Or perhaps it's simply about … well, a literal ghost.
Of course, it's not his literal ghost haunting Dulwich but Van Dyck's charismatic and compelling final self portrait, done in about 1640 and bought by the National Portrait Gallery in 2014.
Playlist: I've put together a Spotify playlist teeming with ghosts (below): no doubt there are many others, so please add any favourites in the comments below, whether there's a literal ghost in it, or whether it's simply a piece of music that has haunted you.
When I looked at the idea of Denis as a ghost I realized that he is not a literal ghost; to me, he is a manifestation of her memory of her traveling partner, one she never let go of.
A metaphor for romance becomes a literal ghost story, where the apparitions are the, "aspects of the woman's character that are gradually stripped away due to the destructive nature of their relationship".
And so the Doctor, in his inimitable fashion, becomes the time traveling literal Ghost of Christmas es) Past to unlock the psyche Kazran Scrooge, er, Sardick, who is very well played by Michael Gambon, best known to US and international audiences as Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films.
In "Personal Shopper," a thriller whose heroine is forever at the mercy of unseen tormenters communicating with her remotely (her boss not least among them), Assayas has stumbled on perhaps the most literal definition of ghosts in the machine.
Both projects seem an effort to unearth and re-examine some of the legacy of his birth, but in this case it is a literal exhumation: Anil's Ghost is told primarily through the eyes of a forensic pathologist.
But he also had a peculiar metaphysical side, as if investing his most charismatic characters with a sort of divine power, seen in the telekinetic ending of "A Letter to Three Wives"; the haunting story of Shunderson, returned from the dead, in "People Will Talk"; and the literal haunting of "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir".
Literally his literal genitals.
