Why ghosts wear clothes instead of appearing naked

Shane McCorristine: When do you think about the spirit, what comes to mind? Phantom, moldy winding sheet? In a bad level of supernatural armor? Or maybe sinister gentlemen in a stiff Victorian suit?

In 1863, George Cruikshank, a caricature and illustrator of Dickens's novel, announced a “discovery” about the diverse appearance of ghosts. It doesn't seem to wrote:

“That anyone has ever thought about gross absurdity and the inability to appear such as ghosts of wearing clothing … Ghosts cannot or cannot, do not dare, because of decency, appear without clothes; and because there can be no such thing as ghosts or ghosts of clothes, why then it seems that ghosts have never appeared and they can never appear.”

Why are the ghosts not naked? This was a key philosophical question for Cruikshank and many others in Victorian Great Britain. Indeed, stories about naked or goalless spirits, especially outside folklore, are extremely scarce.

Both skeptics and hangs-hosts were joyful to think about how exactly ghosts could have form and strength in the material world. What kind of things could be done from, allow them to share our plane of existence in all its mundane?

The image of the Spirit as a figure in a white winding or funeral shock has been retaining its iconic status for hundreds of years, because it suggests continuity between the corpse and the spirit.

The main social role of the spirit before the up-to-date period was to wear a message living outside the grave, so that the link to funeral clothing makes sense. This can be seen in the medieval trail of three living and three dead, in which some hunters meet their future skeletal corpse, wrapped in bedding, admonishing them to the memory of death.

However, until the mid -nineteenth century, along with spiritualism and early forms of mental research, spreading around the Western world, people began to report ghosts dressed in everyday and contemporary clothes.

This caused problems for people interested in studying the reality of ghosts. If the spirit was an objective reality, why should he wear clothes?

If the principles of spiritism were true, is the soul that returned to visit the Earth, the featherlight or other form of the vital substance will not be created? Were ghost clothes also spiritual, and if so, did they share in their essence or were there ghosts of clothes in themselves?

You can take an idealistic position and say that the clothes were metaphysical ideas related to the immortal identity of the user-the spirit of the spirit means more than just revealing the soul's strength.

Another explanation was that ghost Sears automatically dress the ghost through unconscious processes. And so we see the spirit in his ordinary dress, because it is a mental image that we have people, and this choice of clothing will most likely inspire recognition.

Critic and anthropologist Andrew Lang made comparisons between sleep and vision of the ghosts in 1897, when he stated that:

“We do not see naked people, as a rule, in our dreams; and hallucinations, awakening of dreams, in accordance with the same principle. If the spirit opens the door or raises the restriction in sight, it is also that it is only part of the illusion. His hand did not open, it did not open … it was not discouraged … This was not discouraged in the same way.

For Lang, ghost clothes were things from which dreams are created. The implication of the fact that the Sears of Ghost are chests of drawers, but not demolished, seems to reflect the penetrating morality of ghosts, in which most of the nineteenth-century ghosts have been disinfected and clean. The strange assumption of the Lang that there was no nudity in dreams, it reminds.

The issue of ghosts

Fashion and clothing were crucial for identifying classes, sex and profession during the Victorian period. Servant class spirits seemed particularly related to their clothes, not faces or voices – the motive that appears in some reports on the ghosts sent to the Strand magazine in 1908.

Here, the spiritual host informed that “a character who had nothing supernatural, being simply a servant in a featherlight cotton dress … and with a white hat … The whole character had a general home appearance, so that it was the one I thought about. It was not the least like a chef who was dressed in a much darker cottage.”

Clothes identify people and make them able to represent – nudity disturbs this way of immediate categorization of someone.

The issue of ghost clothes is interesting for supernatural historians, because, like a loose thread, attracting it begins to develop some assumptions about matter in spiritualism. Do ghosts remain injured or disabilities that eat them in life?

And what about the erotic meat of the ghosts-devoting and kissing between living and wrinkles in the room snow and “ectoplasm” (gauze-like spiritual substance) photographed from media holes? Could he even have sex with ghosts?

Such nodal debates did not disappear in the 21st century. Indeed, “spectrophilia” – or love for ghosts – is a fetish, which is a lively topic of debate on the Internet today. Another return of the screw in a long history of how ghosts matter in the world of the living.

Shane McCorristine, reader of the history of culture, Newcastle University

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