Tim Gihring, this episode features special guest Chan Poling (The Suburbs, The New Standards), fun quizzes and prizes, and of course storytelling.
The evening is all about the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, the flapper-ific art and music of the Jazz Age, and Saint Paul’s own F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s “Great Gatsby’s Ghost!”