A ghost wearing a white bedsheet, usually with two black holes for eyes, is one of our most familiar supernatural images.
Children recognise it immediately, Halloween shops are full of it, and throwing a sheet over your head remains the cheapest ghost costume available.
But why should ghosts wear bedsheets in the first place?
The answer probably has less to do with beds than with the way Europeans once prepared their dead for burial.
The familiar sheet ghost appears to be the distant descendant of the burial shroud, later transformed by theatre, illustration and popular entertainment.
Ghosts and burial shrouds
For centuries, dead bodies were commonly wrapped in winding sheets or burial shrouds before they were placed in their graves.
These were generally simple pieces of cloth, often linen, which covered or enclosed the body as part of its preparation for burial.
The sight of a human shape covered completely in pale cloth therefore carried an obvious and rather grim association with death.
When artists and storytellers imagined somebody returning from the grave, it made sense that the dead might return as they were buried.
This helps explain descriptions and illustrations of ghosts appearing in winding sheets, rather than dressed like ordinary living people.
The original ghostly sheet was therefore not really a bedsheet at all, but the clothing of a corpse prepared for burial.
It is easy to see how the distinction eventually disappeared as burial customs changed and winding sheets became less familiar.
People continued recognising the old image of the shrouded ghost, even when they no longer encountered genuine burial shrouds themselves.
The ghost moves onto the stage
The theatre also played an important part in turning the white, shrouded figure into a standard representation of a ghost.
An actor portraying a spirit needed to appear immediately different from the living characters, particularly when viewed across a crowded theatre.
White robes, flowing material and shroud-like costumes provided an inexpensive and highly effective way of achieving that supernatural appearance.
Not every theatrical ghost looked this way, of course, and Shakespeare’s ghost of Hamlet’s father famously appears wearing armour.
Nevertheless, pale clothing and flowing material gradually became useful visual shorthand for somebody who belonged to the world of the dead.
By the 18th and 19th centuries, audiences were thoroughly accustomed to seeing supernatural figures presented in this recognisable form.
Victorian theatre then became increasingly sophisticated in its attempts to place apparently genuine spirits before a startled audience.
Techniques such as Pepper’s Ghost allowed transparent-looking figures to appear and disappear, strengthening the association between ghosts and pale, floating human forms.
Oscar Wilde knew the joke
By the late Victorian period, the sheet-wearing ghost was already familiar enough for writers to make jokes about it.
Oscar Wilde exploited the conventions of traditional ghost stories brilliantly in his 1887 comic tale, The Canterville Ghost.
Its unfortunate spectre, Sir Simon de Canterville, approaches haunting almost as a profession, complete with costumes, characters and carefully planned appearances.
Wilde includes references to the ghost performing in a sheet, treating supernatural appearances almost like an actor preparing for another performance.
The humour works because Wilde’s Victorian readers already understood the conventions he was sending up throughout the story.
A ghost appearing in a sheet was recognisable enough by 1887 to be treated as an established supernatural cliché.
From winding sheet to bedsheet
As burial customs changed, the original meaning behind the white covering gradually became less obvious to ordinary people.
The winding sheet survived in pictures and stories, but increasingly became understood simply as a white sheet covering a ghost.
There was another excellent reason for the image to survive, because it was remarkably easy for anybody to reproduce.
Children wanting to become ghosts needed nothing more complicated than an unwanted bedsheet with a couple of holes cut into it.
Halloween celebrations, fancy-dress parties, cartoons and comedy consequently helped reinforce an image that had begun centuries earlier around the grave.
Eventually the imitation became more familiar than the thing it had originally been intended to imitate.
Ghosts wore sheets because everyone knew ghosts wore sheets, while generations of sheet-wearing Halloween ghosts strengthened that assumption even further.
What about Casper the Friendly Ghost?
Casper the Friendly Ghost provides an interesting example of what happened when the bedsheet itself was no longer necessary.
Created during the 1940s, Casper became enormously popular through animated cartoons and, later, the Harvey Comics in which he regularly appeared.
Casper is not actually wearing a bedsheet, despite sometimes being described that way in discussions of the traditional ghost image.
His body is white, rounded and simplified, tapering towards the bottom instead of having ordinary human legs and feet.
Yet his appearance clearly belongs to the same visual tradition that produced the familiar white sheet ghost.
By this stage, audiences needed only the colour, shape and floating movement to understand immediately that they were looking at a spirit.
The burial shroud had effectively disappeared, but the visual language created by centuries of shrouded ghosts remained behind.
Have people actually seen shrouded ghosts?
Interestingly, folklore and traditional ghost accounts contain plenty of apparitions described as white, shrouded or covered in flowing material.
Some supposedly resemble figures wrapped for burial, while others are simply described as indistinct white shapes moving through buildings or churchyards.
Whether these reports influenced the traditional image of ghosts, or the traditional image influenced what frightened witnesses thought they saw, is impossible to establish.
Someone already expecting ghosts to resemble white figures might naturally interpret moonlight, mist or an indistinct human shape in precisely that fashion.
The relationship between folklore and reported supernatural experience often works in both directions, with each helping to reinforce the other.
The bedsheet ghost may now seem comic, particularly when somebody walks into a door because their eyeholes are badly positioned.
Behind that joke, however, lies a much older and considerably darker image of the human body prepared for its grave.
The ghost was not originally wearing a bedsheet.
It was wearing its burial shroud.
