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October 25, 2023 13 mins

The simple bed sheet has provided countless kids and adults with an easy go-to Halloween costume. But why do we associate white sheets with ghosts anyway?

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here, and we're all jacked up because
Halloween's coming. We've been eating candy for six weeks straight.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
And sure things are getting spoopy in here.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Spoopy.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Spoopy. It's a word. It means not quite spooky, a
lighthearted version of spooky.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Is that like your own word?

Speaker 2 (00:28):
No, it's a real thing. You can look it up
and we'll wait.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Okay, hold on a second. Yep, your story checks out.
It's a real word.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
All right. Well, let's talk about bedsheet ghosts then, because
I picked this one out when I was looking for
something spooky and I just I kind of have had
a bit of nostalgia for the old school bedsheet ghosts,
and I was like, well, where in the world did
that come from? Who started doing that? Because it's a thing,
you see people still do it as a cut real
costume occasionally, whether or not you don't have the money

(00:58):
to scrape up for like some expensive cop assume, or
if you're just lazy. Either way, it's great, and it's
also been in a gazillion pieces of pop culture, like
Beetlejuice and Scooby Doo and Charlie Brown and all kinds
of stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
Our friend Toby produced a movie that it featured in recently,
A Ghost Story.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
I stopn't seeing that. I gotta see it.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
It's interesting, like it is art house is it's a
very art house like. There's a lengthy scene where Rooney
Mara just sits there and eats pie quietly in her kitchen.
Like that's a scene. It's really interesting, but it's cool.
It's a cool concept. But the ghost is just wearing
a bed sheet the whole time. Yeah, it's iconic exactly.

(01:41):
I think that's the point. And I never stopped to
question that. I think that was a great question that
you had in your head. And it's really I love
things where you just stop and think, where did this
come from? And there's a definitive answer that makes complete sense.
And this happens to be one of those things.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
Yeah, I love. So we dug into Salon dot com,
Tuftinneedle dot Com, and The Daily Beast, and everyone's story
is the same. So it has to be true. But
it comes from the fact that back in olden days,
and specifically, I mean we can go back to the
time of Jesus if you'd like to, but specifically forward

(02:21):
a bit to seventeenth century Britain when people would wrap
their deceased loved ones in white sheets burial shrouds to
bury them. They used to do that, you know, just
routinely back in ancient times. But then as we got
a little more moderate and coffins came around, if you
had money, you could still go with a coffin, but

(02:42):
if you didn't, you were still using that linen sheet probably.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
Yeah, and it's actually come full circle again because one
of the hallmarks of a green burial is using a
burial shroud instead of a coffin.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
That's right, So a.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
Burial shroud is associated with dead people, and if a
dead person returned from the grave i e. A ghost
mm hmm, you would think that they're probably still wearing
their burial shroud or the bed sheet that they were
buried in, and that that is how bed sheets became

(03:14):
synonymous with ghosts.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, and we could stop there. This could be the
shortest short stuff.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
Yeah, but it gets even more interesting if you asked me.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
It does because all these great websites found some pretty
cool stories to tie into this, and this is something
I never knew it was so synonymous with spooking people
that thieves in London and dare I say, Greater England
would wear the stuff sometimes. I read some sites that
said they would wear it just to scare people sometimes

(03:46):
and rob them on the street. And I also saw
sometimes they would scare them from their home so they
could then just be like, all right, we got the
place to ourselves, let's rob.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
It either way. I mean, don't you deserve to be robbed? Yeah? Scared?
Maybe they were just like, oh god, a robber, and
that's really why they were running out, not that they
thought it was a ghost.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
Sure, and he's wearing a sheet, so he must be dangerous.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
So clearly, by this time, sheets and ghosts were fully
in the mind of the pop culture. I guess, right.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
The thing is is at this time, around this time
in the early eighteen hundreds, like I think eighteen oh five,
maybe there is a very famous case of a person
being mistaken for a bed sheet wearing ghost who paid
with their life basically for walking around wearing a white
outfit and refusing to wear anything but that.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
Yeah, because here's what happens. People thieves are wearing these
things are going around and robbing folks and scaring them
out of their house to rob them. And so, of
course what's going to happen is, well intended angry citizens
are going to rise up and they're going to be
like street cop ghost hunters, and they're going to walk
around trying to ghost bust.

Speaker 1 (05:01):
Yes, but this particular case, the guy who is responsible
for the death, his whole defense was I thought that
was a ghost, right, Oh, okay, okay, let's think it.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
He but he was he was ghost hunting criminals. Though
at the time that was his defense. He thought it
was a ghost. But I thought that they knew they
were criminals. That was the whole point.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
No, not in this particular case. No, okay, well let's
talk about it. So the guy we're talking about who
died was Thomas Millwood's and this is in Hammersmith, which
is in a neighborhood in West London. And Francis Smith
is the guy that you're referring to who was out
hunting ghosts. And I think what you're talking about is
there were a bunch of reports of ghosts attacking people,

(05:48):
not necessarily killing somebody, but that the word on the
street was there're ghosts out there that are doing harmful things,
and that's what brought Francis Smith out.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
Yeah, I think you're right, funny because I looked over
this quite a few times, and every single time my
read of it was he was a criminal vigilante and
he knew that ghosts people were putting on the sheets
and doing it. But I think you're dead right. I
think he's he was a ghost hunter.

