You might be asking yourself: Why is he so afraid? I know why,
but I'm asking a different question. Why do ghosts wear sheets?
This is a question that has an answer, but it also has a more complicated answer that
you'll see a bit later. And I think it says something bigger about belief.
"Ooohhhhh." "We're ghosts."
Okay, I'm gonna be real with you. I was
trying for like 20 minutes to act like a ghost. Uh,
but it turned out to be really hard. Do I look fat? I still have hope for the thumbnail.
So
let's answer this question. I wanna give you the straightforward answer first, and then I'm gonna
go into some of the deeper stuff that's behind it. Ghosts, they're wearing burial shrouds. If you've
heard of the shroud of Turin, uh, you know what a burial shroud is. Burial shrouds covered a corpse.
Simple explanation. These did have a bit of an evolution in the late Middle Ages. People were
being buried in winding sheets like these. See how it's tied at both ends? There are
straight up connections to ghost stories, like this illustration for "The Winding Sheet."
Later on, you also had more elaborate shrouds, uh,
like these, those showed up on ghosts , like in this 1825 illustration about necromancy.
The same thing happened in this 1806 illustration of the same story. Also,
coffin sheets were popular, which makes sense because not everybody could afford a shroud.
And so that's your straightforward answer. I mean, all these things, winding sheets, coffin sheets,
burial, shrouds, they were all clothing corpses and they were all on the sheet spectrum.
But I don't think that gets to exactly everything that you need to know to understand why they're
wearing sheets. And for that, we have to go to a brief and hilarious debate about ghost clothes.
I am just gonna try one more time. I cut the eye holes like way too large. Do I look like
a skinny ghost now? "(Really good ghost voice) Ooh, I don't like to eat carbs."
You guys. I think I'm gonna have the thumbnail here. I'm gonna show you in part 3.
These are the spirit photographs of William Hope,
circa the early 1900s. Notice the clothes. It is the continuation of a debate that had
been going on since the mid 1800s. What should ghosts wear? In "Spectral matter,
the afterlife of clothes in the 19th century ghost story" and "Spectres of the self," these
two authors describe a hilarious problem with ghost stories that people were identifying.
Imagine you see a ghost. He's not naked, right? I mean, a, that's like indecent.
But suddenly you're having to answer all these questions about a naked ghost .
So you're putting clothes on your ghost in your ghost story, right? But then you have
a problem. Where did the clothes come from? If a ghost was a representation of a soul, then
were clothes ghosts too? Did that mean that clothes had souls? This was an actual thing
that they had to consider in the 1800s and people were kind of perplexed by it.
Um, this illustration parodies the thinking by saying that there must be ghost stockings.
Um, actually, let me, let me read you this. This is pretty funny, . This is like a
riff on ghost clothes, and he's just saying all the issues here.
"If sold, then there must be Ghost tailors working with ghosts of needles, how sharp they must be,
and ghosts of threads, how fine they must be. And the ghost of a sleeve board and the ghost of an
iron, which the tailors use to flatten the seam." This is very much like an angry blog post about
how ghost clothes are stupid. But this represented a big debate that was going on at the time. Ghost
clothing was presenting a cosmic problem. Check out this 1901 book. It is a bit more
sympathetic. I I want to read you a passage from it. This is very much telling us the problem,
which is that "if they were projections of dying persons, one would naturally expect
them to appear in their bed clothes or minus any clothing that being their condition at the time of
projection. But these ghosts generally appear to carry a wardrobe with them or to be able
to improvise one of the surrounding element." So this is a problem, right? And then he says,
"Our spiritualist friends will tell us, no doubt, that this would be a
very easy feat for spirit to perform." And so then he goes on to say that, yes,
of course spirits could do this, "but some of my audience will no doubt prefer a more
convenient way of solving the problem, namely by flatly denying the phantasms."
So he's saying the logical thing here. If you deny the ghost clothes, which are weird,
you have to deny the ghosts. So how do you solve this problem? You either have spirits
who have ghost tailors and stuff like in that illustration, or you have spirits that can like
imagine up clothes, or perhaps you have a simpler solution — that the spirits appear in the forms in
which they were buried, which is in those burial sheets, the winding sheets, and the dust shrouds.
I'm gonna try to get this thumbnail now. I think this is looking okay. Uh,
wait. Now where's my mustache? Right? Where am I? How did people do this?
So this video could have been a laundry list of different ghost portrayals in history
that kind of added up to a trope. I think there's merit in tracing the symbol. Uh,
for example, there's the Hammersmith Ghost in 1804,
where somebody thought a guy in white clothes was a ghost and actually killed him.
And this illustration for it became super famous, no doubt impacted how we think about ghosts. The
same ghost for this illustration of "Oh, whistle, and I'll come to you." It is super ghosty. This
continued into 20th century filmed portrayals. "It's what we've been reduced to sheets?"
"Think of them as death shrouds, and the moaning is important."
But what I find most interesting is that the solution of ghosts wearing sheets,
it was a logical solution to an illogical idea: the belief in ghosts.
But isn't this the truth behind so many things that we believe in? The analysis
of the moon landing using meticulous science that just happens to be wrong,
or the diagramming of JFK's assassination and everything else? I'm sure that you can think
of some things that you don't believe in where the logic surrounding it doesn't seem sound.
We've got a theory, right? A leap of imagination, and it's kind of this
formless thing. And then we fit rules around it as a way to convince ourselves that it's true,
to strengthen our belief with tools that are outside of belief that look like logic. The rules,
they are hiding the thing that is under the sheet.
All
right. Uh, that is it for this one. Thank you for watching. Happy Halloween. I'm sorry I
couldn't dress up like a ghost. I thought it was gonna be really easy, but I'm like going around
everywhere. It's like, do people have different sheets? I mean, how, what is the technology here?
This is a personal channel where I post personal videos, history videos, stuff like that.
Um, if you can, uh, subscribe, that'd be great. Uh, leave a comment what you think about this,
uh, history, if you think I left pieces out that are important,
and otherwise, I will see you in the next one. Have a good and spooky,
uh, Halloween. And don't, don't do the ghost costume. It's just not worth it.
Right. Yeah, see like... (trails off, never to be seen outside of a sheet again).