Ghost Stories in the Galleries: A Night of Creative Writing and Sketching
LSU Museum of Art
Baton Rouge
Oct. 28, 2025
An event involving ghost stories in the art gallery at night seemed apt for Halloween, but when I pulled up to the LSU Museum of Art, I wasn’t sure what to expect. How spooky was this actually going to be?
The event, the first creative writing programming for the gallery, is part of an ongoing effort to reach out the community. Participants left with goodie bags, which included an invitation to come back to the gallery for free. Rather than an event centered around telling ghost stories, organizers prompted participants to write or sketch their own ghost stories in different rooms within the gallery, drawing from the art as inspiration.
After some introductory thoughts, we were led to the contemporary art room where we were met with a table of ghost character profiles, notebooks, clipboards, and stools. The premise of all the stories was that a ghost got stuck in a painting. We picked our characters and had 15 minutes to answer the questions of how and why the ghost got stuck in the painting, and why they wanted to get out. At each subsequent room, mini-prompts like spells and fortunes/misfortunes drawn randomly from buckets helped people further develop their stories.
I hadn’t written a short story since 2019. I want to write more fiction, but I know I’m not exceptionally good at it, so I don’t. It’s funny how something that was so integral to my formative English education has become strange to me now. Before I learned to write journalistic articles or criticism, I was writing short stories in class or doing writing exercises like this ghost story prompt, but after school is finished, no one is asking you to write something random and sitting to do so felt slightly uncomfortable – in a good way.
It’s like riding a bike for the first time in years. One never forgets how to be creative; you just feel a little wobbly doing so. I wasn’t the only one. For some people at the gallery event, it was the first time they’d written something with paper and pencil in a long time. For others, the activity illuminated their own insecurities about writing.
“I’m such a bad writer,” one participant said to no one in particular in the ceramics room.
But the stories were just for us, and the point wasn’t to create a masterpiece. At various points, we were given the option to talk about our stories with others, but there was no obligation to read any part of what you’d written.
“Writing can be very vulnerable and scary to share,” said Gianna Vanesko, a museum educator assistant/student at LSU who spearheaded organizing and hosting the event. She hopes that events like this can help give people a place to open up and tap into their creativity.
In that respect, the event succeeded. By preparing a space and materials for people, organizers like Vanesko set people up for success. There’s no “wrong” way to have shown up for the event, no wrong story, just two hours under museum light looking at art and writing or sketching in 15 minute increments.
One person wrote about a mouse trapped in a painting of all bunnies who falls in love with blueberries. Another embodied the ghost of a tree both through her costume and her story and wrote 15 pages about being a cypress that was over 1,000 years old.
Interdisciplinary events like this can help people feel a connection to the art they may have never even seen otherwise and cast the space in a new light. I’ve been to this museum several times before but never while spooky music was playing in the background. Never while writing fiction. The scariest thing about the event may be the writing itself, but it’s a fear worth braving.
