Why ghosts wear sheets
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ต.ค. 2022
- Ghost clothes!
More info and sources at bottom.
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Oddly funny ghost roast:
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More about those spirit photos:
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Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750-1920 Illustrated Edition (affiliate link - I only read the one chapter though)
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Spectral Matter: The Afterlife of Clothes in the Nineteenth-Century Ghost Story
muse.jhu.edu/article/635692/pdf
Playing Dead (didn't include this, but it's all about Shakespearean ghost costuming strategies)
academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/vi...
I always thought they wore sheets to make themselves visible to humans 👻
This is definitely the Beetlejuice theory.
That too
Same!!
I never thought the ghost was supposed to be wearing a sheet. I always thought the sheet was supposed to be the ghost's "body". Just a simple way to draw clouds of ecto-plasma, mist, RediWhip or what ever ghosts were supposed to be made of. Now I stuck with the though of a nekkid ghost dude under that sheet.
mmmm rediwhip ghost
lol
I believe the word is for what the ghost is made of is ectoplasm as used in the quackery called spiritualism.
Did anyone actually think ghosts were wearing sheets? Lmfao
i thought the same; when i was little, that is what i thought souls looked like if you took it out of a body. lol
Never realized the sheets were burial shrouds. Makes more sense why someone would be scared by that now.
Like I grew up watching that hassle in the castle Scooby Doo episode and always kinda rolled my eyes at why they'd be scared of a dude in a sheet even if it started walking through walls.
That's one of those interesting cases of it being so removed from the zeitgeist by the time I was born that it just didn't make sense. Also love when knowledge like this makes things like that Beetlejuice scene funnier.
Same! I had no idea either and I watched a lot of Scooby Doo. We Muslims still get buried in shrouds with no box.
As a kid, I always thought the sheet costume was a cheap solution. Now, I realize the authenticity and how difficult it is to pull off…uh,er, put on. 🎃 Thanks for another entertaining video.
I had a whole ghost dialogue version of this video written…and then I tried to do it…
Plenty of modern ghost stuff still discusses what they wear- usually the theme seems to be "you're stuck with what you die in". Being Human had some good jokes about that- there was one guy who was constantly stuck in full scuba gear who died in a car accident
So, does this mean it's useless to bury them wearing nice clothes.
Tbh how come none of these old authors considered the following solution: "Ghosts are representations of how a person viewed themselves, and thus appeared in the clothes they saw themselves to be wearing"
As a ghost, I'd probably be around in shirt and shorts all the time.
ghost crocs
I've heard it said that you should be very careful about what you are wearing at the moment of your death, because that will be your ghost outfit for eternity.
@@PhilEdwardsInc terrifying
@@host_theghost507 this is actually a thing my mother used to tease me with, making sure I always wore clean underwear because I wouldn't want to be stuck wandering around heaven permanently wearing dirty underwear
In Hamlet, the ghost of the old King is wearing the same armor as he did when he lived, and otherwise looked just like him
Considering what people got up to at seances, I'm surprised naked ghosts weren't more common
"Ooh! A naked ghost!!"
"Ah, that's just Uncle Tom's ghost, we have not figured out how to make him clothed yet."
I was a ghost for Halloween once. It’s definitely not as easy as it looks. The eye holes are hard to position and move around constantly.
Thank you, you're making me feel better about it.
Double-sided costume tape on forehead and cheeks to keep them correctly aligned?
Great video. I knew that images of sheet ghosts were supposed to be in burial shrouds, but never considered that the reasoning for that is possibly related to concerns of indecency.
Currently writing my dissertation on the depiction of ghosts through time you saved my soul and you gave me references 😭
those sources in the description were helpful to me for sure!
I'm curious what are you studying??
Don't feel bad about the difficulties you were having with the sheet. Last year, my son dressed up as a sheet ghost and it was by far the most annoyingly tricky costume I've ever made.
i need this affirmation!
I'd think that ghosts, if they exist, would be more of a swirl of ectoplasm that we just misinterpret as sheets, ectoplasmic swirls being an unusual get-up. Thanks for the thoughtful video!
I always interpreted the “ghost clothes” thing as implying that the clothes are an extension of the person. What someone chooses to wear is very closely linked with their personality & by extension their sense of self. We dress in the way we want to be see ourselves & have others see us as. If ghosts are souls that stick around & retain that sense of self after death then it would make sense that they would take a form with their clothes because their clothes are a part of themselves.
