In 1957, one Popeye cartoon depicted the sailor eating his spinach to annihilate a bunch of ghosts on a haunted ship. When Casper the Friendly Ghost arrived in 1939, it was the first major indicator that culturally, ghosts had become figures of fun. It was a creative element that added a cute twist to the ghosts of old. But their loose outfits, including capes, were clearly fashioned out of sheets. The cartoon ghosts were transparent, with hats and expressive faces. In 1937, Disney released The Lonesome Ghosts, an eight-minute cartoon in which Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy are a ghost extermination team assigned to clear a house of spirits. If bedsheet ghosts had become something of a casual amusement by the end of spirit photography’s heyday, it was children’s cartoons that took that element of fun and ran away with it. A spirit photograph made by 'Melander & Bro', 1889. And that imagery carried into the depictions of ghosts in Victorian spirit photography-a trend that didn’t disappear entirely until the 1930s. It followed that ghosts in white sheets were scarier. Theater scholars argued that unadorned actors playing ghosts were able to elicit greater sympathy from audiences. On-stage ghosts varied enormously, from simple depictions of actors in white face paint or armor, to tricks involving mirrors and trapdoors. These ideas were compounded by theatrical presentations of spirits and hauntings throughout the 19th and into the early 20th century. I should say, however, that the genuine ghost is always white and always makes its first appearance at the haunted spot at precisely 12 o’clock midnight.” Heaton wrote in to say that ghosts “are nearly always white, although some of the authorities admit there are dark ones. One of them, he claimed, was a large white object with long horns that he would have shot if he’d had his pistol with him. Wills, wrote in to say that he had seen two ghosts in his life. In 1889, one Missouri newspaper conducted a poll of its readers, asking if they believed in spirits. Millwood’s tragic death by no means shifted the general public’s ideas about be-sheeted ghosts (or shooting at them). He is depicted as being wrapped in a white sheet despite the fact that the character was not buried in one. An illustration by Andreas Bloch (1860-1917) of 'Gudrun and the Ghost'-characters from 'The Laxdale (Laxdæla) Saga.' In the Icelandic story, a woman is visited in a church courtyard by the ghost of her husband who has just died at sea that day. The “ghost” haunting the neighborhood was later exposed as a local man exercising some personal revenge. Smith was found guilty of murder and sentenced to one year of hard labor. (Local residents and a night watchman had recently reported being terrorized by some such spirit.) At Smith’s subsequent murder trial, Millwood’s wife said her husband had been mistaken as a ghost by three other people before the shooting, and that she had asked him to start wearing an overcoat, to no avail. Smith had seen Millwood’s pristine white work uniform, complete with white apron, and assumed he was a ghost. In 1804 London, a bricklayer named Thomas Millwood was mistaken for a malevolent ghost, and shot and killed by a man named Francis Smith. Even after multiple ghost impersonators were exposed by the authorities over many years, the public continued to believe that unhappy spirits roamed the Earth clad in their burial shrouds. These undead disguises had the dual benefit of hiding the thieves’ true appearances, while also scaring their targets into handing over money. This depiction was, by then, so widely accepted that, an entire subset of English thieves began donning white sheets and pretending to be ghosts. (The maggots are a nice touch, don’t you think?) Depiction of the ghosts from 'The Three Living and the Three Dead.' ('The Psalter of Robert de Lisle' )īy the 1400s, people reporting supernatural phenomena almost always described apparitions as being clad in their death shrouds. In the story of “The Three Living and the Three Dead,” three spirits/corpses warn three noblemen to live virtuous lives or be damned. In the 1300s, ghosts were often presented as skeletons draped in their shrouds, as this depiction from The Psalter of Robert de Lisle (created some time between 13) demonstrates. In poorer families, the recently deceased were simply wrapped up in the sheet from their death bed, and secured inside by a knot tied at either end. The root of it lies in the fact that, up until the 19th century, the dead were almost always wrapped in burial shrouds, rather than placed in coffins. This specific image of ghosts-as-white-sheets has been engrained in our culture for centuries and, until fairly recently, it was considered genuinely terrifying.
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