Why do ghosts wear clothes or white sheets instead of appearing naked?

When you think of a ghost, what comes to mind? A creepy, moldy sheet? A sinister pile of supernatural armor? Or perhaps a sinister gentleman in a stiff Victorian suit?

In 1863, George Cruikshank, the caricaturist and illustrator of Dickens's novels, announced a “discovery” about the diverse appearances of ghosts. It doesn't seem he wrote: :

That anyone has ever thought of the gross absurdity and impossibility of such a thing as ghosts with clothes… Ghosts cannot, cannot, cannot, for the sake of decency, appear without clothes; and since there can be no such thing as ghosts or ghosts of clothes, why then does it seem that ghosts have never appeared and can never appear.

Why aren't ghosts naked? This was a key philosophical question for Cruikshank and many others in Victorian Britain. Indeed, stories about nude or nude ghosts, especially outside folklore, are extremely scarce. Skeptics and spirit seers alike enjoy wondering how spirits can have form and power in the material world. What kind of material can they be made of that allows them to share our plane of existence, in all its mundaneness?

The image of the ghost as a figure in a white sheet or burial shroud has retained its iconic status for hundreds of years because it suggests continuity between the corpse and the ghost.

Main the social role of the spirit before the newfangled era was intended to carry a message to those living beyond the grave, so the connection to funeral clothing makes sense. This can be seen in the medieval trope Three alive and three deadin which some hunters meet their future skeletons, wrapped in cloth, admonishing them to remember death.

However, in the mid-19th century, with the spread of spiritualism and early forms of psychic research in the Western world, people began to report seeing spirits dressed in everyday and contemporary clothing.

This created problems for those interested in investigating the reality of ghosts. If a ghost was an objective reality, why would it wear clothes? If the principles of spiritism were true, shouldn't the soul that returned to visit earth be made of lithe or some other form of ethereal substance? Were the spirit robes also spiritual, and if so, did they share a common essence, or were they stand-alone spirit robes?

One could take an idealistic stance and say that clothes were metaphysical ideas related to the immortal identity of the wearer – an identity of spirit signifying more than just the appearance of soul power.

Another explanation was that spirit seers dress the spirit automatically, through unconscious processes. And so we see the ghost in his or her usual attire because that is the image we have in our mind of that person, and that choice of clothing is most likely to attract approval.

Critic and anthropologist Andrew Lang made comparisons between dreams and ghost vision in 1897 when: he stated this: :

As a rule, we do not see naked people in dreams; and hallucinations, which are waking dreams, follow the same principle. If a ghost opens a door or lifts a veil from our eyes, it is also just part of the illusion. The door didn't open; the curtain was not lifted… This was done in the same way as when a hypnotized patient is told that “his hand is burnt”, real blisters appear in his imagination.

For Lang, ghost clothes were the stuff dreams are made of. The resulting conclusion that ghost seers are dressers rather than undressers seems to reflect a pervasive ghost morality that most 19th century ghosts were cleansed and pure. This confirms Lang's strange assumption that there is no nudity in dreams.

The case of ghosts

Fashion and clothing were central to identifying class, gender and occupation in the Victorian period. The ghosts of the servant class seemed to be particularly attached to their clothes rather than their faces or voices – a theme that appears in some ghost reports submitted to The Strand magazine in 1908.

Here the seeing spirit reported seeing “a figure that had nothing supernatural about it, just a servant in a light cotton dress… and a white cap… The whole figure had the general appearance of a maid, so that she was the one I was thinking of.” It was nothing like the cook who dressed in much darker cotton.”

Clothes identify people and make them capable of representation – nudity disrupts this way of immediate categorization.

The issue of ghost clothing is compelling to historians of the supernatural because, like a loose thread, pulling on it begins to unravel some of the assumptions about matter in spiritualism. Do ghosts retain injuries and disabilities that befell them in life? What about the erotic corporeality of ghosts – the touching and kissing of the living and the dead in the séance room and the photographed “ectoplasm” (a gauze-like spiritual substance) emerging from the media's orifices? Could the living even have sexual relations with ghosts?

These kinds of convoluted debates have not disappeared in the 21st century. Indeed, “spectrophilia” – or the love of ghosts – is a fetish that is a lively topic of debate on the Internet today. Another turn of the screw in the long history of the importance of spirits in the world of the living.

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