Old trope about ghosts being a long white bedsheet

[Senegoid]

@Don_Draper

Then suddenly it occurred to me – how did the trope ever start of a ghost being depicted as a figure in a long white sheet (with or without eye-holes) and going “Whoooooooooooo” ?

Seems easy to speculate about the “going ‘Whoooooooooooo’” part. Owls hooting in the night.

[Unpronounceable]

@Mister_Rik

If the ghost is supposed to be the soul of the departed, not the body, why is it wearing anything at all?

Do you really want to see your grandpa naked?

[Guest-starring_Id]

@Unpronounceable

Do you really want to see your grandpa naked?

…and probably in some unflattering stage of decomposition?

[Digital_is_the_new_Analog]

@Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker

99er thread on the subject.

(I just wanted to point out that user #1972 posted a link to thread #7291. I’m amused by that, for some reason.)

[Don_Draper]

@ekedolphin

Don’t know where it originated, but in addition to those examples already named, I love the dead couple pulling it on Lydia in Beetlejuice, and Mort’s appearance in the webcomic Questionable Content. In both cases, the person they’re trying to scare completely no-sells it.

the Beetlejuice scene.

[Kimstu]

@aldiboronti

No, way way earlier than that. Satua nailed it, the ghost wears a winding sheet, a shroud. There are illustrations in Elizabethan books showing the ghost in a shroud. John Dee, the famous Elizabethan conjurer has a well-known picture in one of his books showing him in a cemetery at night invoking a spirit from the grave. The ghost is attired in the usual white shroud from head to foot.

Yup. Shakespeare, Hamlet (circa 1600), Act I, Scene 1:

Horatio: In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun, and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.
And even the like precurse of feared events,
As harbingers preceding still the fates
And prologue to the omen coming on,
Have heaven and earth together demonstrated
Unto our climatures and countrymen.

(Emphasis added.)