In that view there should be plenty of nudist ghosts then. Surely I would not limiti myself to be nude only in private if I'm a ghost
I liked your take on paranormal theory. It is backwards to the the scientific method, by starting with a theory and meticulously fitting (and omitting) evidence to match the theory’s requirements.
well said!
It's interesting that people assumed at all that a ghost would carry a visual copy of their body into the afterlife. I think that's even broader than the clothing debate. However, it took philosophers a while to rationalize what our consciousness is. I think since our bodies are the only part we can see, we assume that it is of greatest importance.
I’ve always thought this was a stupid point. Why wouldn’t something like ghosts look like their body? If it’s supposed to be some magical disembodied mind or impression left by a mind, it’s going to look like what that mind expects itself to look like. There are a lot of valid skeptical analyses of ghosts, the “Hurr durr why would their be ghost clothes and ghost bodies durr” line of questioning is not one of them
I always thought ghost should be simply naked, since souls are pure and they don't have anything to hide. But very soon I learned that showing up naked to a Halloween party was not a good idea :-(
and doing the disco while naked also has its issues
@@PhilEdwardsInc hehe, that is whole different ghost story. Greetings from Vienna
I always thought it's a cheesy shorthand for a somewhat shapeless, luminous or see-through, form that a soul/spirit is imagined to take after it's no longer in a clearly defined body-boundry.
Funny and interesting video as always!
This is kinda far from the topics but can't help to mention that in Indonesia there are specific ghost called "Pocong" that covered in that "burial shroud" or "kain kafan" in Indonesian. Because we bury deceased with that "burial shroud" so we also associate ghost with those sheets. But if there was a ghost sighting in abandoned dutch house or building the ghost is surely wearing those fancy European clothing😂
very interesting!
In “Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad” the sheets are the ghost. The sheets were possessed. Just realized this after watching your video. And nowadays ghosts are always wearing cloths. Sometimes indistinguishable from the living like in American Horror Stories, and the Sixth Sense.
I like videos that give food to thoughts.
Oh thanks for the detail on that!
There was also Dead Like Me, which was a criminally underrated show.
Given the amount of ghost media where ghosts tended to either actually be or resesemble bedsheet ghosts, like Casper the Friendly Ghost.
I've usually just assumed thats how Spirits sometimes looked in those stories.
Fascinating topic as always Phil! One thing that occurred to me was these supposed "photographs" of ghosts, wouldn't they be relying on a double exposure trick? Surely that wouldn't work if the apparitions were wearing something dark like a suit or an overcoat. Something very light on the other hand, like a white sheet would be the perfect thing. Maybe this helped to reinforce the image over time?
Yeah I reckon this is definitely part of it - but the spirit photography of Hope and Mumler featured so many normal looking people that I became convinced photography techniques weren’t the sole reason (or even enough to prove as a theory). That said, seems like a very good guess.
Double exposure should work either way. Of course, if the "ghost" were the same brightness as the background, that would make it less visible. Otherwise, lighter and darker should work equally well.
Never asked that question but here I am 👀
same
and so are the 👻
It's so funny to me that the Victorians were getting into arguments about ghost tailors. This is exactly the kind of thing I'd expect on, say, Twitter if the concept of ghosts was new now.
Oh, I think I can see a remnant of the fancy shirt used for burial in the movie It's A Wonderful Life. Clarence the angel is shown wearing a weird (to modern sensibilities) shirt, and it must've looked odd to the characters in the movie, as he remarked "I was buried in it".
The "Winding Sheet" definitely seems like a nice way of saying "we put your loved one in a sack and buried 'em like that."
my mood everytime Phil uploads 📈📈
From an artistic standpoint, I'd like to imagine a ghost wearing what they would have been wearing in the final moments of their death. Also I like how sometimes in media they show how the spirit even died, and is always in unending agony from the wound, or illness that caused their death. Like the ghost of someone who had been hung would have a crooked neck from when the noose tightened. That's how I'd design a ghost.
If there are ghost tailors with ghost needles, then there must be ghost factories with ghost iron, mined by ghost miners in ghost caves
same page as that old article!
In the BBC comedy series 'Ghosts' the ghosts wear the clothes from when they died. It includes a scandalous politician who is wearing a suit and tie from the waist up but no trousers.
The ghosts can take off their clothes but then it disappears and they are suddenly wearing them again.
The series is great by the way - it has been remade in the US although I've not seen that one yet.
I think this could make a good lecture for science & PhD students.
Because science do chase a lot, a LOT of ghosts.