Speaker 1 (06:15):
He was, and so he ran across Thomas Milwood, who
was I think a bricklayer. And Thomas Milwood was well
known for wearing white pants, white shirt, white apron and
his wife was even like, dude, you know there's like
a ghost panic going on out there. You probably should
wear something that's not white so people know, you know,

(06:35):
you're not a ghost. And he says, after your labor day,
exactly right, it's so ghost, Francis.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
You you got to put away that searsucker suit and
all your white stuff.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
Exactly. So Thomas said, no, nay, stay out of my business.
I wear white and I like it. It's my signature color.
And she's like, it's not just a color, it's the
presence of all colors. And the conversation has kept going
on like this, but we'll take Yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:01):
That's right, and very sadly he was killed because of that.
They were at the trial. I believe they found out
that Millwood had supposedly scared this couple in a carriage
whinde out. Yeah, yeah, not like I'm trying to rob you.
Just like everyone thought he was, I guess a ghost,

(07:22):
even though it wasn't a sheet because he was wearing
all white. I'm kind of worrying about wondering about nineteenth
century London all of a sudden.

Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yeah, same here. As a matter of fact, I mean
talk about superstitious.

Speaker 2 (07:33):
So the long and the short of it is, Millwood
was sadly killed and Smith was sentenced to hang. Initially,
and King George the Third stepped in and said, Nope,
I like the cut of this guy's jib. Let's just
give him a full pardon. Pretty nice, Pretty nice. Shall
we take a break?

Speaker 1 (07:54):
Let us take a break.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
Yeah, all right, we'll be right back with more bed
sheet ghosting.

Speaker 1 (08:27):
So bed sheets with ghosts are have been around for
quite a while, but there was like a there have
been diversions off of that straight path from then to now.
For example, ghosts were synonymous with wearing suits of armor,
particularly Hamlet, Hamlet's father when he comes back, he's wearing
a suit of armor, or Jacob Marley was just wearing

(08:48):
his regular clothes that he died in or was buried in,
but with chains or another one that lasted for a
really long time were just straight up skeletons, like anime
skeletons that were moving around and talking and scaring people.
They were essentially ghosts. But that bed sheet or that

(09:09):
burial shroud or whatever you want to call it, draped
over a dead person, that being a ghost. That's the
one that's really kind of become universal.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
Yeah, And it was the nineteenth century that that really
really finally was fully embedded, when well, they didn't use
burial shrouds by that point. Most people were in coffins
at this point, but if you didn't have a lot
of money, you were still in that same position, but
instead of like a linen shroud, they would just wrap
you in the sheet on the bed that you died in,

(09:42):
basically y and wrap you up, tie knots on the
ends and thus ingrained the bedsheet ghost.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
Yeah, hope you like that floral pattern because you're trapped
with it for a turnament.

Speaker 2 (09:52):
Right for the star Wars sheets.

Speaker 1 (09:54):
So the bed sheet and the dead person was so connected.
By the late nineteenth century, when spiritualism, a mediumship became
really popular. If you took a double exposed photo with
a person wearing a bed sheet and you superimposed it
next to the living person you were taking a ghost

(10:16):
photo of. They would see that and be like, oh
my god, there's a ghost right behind me. A person
wearing a bed sheet they would take to believe as
a ghost.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
Yeah. So of course psychics and mediums and people that
did stuff like that, they would have all sorts of
rigs to make it look like the ghost was in
the room with you, and it seemed like it work.
I guess they were making enough money doing it. Of course,
some people got in trouble for that kind of thing occasionally.
So eventually it moved to the stage, and they found

(10:46):
some theater scholars from the time that said, you know,
we did some polling and we found that people are
more scared when we use the bedsheet ghost on stage
than just somebody in like white makeup rattling chains.

Speaker 1 (10:59):
Yeah. Leslie, the theater scholar who did the.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
Polling from the candy company. Leslie gets around, right.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
I think that the time when it became not scary
was when children's cartoons kind of took over the idea
of a bed sheet ghost and made them not scary
because these were children's cartoons. There's a really famous example
of Mickey Mouse cartoon from nineteen thirty seven called Lonesome Ghosts,

(11:28):
and the ghosts are not clearly wearing bed sheets. Because
what's interesting, Chuck is if you look at these ghosts,
or you look at Casper or the ghost or whatever,
they are white, transparentish and generally featureless. They'll have eyes
or a nose or something, but there's no general there's
no general shape to them. And it's like the bed

(11:49):
sheet covered ghost has now morphed into a ghost made
out of something like a bed sheet.

Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, Like Casper isn't a weird kid wearing a bed sheet, right,
Casper is made of bed sheet if you.

Speaker 1 (12:04):
Look closely, though, I'm pretty sure it is Richie rich
under there, right.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
Oh man, I never thought about that. That's I think
you might be right. I am never made that connection.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
So I think, Chuck, we've proven, beyond the shadow of
a doubt that bed sheets are associated with ghosts.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
Yes, and you know what I might I might do
that this year. I'm kind of short on costumes.

Speaker 1 (12:25):
That's great. Well, one of these sites that you that
you came across suggests that if you're gonna use it
as a costume, find an old sheet that's frayed or thinning,
because it'll be ten times scarier.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
M you know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna get
a brand new one and not even iron it so
it still has those folded crease markers.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
That's the scariest of all.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
Yeah, the laziest costume of all.

Speaker 1 (12:48):
You got anything else?

Speaker 2 (12:50):
I got nothing else.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
I got one thing. Happy Halloween, everybody, Happy Halloween. Short
Stuff's Out, if.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
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