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Vienna is exactly as you expect it to look, all romantic, theatrical nostalgic and imperial. The horse and carts are so quaint and fitting, the cellar bars and restaurants so aptly serve up plate-sized Schnitzels. And yes, everywhere you go in the centre, you hear music, whether it's simply a sound in your ear, actually coming from a concert venue, or just drifting through a thick baroque wall. The square-shaped 18th and 19th century buldings are empty music sheets waiting for heads to appear in the windows to outline the notes. The whole city resonates with history, legacy and spirituality. But beneath that lies a stark obsession with death and the ghosts are everywhere.

The cavernous imperial tombs, the graves of famous composers, the shadowy, disappointed intellectuals brooding over empty coffee cups in the Cafe Central, the Jewish spirits unable to fix the broken gravestones in the cemetery, the apparitions of failed musicians, singers and actors hanging around the stage door of the Opera House, all the infants who didn't survive crowding the existential kindergartens and the haunting vacant expanses of the Habsburg palaces and castles where ethereal aristocrats waltz eternally to the 'Blue Danube'. Unfortunately, I don't have the power to 'make contact' with those on the other side, but Vienna's one place where I wish I had such an ability. Let's pretend, at least for a few days, that I do.

My attempt to make contact starts not in the Innenstadt but out at the Zentralfriedhof in the Simmering district. Vienna has almost 50 cemeteries and the Zentral has the largest number of people interred in Europe, including some of the world's most famous composers: Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Schoenberg, Salieri, and the prodigious Strauss family. There's a monument to Mozart, but he was actually buried in nearby St Marx Cemetery in a grave not even his widow could find. Falco, of 'Rock Me Amadeus' fame, is also buried in the Zentralfriedhof. But it's difficult to communicate with ghosts when there are so many tourists around you, so many cameras clicking, and too much inappropriate laughter. The ghosts of many civil servants and successful hairdressers vie for my attention but all the composers are absent. So, it's back onto tram 71 to the Innenstadt.

Throughout the city, there are museums and houses dedicated to the famous composers born here and the others who made Vienna their home. Perhaps the ghosts haunt these domains: Schubert in his birthplace on Nussdorferstrasse (where 16 families were crammed into 16 bed-sits) and in the house on Kettenbruckengasse where he died, Mozart in his apartment on Domgasse (the museum there makes it seem he lived his whole life in the apartment when it was only three years), Strauss in his Donauwalzerhaus on Praterstrasse where he composed his famous waltz and Haydn in his domicile on Haydngasse, which also features a Brahms Memorial Room, meaning the two are probably still hanging out there together.

Of all the composers, though, the hardest to locate is most certainly Haydn's famous pupil, Ludwig van Beethoven. He lived in the no less than 60 different places during his 35 years in Vienna, and was known to be a cantankerous tenant, loud, argumentative, unconventional and disrespective of those who shared the dwelling. No doubt more than one landlord, fed up with Beethoven's behaviour, cast the great man out onto the street. Two residences, though, are now memorials - the Pasqualati House on Molker Bastei and the Heiligenstadt Testament House on Probusgasse where he admitted his deafness in the famous Heiligenstadt Testament, written in 1802 and found after his death 25 years later. A number of other houses feature plaques, but the house in which he died on Schwarzspanierstrasse was destroyed in the name of progress, as were many others.

Perhaps Beethoven's ghost is a restless as the man was, still moving from place to place, trying to found peace and to hide. One would hope that he and Mozart are sitting down somewhere, forming a spiritual partnership, the two superstars of the Viennese all-star orchestra. Within the narrow, cobblestone alleys of Vienna's old town, sometimes the wind rifles of the Danube and floats down the streets, rustling your hair and leaving a tune in your ear you've never heard before.

But then the wind changes direction and blows from the grand expanse of the Hofburg, carrying a sound of regal importance. Aristocratic ghosts crowd around me and push me towards the palace; eager for recognition, they are clearly jealous that all their grandeur and imperial achievement merely amounts to being overshadowed by the incredible accomplishments of a couple of musically gifted commoners. Sorry, Habsburgs, but the unfortunate situation is that the names and deeds of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and co are more well-known than yours, and despite your enormous castles, their legacy more widely appreciated.