The first mistake is believe that it's easy to recognize when it's a ghost or when it's a good theory. When things "make sense" they are true, and when they don't, they are false...
The way you show "there is more behind it" is a great example of why one should never stop at the easy explanation.
in Indonesia, and Islam in general, we bury our corpse in a burial shroud too. But we have a different ghost as a result called Pocong. It isn't bed sheet ghost but it origin are similar. I think?
My guess was that ghosts were invisible and needed something to convey their existence visually. Where the sheet came from, though, I figured ghosts floated into them while they hanged on clotheslines.
I love the thought of a ghost just stealing stuff off a clothes line
Until now, I never gave this part of ghost lore any real thought, but your presentation is well researched, and makes a lot of sense. While we're on the topic of ghosts, does anyone know where the stereotype of ghosts saying "BOO!" comes from?
ooh that's a good one
@@PhilEdwardsInc Thanks. I'm thinking that maybe you could do a double-feature on ghosts and vampires. We don't wonder why Werewolves howl, or Zombies moan. But a ghost saying "Boo!" is kind of off-the-wall - that, and why everyone seems to think that vampires say "Bleh!" An analysis of the "BOO!" / "Bleh!" meme would be intriguing.
Thanks for posting your video.
Subscribed.
Here I thought it was a soulution to them being souls(transparent) like since I have never really realized seen that many ghost photographs of antiquity to early Hollywood, I just assumed those outfits more had to do with the general cloak=creepy motif of the occult and monsters like death(the grim reaper),vampires,witches, and even things like cult members.
Your videos, VICE and Vox are the only videos that I actually get excited to watch. Thank you Phil Edwards for being authentic!!
Just wish the latter would have better narrators.
You’d like Johnny Harris & Cleo.
Vice?
That's pure propaganda.
Your list is super short
i think my first exposure to the ghost sheet was in Peanuts. i always figured it was an Americana thing
The real question: what if a ghost got isekaied to another world?
Phil, I love the way you tell stories. No matter what the topic (and regardless of thumbnail!) I know I'm going to enjoy taking the ride watching your videos and hearing your stories. Did you just naturally develop this skill over time or did you create an algorithmic or formulaic process you follow to tell stories in such an engaging way, regardless of the topic? I'm always fascinated by your videos, but also META-fascinated about how you create them!
That’s very flattering! I am actually pretty formulaic and try to graft on a three act structure onto most short pieces (and occasionally more acts for longer videos). A holdover from when I wrote mysteries and a result of doing a hundred plus videos. Sometimes I have even tried doing a heroes journey! Pretty pretentious sounding for my topics, but it helps clarify my thinking and gives me more room to do other stuff (if that makes sense).
@@PhilEdwardsInc Wow! Fitting the 17 stages of a Heroes Journey into a three act format in an 8-10 minute video is AMAZING!! You rock, Phil!
Great stuff Phil. - Love seeing you under the sheets.
this video is just so good.
the whole channel is amazing. didnt even know i would want this kind of channel so much, with that story telling and the effects and the music. it's just brilliant. thanks a lot for this
Bravo Mr. Edwards, Bravo. I was truly sceptical this would make for a good video but you more than changed my mind once I watched it.
your logic around illogic reminded me of "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" 🙂
Great video as always Phil!
Great video again! I never even thought to wonder why ghosts wore clothes or sheets at all but of course it all stemmed from burial shrouds. Very interesting.
Have a good one Phil! Cheers from St. Louis 😁👍
🍻
Awesome history of ghost attire and love the presentation style.
"What did you get for Halloween Charlie Brown?"
"I got a rock....."
As always, great stuff!
That was great. Personally I think ghost sightings are just time leaking, a fleeting extra-temporal experience which science will one day explain and possibly build upon. It works on poltergeist activity as well; the table didn't move, you just experienced a point in time when it was in a different position. This isn't even a theory, merely a hypothesis, but it's mine and I like it 🙂
I only know this trope from Western cartoons. Makes sense, since there you guys wrap corpses in white. Where I'm from, in Chinese culture ghosts/zombies wear traditional clothing, which you can see in old Hong Kong horror movies.
“I got a rock.”- Charlie Brown 👻 😂
I honestly thought that the shroud was suppose to show that the ghost is formless and couldn’t be comprehended
Growing up, I thought ghosts would be a much bigger problem.
their pr is great
Just finished work, put the video on, got ready for leisure time, heard the big ah-ha moment at the end, rewound the video, then watched it again. Fantastic video. I love this channel.
