If I Were a Ghost by Rich Anthony, a Halloween Song for Children and Adults, Leads the Joliet Songwriter’s Spotify Page
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If I Were a Ghost by Rich Anthony, a Halloween Song for Children and Adults, Leads the Joliet Songwriter's Spotify Page
Six Weeks of Plays, Reviews and TikTok Clips Show Who the Song Reaches
If I Were a Ghost sits first on the Spotify page of Rich Anthony six weeks after release. It is a 3:58 acoustic folk-pop single about spending one day as a friendly ghost. It got there with 10,176 plays, while the three songs ranked below it each have more. The order follows recent listening, not lifetime totals.
Rich Anthony is in the playlist below, and the songwriter’s coverage history is collected on Rich Anthony’s artist profile. If I Were a Ghost reached this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Listen first, then read on.
The song was written for a wide audience on purpose. Rich Anthony, a Joliet, Illinois singer-songwriter, wanted children and adults alike to find a favourite line of their own. The lines run from silly to serious. In one, the ghost would “hang with bats, nap in a bell”. In another, it wonders: “Would I still feel the sunset’s glow?”
That range matters for a Halloween record. The ghost here frightens nobody. It floats out of a window, passes through walls and travels from Tokyo to Zanzibar without a passport. It plays with a ghost dog, and no bills or chores wait at home. So the song fits a family playlist in October. It also suits the adult listener who wants a lighter seasonal track beside the usual horror themes.
The Joliet Songwriter Behind the Ghost Song Has Taught High School and Records With a Small Team
The songwriter knows a young audience, too. Richard Anthony Goberville, credited as the composer, releases music as Rich Anthony, and has taught at Joliet Central High School. In August, a TikTok clip looked back on one class there as a favourite teaching moment.
The recording is simple by design, homespun folk-pop with a light step. An upbeat acoustic strum sets the pace, a whistled line drifts in and out, and the vocal sits level with the guitar so the story leads. Colin Schlegel recorded the live instruments, Brandon Harvey recorded the vocal, and Dan Vasquez mixed and mastered the track.
If I Were a Ghost Passed Older Rich Anthony Songs on Spotify Within Its First Six Weeks
The Spotify figures read cleanly. If I Were a Ghost came out on 18 September and averages roughly 250 plays a day. How Do I Say Goodbye, released in April, has 17,505 plays, about 90 a day over a longer run. If I Had Your Love holds the catalogue’s biggest tally, 80,399 plays, built since May 2023.
The artist page counts 6,629 monthly listeners. The catalogue behind the new single runs back to 2014, with a fresh single every few months since 2022.
Reviews arrived quickly as well. Sinusoidal Music filed the single under folk rock and singled out the whistling. Good Music Radar dwelt on the serious questions under the jokes, such as whether a ghost would still remember a life.
TikTok carried the steadiest push. Rich Anthony posted about the ghost song on release day, then kept going: eight clips named it by 24 October. Most drew a few hundred views each. One, posted on 26 September, passed 12,500.
Rich Anthony Built a TikTok Community on Saturday Player Piano Streams Before the Ghost Song Arrived
The larger audience was in place before this release. Rich Anthony’s TikTok account counts 49.4K followers and 2.1 million likes. A player piano sits at the centre of it.
Most Saturdays, at around 7pm Central, the account goes live with piano rolls, and viewers can request one. Some of the rolls are a hundred years old. A recent clip played Gee But I Hate To Go Home Alone, a song from 1922.
The ghost single borrowed that habit of inviting the audience in. The clips put questions to viewers: who would you visit first, and what would you do as a ghost? Rich Anthony’s own answer was to sneak into top secret government meetings. On release day, a dog got a ghost costume, which proved harder to fit than expected.
On Facebook, where the music page counts about 1,000 followers, the pitch was simpler: a song for your Halloween playlist.
Ghostbusters and Thriller Show How Halloween Songs Can Return to the Charts Years Later
That playlist is where seasonal songs earn long lives. Ray Parker Jr. took Ghostbusters to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks in 1984. The song came back into the UK Top 75 in 2008 and again in 2021. Michael Jackson‘s Thriller peaked at number four in 1984, then re-entered the Hot 100 at number 42 in October 2013 on Halloween demand.
If I Were a Ghost is built for that same seasonal return, and its first real test comes next October.
From the BestMusic.News Curator Team: “What interests us is the gap between the two audiences. The TikTok following is several times the size of the Spotify one. A friendly Halloween song is a sensible bridge between a livestream crowd and a seasonal playlist.”
Start with If I Were a Ghost, then play How Do I Say Goodbye, the artist pick from the same 2026 run.
Follow Rich Anthony on Spotify, TikTok, Facebook, the YouTube channel, Apple Music, Deezer and SoundCloud, and stream the single as a release on Apple Music.
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