Today is Halloween, the day when skeletons and spooks and statisticians ((While The Aperiodical is an equal opportunity employer, the author maintains a legitimate fear of “approximate counting”)) roam the earth to wreak their awful revenge on the innocent.

Maths has a habit of borrowing peculiar words from the vernacular, so I thought I’d go on a witch-hunt in the arXiv and see what bone-chilling titles I could find. Here’s what fell into my genuine recreation Ghostbusters Ghost Trap:

Limiting Risk by Turning Manifest Phantoms into Evil Zombies

On the effect of ghost force in the quasicontinuum method: dynamic problems in one dimension

Taming the Ghost in Pais-Uhlenbeck Oscillator

Recovering Missing Slices of the Discrete Fourier Transform using Ghosts

An algebraic approach to laying a ghost to rest

Conclusion: mathematicians ain’t afraid of no ghosts.

Have you got any blood-curdling paper titles to share around the campfire?