Hope you’ll also do one about ectoplasms too! Read Mary Roach’s foray into that in “Spooked” but wanted MORE 👻
good book! there is a lot of ghost stuff, isn’t there?
Informative & funny, thanks!
Topper Returns (1941) has Joan Blondell as a ghost. She does have a change of clothes during the movie.
Great video. I always thought that the clothes could be what theybwere wearing when they died, rather than burried. The experience being so traumatic that it left it's impression on a specific site. That is why ghosts would haunt a specific area, and not roam around, and why they are seen wearing clothes. It mught not even be the spirit of the person, but some impression left from extreme trauma.
That whole "ghost clothes" debate reminds me of the current "is a hot dog a sandwich"
hahaha exactly
My 2¢ there is that a sandwich must have bread layers that are not joined as a hot dog bun is. The hot dog bun is really a split roll, while with a sandwich we have two discreet pieces of bread. The only exception where one united piece of bread can make a sandwich is when we fold a slice of bread over to make a "half" sandwich. The name itself tells us that this is in reality a little less than a "true" sandwich. 😁
This reasoning bears itself out with a sub sandwich, which is a true sandwich even though the bun resembles a hot dog bun, because it is actually two discrete slices. Those of you who will mention the Subway split-yet-connected bun slices will have to realize that Subway sandwiches are cruel bastardizations of real subs, created specifically for high-volume, high-profit mass consumption.
My years of research into this are reflected in my body mass.
Matpat did a video on this already, it’s not. A sandwich has 2 slices of bread, a hot dog only 1.
In all seriousness I just so happen to live in a place that was a former brothel just on the outskirts of Reno, NV.; Oh and for years has been reported by many to be haunted. Seeing is believing....and I saw. The woman walked out of a neighbors bathroom and stood next to me and I saw her out of my peripheral vision. She was so clear and real I turned to say "Hi" thinking it was my neighbors Mother. I didn't speak of it for months but it turns out I wasn't the first to see her. My advise is: They were and are people so respect them and hopefully they'll do so in return.
I like how ghosts started off as dead people under their burial shroud, and now we see the shroud itself as a ghost 👻
hey that was fantastic! haha watching it in the interims between the halloweens lol because, of the randomness of the algorithm. Burial shrouds! ohhhhhh ok, makes so much sense now!
Subscribed.
Belated Happy Halloween 🎃🎃🎃
That was fun and very informative.
I always assumed it was because ghosts can't be seen so they put a sheet over themselves to be seen
No mention of the obscure Egyptian Book of the Dead god Medjed. Despite the cultural obscurity up until recently, Medjed does make it seem like it's possible that the bed-sheet ghost has been part of the popular consciousness for thousands of years
that’s a good point! is he in that moon knight show?
Phantastic
This is a David Foster Wallace's "How is the water" moment for me...which always sends me into a moment of anxiety.
what's water?
I never gave any thought into this... Another well excavated story from the obscure phil.
it's so interesting how something so simple has that mutch history behind it
2:31 maybe a real ghost opening locker's door behind?? hahaha happy halloween!
👻 🚪
Those are burial shrouds? I never realized that, i didn't even think the sheet was on purpouse and not a misrepresentation.
This is a good question.
Ghost needles and thread, then ghost shopping malls and ghost Amazon.
I had always thought it had something to do with the furniture covers in the stereotypical abandoned house
It's funny to think of a ghost trying to dress himself, "gosh I'm naked, what if they see me????"
Hmm I've always pondered that question watching casper. I'd prefer to imagine a spooky economy in the land of the dead like in coco, imagine having to solve geopolitical issues in the underworld.
I'd always assumed ghosts in clothes were based on some idea that the spirit appeared to others in the way they viewed themselves, and that's how younger looking ghosts worked when the person they were based on died of old age or of a terrible accident. So maybe there would logically be some naked phantasms if the person was a nudist? Regardless, one of the things I don't worry about too much because I don't want to spend too much time ruining the verisimilitude of someone else's story, like I tend not to insist on Star Trek tv shows realistically showing people using restrooms.
Spin me up in a winding sheet when I die. I want to go out like a well wrapped burrito.
put "burrito style" in your will
The easiest explanation is that a ghost’s appearance is how it saw itself in life. So the “spirit” of a person is one’s self-image. You could be a naked ghost if you were a naturalist in life, but i reckon most folks imagine themselves in whatever they enjoy wearing
I wondered why "ghosts" wear sheets - great explanation for such esoteric musings.
I thought ghosts clothing would be the last thing a person was wearing when they died like in the movie Ghost Town with the Dentists seeing ghosts and yes, one of them was naked when he died.
