We Are All Ghosts

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders.

Soviet War Memorial, Straße des 17 Juni, Tiergarten, Berlin, Germany

It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind.

Brandenburg Gate, Pariser Platz, Berlin, Germany

They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them.

Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Cora-Berliner-Straße, Berlin, Germany

Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world.

Soviet War Memorial, Straße des 17 Juni, Tiergarten, Berlin, Germany

They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.

From Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881)

A Ghost of Low Replies

On the way to Kew,
By the river old and gray,

Bushy Park, Hampton Hill, Richmond-upon-Thames, TW12

Where in the Long Ago
We laughed and loitered so,

Ferry Lane, Kew, Richmond-upon-Thames, TW9

I met a ghost to-day,
A ghost that told of you -

Osterley Park, Isleworth, Hounslow, TW7

A ghost of low replies
And sweet, inscrutable eyes

Richmond Park, Richmond-upon-Thames, TW10

Coming up from Richmond
As you used to do.

From William Ernest Henley’s On the Way to Kew

Oslo Opera House

The Opera ghost really existed.

Snøhetta's Oslo Opera House, Kirsten Flagstads pl. 1, N-0150, Oslo

He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the managers, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet, their mothers, the box-keepers, the cloak-room attendants or the concierge.

Snøhetta's Oslo Opera House, Kirsten Flagstads pl. 1, N-0150, Oslo

Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say, of a spectral shade.

Snøhetta's Oslo Opera House, Kirsten Flagstads pl. 1, N-0150, Oslo

From Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1909)