There’s something almost liturgical about a Ghost concert. The lights go down, the phones go into Yondr pouches, and very quickly, twenty thousandish people stop being strangers and start being a congregation. Saturday night at the Honda Center, that congregation was enormous, multigenerational, and utterly committed. Where else can you see aging boomers in full Papa cosplay standing shoulder to shoulder with pre-teens who probably learned the words to “Cirice” on TikTok. Ghost has always attracted an unusually wide flock, and on the Skeletour that flock has never looked larger or more devoted.
The evening began in shadow. A dark, shredded curtain hung over the stage while Papa Emeritus V Perpetua appeared only as a voice and a silhouette on the side screens, delivering the opening notes of “Peacefield” like a sermon delivered from behind a veil. When the curtain finally dropped, it gave way to a blinding wall of white backlight, a theatrical birth that set the tone for everything that followed.
Frontman Papa V and the Nameless Ghouls moved through the new album *Skeletá* with confidence early on, pairing “Peacefield” with “Lachryma” before the setlist began pulling in the deeper catalog. The staging evolved accordingly, what started with a relatively simple Grucifex shaped lighting rig slowly grew into something genuinely stunning, with towering stained-glass church imagery, looming demonic figures, and waves of thick fog that made the backing vocalists appear to float suspended over an abyss…