Imagine my delight to see the title "O Whistle and I'll come to Ye", having sung the complex and pretty choral piece over 35 years ago. :
"
O whistle, and I'll come to ye my lad,
O whistle and il come to ye my lad.
Though my father and mother and all should go mad,
O whistle and il come to ye my lad."
Here's a pretty good version, with even the ghost shroud hanging directly above the singers: th-cam.com/video/lUxvX_EV4eE/w-d-xo.html.
And then in addition to find the radio play recording here!
Thank you as usual Phil Edwards.
ah thanks for that!
"We must not indulge fear! My cousin Blob spent his whole life being afraid of ghosts. Now... He IS one!" -Gomez Addams
Awesome video! An interesting side note: prior to the 19th Century, ghosts were not typically thought of as being see-through. It was only after they started to use double exposures and partially exposed images in spirit photography that translucent ghosts became the cultural norm.
On an even more tangential note, the winding-sheet look later evolved into the footy-pajama look of Casper the Friendly Ghost. When Casper is flying, his legs disappear and take on a wavy shape that is either meant to represent the bottom of a winding sheet or possibly Casper's ectoplasm changing form. The winding-sheet effect is more obvious with his uncles, the Ghostly Trio-their heads look sort of like the peaked top of a folded sheet-which became a legal matter when Harvey Comics sued Columbia Pictures for copyright infringement over its Ghostbusters Logo.
The 19th Century is the last time you'll hear anyone seriously talking about ghosts having any kind of physical dimension. Modern paranormal researchers tend to prefer vague terms like "energy," implying that the ghost can appear pretty much any way it wants to.
thanks for this!
On ghost clothing: were used to seeing souls every day, dressed in the usual form, not clothes, those are decoration to the flesh and bone souls occupy. So if a ghost is observed, it's observed as a naked soul, something our flesh brains can't quite process, hence ghost being transparent, out the corner of the eye etc. Therefore it's not unreasonable to assume that the flesh brain projects a certain amount of information onto what's being observed in order to try to make sense of it. That projection is based on the life experiences of the observer and thus different apparitions are born.
So ghosts wearing shrouds is like if a ghost today wore a body bag.
this is the most interesting thing ive ever heard of in my life i mean we have clothing why would spirits be any different? great video this is so fun and actually a terrifying but beautiful concept
Thank you for digging up ideas and sharing them with us. What made you first look into this one?
I tried to look up what it was but couldn’t find any evidence. I know that the paper (not the book, which I found in the citations) convinced me it was worth doing (as well as Googling for other TH-cam vids on the topic). I think I found the paper just searching “ghost sheets” on the academic site Jstor.
@@PhilEdwardsInc TH-cam is the special place where dusty arguments from 'ye olde dayes' can find a new life!
I always believed that ghost wear what they died in, like in the movie "ghost town", so some ghosts are naked others are dressed
Ghost clothes debate sounds like the round/flat earth debate if the earth, like birds, didn't exist.
I think the sheets make more sense in the case of revenants. But I should think a spirit would present itself in a way reflective of its purpose.
I have been thinking it's the ghosts idea of how they look, a little bit like how Neo's hair comes back in the Matrix, combined with what killed you and what's keeping you from passing.
Ghosts have many reasons to be ghosts, you can have unfinished business of all sorts, or you can be cursed or have some other supernatural force keeping you etc.
People also die in very different ways, some die in a bed knowing its going to happen and others get hit from behind with a blunt object.
So a ghost that knows it's dead or knew it was dying has a higher likelihood of wearing a sheet maybe? :)
If there is a customization screen before I become a ghost, then I'll go for a classic sheet.
lol same on the customization screen
Can't wait to see Phil struggle with a toga for Saturnalia!
The thumbnail is so creepy. No matter if I move from one side of the screen to the other, it looks like the mustache is following me.
🥸
Can't Stop the Spirits when they need you!
Woo-o-o-o-o! With that mustache in place, I didn't even notice the ghost in the thumbnail! Another great video, Phil!👻
it’s going to grow stronger, like a ghost in reverse
This video aired on TH-cam on my 15th birthday❤🎉👻💀☠️🎃🦷⚰️🪦
I didn't...just...hear...you...DENY the MOON LANDING, did I?!?! Please tell me I misheard that.
I would guess mummies also contribute to this narrative a little bit. Mummies had white wrappings that would cover them like a sheet
interesting, thanks. Ghost clothes, etc. Never really gave it much thought