But you do fascinate me, especially given you lived in such opulence while all around you much of the Viennese lived in squalor, notably a young Schubert, whose family were crammed into two tiny rooms in which eleven of 16 children died in infancy. But before I bow to you in the Hofburg, I will start at your final resting place, as I did with the composers.

The Imperial Burial Vault is located on Neuer Markt. The Habsburgs, almost 150 of them, have been interred since 1633. The bodies, that is - the hearts of the leading Habsburgs are in the Augustiner Church while their organs are in the catacombs below St Stephan's church. The opulently ornameted sacrophagi, particularly the statue-adorned coffins of Karl VI (with four skulls wearing crowns) and his wife Elisabeth Christine (with four young women with heads covered by cloths) and the magnanimous sacrophagus of Karl VI's successor Franz Stephan and his wife Marie Theresia, are sights to behold. The vault is dark, ghostly, and not surprisingly, ghostless. The royal spirits have taken their rightful places in their castles, holding grimly to the glory years of the 18th and 19th century. A commoner myself, I don't belong in such a world and so shun the Hofburg, Schonbrunn and Belvedere palaces.

More fascinating are the ghosts on the streets, those everyday Viennese for whom life was a struggle and who still lurk outside the cafes, concert halls and castles, lamenting old disappointments and seething that their chance never came. Vienna was the most prominent music and theatre city for centuries, more of an attraction than Hollywood can ever be. How many musicians, singers and actors must have journeyed here hoping to make their name, their mark, their fortune? Vienna chewed up and spat out those not good enough. Their ghosts now fill the ranks of the 'Unknown Orchestra', grinding out tunes and singing never before heard arias in the quiet mornings when the Opera House is empty; but their tuneful lamentations dissipate with the first sweep of a broom across the stage floor, for even as ghosts, they still haven't made the cut.

For every famous name in Vienna, now a ghost commanding old haunts, there were perhaps thousands of nameless people who tried and failed, now faceless ghosts merging into one apparition of failure, and thousands of others whose existence was swept away by the violent tide of history; the piles of bodies in the 'plague pits' and the broken Jewish graves in the cemetery testify to this. Vienna is a city thriving with life, where people hustle with an air of expectancy to a show, where cafés are smoky and crowded and voices rise in ascending volume; where even horses dance. But the statues, cemeteries, memorials, houses, residences and even street names (the main street Am Graben menas by the graves) give the dead an eternal omnipresence and mark all those people, famous or not, who were here and whose spirits wallow in old glory or cower in the long shadows of hopes lost.

Morbid Museums and Ghostly Sights

Funerary Museum, Goldeggasse 4
A curious museum, open by appointment only, which exhibits funeral customs, burial rites and the Viennese perspective of death, including the remarkable 'flap coffin' which opened on the underside allowing it to be used again and again.

St Ruprecht's Church, Judengasse
Vienna's oldest church has a rather shocking exhibit on show near the entrance: the skeletal remains of St Ruprecht visible through a glass Sarcophagus. It's not actually the saint, but it takes you back when you first see it.

Treasury of the Order of Teutonic Knights, Singerstasse 7
With ceremonial regalia, domestic trinkets and the Order's central archive, no doubt there are the ghosts of seven centuries of Grand Masters lurking in this buildings.

Jewish Museum, Dorotheergasse 11
On the second floor, the free standing glass panels imprinted with holograms provide a ghostly image of the city's once vast Jewish population.

Kaisergruft, Neuer Markt
The burial vault of the Habsburgs located under a Capuchin church in the centre of Vienna.

St Michael's Church, Michaelerplatz
Thousands of bones, hundreds of coffins and some excellently preserved mummies are on display in the church's crypt.

Pathological-Anatomical Museum
Housed in the so-called 'Fool's Tower', where the mentally ill were once held, the museum contains 42,000 plus exhibits of deformed body parts.

Catacombs, St Stephan's Church, Stephansplatz Far below the city streets, the dead were stacked on top of each other, including the masses of people who died from the plague, buried in so called 'plague pits'. Most of the catacombs are now closed to the public but there are rumours that hidden tunnels connect them to the main sewer system and to other unknown crypts.

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