Ghost stories are a Christmas tradition, although it is not entirely clear why. The association feels ancient, following the winter solstice, the longest nights and the gathering of friends and family in the darkness. Charles Dickens is certainly responsible for codifying the tradition: A Christmas Carol, the story of a miser visited by three ghosts, was first published a few days before Christmas 1843 and was an immense success. But he was inking over existing pencil lines. ‘The Apparition of Mrs Veal’, regarded as the first modern ghost story and probably written by Daniel Defoe, was first published just before Christmas 1706. In A Natural History of Ghosts (2012), Roger Clarke intriguingly connects the tradition to the (now less current) association between ghost stories and servants. Servants, he observes, were traditionally hired at Martinmas, in early November. By Christmas they would be spending the dark nights away from home in an unfamiliar grand house, and might naturally be prey for spooky tales told by older members of the staff.
Dickens’s ghosts in A Christmas Carol are ultimately helpful, both to Ebenezer Scrooge and wider society, causing the miser to mend his ways. And the ancient ghost story that he drew on, according to Clarke, also concerns a helpful ghost, albeit one motivated by self-help. In his letters Pliny relates the tale of a scholar investigating a haunted house; the shuffling chain-bound ghost directs the visitor to a spot in the courtyard where, upon excavation, a manacled skeleton is found. Once this is reburied with proper respects, the haunting ends.
Some of these more helpful spectres currently making an appearance at the Leighton House Museum in Kensington, west London. This unique house, designed by the architect George Aitchison for the artist Frederic Leighton, was begun in 1866 and became a 30-year collaboration between the two men, until Leighton’s death in 1896. In the 1920s the house came into the possession of the local authority and was opened to the public; the museum, fresh from a major refurbishment and extension which completed in 2022, is marking the centenary of its foundation with a series of events, including ‘Ghost Objects: Summoning Leighton’s Lost Collection’, which closes on 1 March 2026.
For ‘Ghost Objects’, the artist Annemarieke Kloosterhof has recreated objects from Leighton’s home in paper. The largest and most striking of these paper reconstructions greets you on arrival at the museum: a towering white palm in the ornate stairwell of the house, rooted in a huge brass jardiniere imported from Benares (now Varanasi) in India. Three more are distributed around the house: a cabinet, a ‘klismos’ chair and its footstool, and a 15th-century Italian tabernacle. The ghostly whiteness of these objects never lets the viewer forget that they are paper; but otherwise it would be easy to lose sight of that. The slender looming palm fronds and the swooning curved legs of the seat defy paper’s tendency to fold and buckle and the finish and detail of the cabinet and shrine make the head swim. The cabinet has working paper doors on paper hinges (although many visitors will have to take that on trust as the work is too fragile to be handled by everyone). The tabernacle, which depicts the Virgin and Child in a rich decorative frame, comprises 8,000 objects, many of them cut from pieces of paper left over from the other works: ‘The ghosts of my ghosts,’ as Kloosterhof puts it.
Spectral paleness aside, what’s ghostly about the objects is their lost nature. Each one represents a negative: an object that isn’t there. After Leighton’s death, the contents of his house were largely sold. The recent history of the museum has been the slow recollection of those dispersed treasures. The four Ghost Objects are the most keenly felt absences in the collection, a sort of wish list of items that are known to have been in the house, and which probably still exist, but cannot be located.
As they are being summoned from photographs and sale records, the objects have required remarkable detective work by Kloosterhof, project researcher Carlotta Gonzi and the museum. Gonzi was, for the first time, able to identify the tabernacle as the work of Domenico Di Paris, and was even able to find a record of its sale to Leighton in the ledgers of a Florentine art dealer. The ‘klismos’ chair – an ancient Greek design with distinctive galloping legs – was only pictured with a leopard skin draped on it and, in the absence of other examples, some informed guesswork had to take place. The elegant stretcher bracing the legs of the cabinet was visible only as a shadow in a photograph. The search for the jardiniere resulted in a tantalising pursuit through the salerooms of England, only for it to slip out of sight.
Glimpses, shadows, antiquarian pursuits – ghostly stuff indeed. And Kloosterhof’s sculptures are beautiful enough to still the breath. But ‘Ghost Objects’ also has a practical, worldly intention: it isn’t about melancholy evocation of what’s lost, but an effort to find. The museum’s hope is that the exhibition will attract the attention of people who might be able to help track down these missing pieces of the collection so they can be reinstated, not unlike the chained remains in Pliny’s tale. Which makes it a story worth repeating – and a vital test case for the value of new art in shedding light on the old.
‘Ghost Objects: Summoning Leighton’s Lost Collection’ is at Leighton House, London, until 1 March 2026.
