Credit: Dangerous Minds / Nadar / Erik Drost

One of my favourite theatrical superstitions is that theatres are crawling with the ghosts of the actors who made those playhouses famous.

That if you take the wrong (or, to me, very right) turn in the backstage area of any given theatre, you’ll find yourself face to face with one of the great stars of the late Victorian era. Still getting into character and waiting for their cue to take to the stage and do the job they dedicated their life, and afterlife as it turns out, to. This just doesn’t happen in other jobs. Imagine being a chef and finding Anthony Bourdain standing next to you on your next desperate smoke break. Or an architecture firm that occasionally breaks out the Ouija board to get Frank Lloyd Wright’s take on their next project.

It doesn’t even find its way into the work of other artists. The common response to haunted theatres is that actors are a particularly superstitious bunch due to the artistic nature of their job. However, no writer or sculptor or musician ever talks about the constant haunting that blights their days at the studio or office. I won’t deny that sensitive artistic types are more likely to believe in the existence of hauntings and spirits, but then, these spirits don’t seem to visit any other kinds of artists.

That is, until eleven years ago, it seems. In October 2015, the Cleveland Museum of Art began installing their next major exhibition, Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse. On the day that the exhibition was finished being installed, a staff member snapped a photo of the museum’s lower lobby, situated just outside the exhibition hall where the paintings were being exhibited. What that staff member didn’t notice until studying the photos later was a man depicted in it.

A man with a quite astonishing resemblance to Claude Monet.

Was this really the ghost of Claude Monet?

The photo is pretty uncanny. Standing at a railing, peering into the exhibition hall where a number of his most famous paintings were displayed, and standing directly above a photo of Claude Monet, is an older man in a dark suit, distinguishable by his white hat and long white beard. Exactly the same kind of beard worn by Monet later in life. Now, this obviously could simply be a museum punter. It’s not out of the question that a man with a long white beard could frequent an art museum. It’s actually more likely than you’d think.

However, the plot thickens when talking to Kelley Notaro, the museum’s communications associate. In an interview with Today, she confirmed that the photo had not been retouched or Photoshopped, and that several other people had spotted the man in question wandering the museum and the exhibition that day. The smoking gun here, that Notaro talks about in the interview, is that the museum had no record of a man fitting that description entering the museum that day, much less having access to the exhibition, which wasn’t open to the public yet.

So who knows? They say that spirits haunt the places and things that meant the most to them. It’s the reason why actors are often found in the theatres that gave them their livelihood. It stands to reason that painters would view their works as the most important things in their lives, so maybe some paintings also have the souls of those who created them attached to them. So, next time you’re alone at a gallery, take a second look around.

You might not be.