Rachel Whiteread, Ghost. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

If you thought you were safe from harassment by ghouls, gremlins and hobgoblins after Halloween, think again. November 2 is, by tradition, the Day of All Souls — on which (it has been believed) the unhappy souls of the dead return to their former homes. In the past, people were so superstitious about unsolicited and unsavory visits to their homes on All Souls, that they’d keep the kitchen warm and leave food on the table overnight to appease passing spirits and specters.

It’s a spirit we’re visiting today in the eerie form of Ghost (1990) by Rachel Whiteread (born 1963). Whiteread was a YBA: she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and started working in the 1980s. Mostly Whiteread makes casts, not of objects themselves, but of the space in or around them: the underneath of chairs and tables, behind bookshelves, within rooms.

The brilliant thing is that the NGA has what is undoubtedly her breakthrough piece: Ghost is the first of her works to cast an entire living space. It’s a negative plaster cast of a parlor in an abandoned Victorian townhouse on a street in North London. Ghost got Whiteread attention from the public and critics and is still to this day her best-known work.