The current version of Ghost does require Node 18, so going to 16 is not the fix.
Does npm work ok otherwise on node 18? If you can’t npm install /anything/, it’s a node/npm problem, nto a Ghost problem.
I’m going to take a crazy guess here. Node 18 changes how ipv4 vs ipv6 is handled, and that timeout is trying to connect to an ipv6 IP address. Is your ipv6 networking set up right?