Ghost Story (2007) by Willie Doherty included in Ghosts: Visualizing the Supernatural curated by Eva Reifert at Kunstmuseum Basel. Ghost Story is filmed using a roaming camera that dollies slowly down country roads and across expanses of concrete; the narrative is broken but alludes to a massacre based on Doherty’s fragmentary memories of witnessing Bloody Sunday as a 12-year-old bystander.

Ghosts have also always haunted art. As entities of the in-between, ghosts are mediators between worlds, between above and below, life and death, horror and humor, good and evil, visible and invisible. Any attempt to depict, record, or communicate with them thus offers a conceptual challenge and an emotional thrill.

This fall and winter, the Kunstmuseum Basel dedicates an extensive exhibition to these unfathomable entities. With over 160 works and objects created during the past 250 years, Ghosts. Visualizing the Supernatural explores the rich visual culture associated with ghosts that took shape in the Western hemisphere in the nineteenth century—when science, spiritualism, and popular media began to intersect in new ways, inspiring art and artists ever since.

Today, the nineteenth century is mostly regarded as a golden age of rationality, science, and technology but it was also a high season for the belief in ghosts and apparitions. In the second half of the century, ghosts became a tool for probing the emerging contours of the psyche and helped open new paths into people’s inner lives. The Romantic era produced an appetite for spectacles and marvels, and a belief in spirits was flanked by innovations in technology, including in the technologies of illusion (such as the theatrical technique, Pepper’s Ghost).

Hundreds of millions of people all over the world believe in ghosts. Their collective belief has deep historical roots. Although the enormous progress of science and technology would seem to leave no room for ghosts, most people even today retain an attitude of skeptical credence in the supernatural.

The fact that such manifestations interact continually with our collective imagination—our cultural unconscious, even—is what makes the ghost such a powerful and enduring figure and the exhibition a surprising, fun, and thought-provoking journey.