You can’t miss The Ghost’s latest street artwork.

A prominent blue wall in Dawlish Road, just across from Teignmouth station, is adorned with dozens of his distinctive pixelated video game characters and motifs. He calls it Project Mario, after the Super Mario games and movies.

There are plenty of other Ghost manifestations around the town: precise representations of cartoon and video game characters, made from plywood and painted pixel-style in hundreds of tiny squares. Once you start noticing them, you spot them all over the place - on walls, above shopfronts, perched above street signs.

People, especially children, love the Ghost’s work, and he’s got quite a following on Facebook. Every time a new piece appears, he gets several requests to decorate the walls of shops, homes and businesses. But he has to turn most of them down – he doesn’t want his fun hobby to become another form of work.

It also helps him retain his anonymity.

Ghost doesn’t want to reveal his identity, or his real name. But that’s not an attempt to build up a Banksy-style mystique around his work; it’s more like a form of modesty.

“Kids think it’s some cool dude doing it, and I don’t want to see the disappointment in their faces when they see that it’s just me,” he laughed. “People who know me, they all know it’s me - but most people on Facebook don’t have a clue.

“When people describe me as an artist I feel like such an imposter – I’m not an artist in any way. Basically it’s just painting tiny squares.”

The Ghost art phenomenon first materialised ‘out of boredom’ during the Covid lockdown, when he was stuck at home with no internet and started playing around with some DIY and craft materials.

Without realising it, he was producing similar work to a Parisian street artist known as Invader, who creates pixelated mosaics based on 1980s video game graphics.

“I’d never heard of him, but he makes these with tiles and tags them with a little Space Invader, and does them in cities around the world.

“And I thought I could do that in Teignmouth – just concentrate on one small town, and I’d be the Pac Man ghost.

“So he’s a millionaire and famous, and I’m unknown and skint.

“I’d done three or four and you know, it’ s a small town, I’d hear people talking about it, saying ‘where have these come from?’ and it was becoming more and more popular, I was seeing it on the Teignmouth Facebook pages.”

To keep his identity a secret, Ghost has to install his work at night,– which can pose problems when it involves climbing up the walls of buildings. The Project Mario wall involved scaffolding, and he was up there one night until 3am attaching the 71 separate pieces to the wall, making up the layout as he went along.

“I generally put high-vis on so I look less like a burglar,” he said.

“You know, I come along in the middle of the night with my little collapsible ladder – what do I look like? So I’m trying to hide in plain sight.”

Is he ever tempted to create a piece of art with a political or social message, Banksy-style?

“No. I do have my political opinions on stuff but I keep it all quite light-hearted, I keep it to retro video game characters.

“I want to make people smile, rather than some big message….. I’ll leave that to the Banksys and the serious artists.”