The best ghost, ever: Richard Kiel on Gilligan’s Island. They must have used a silk sheet (a BIG silk sheet), the flow was wonderful. Mr Howell with his straw boater on his head was hysterically funny as a ghost.
See, this is a great find, because this ran 7 months before “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” but also features a ghost with eyeholes.
I’m a little older than you, and i would have sworn that “white sheet with holes” was a cliche costume for ghosts before 1966.
Probably! I’m just trying to find actual examples of it.
Brace yourself — after some research, I discovered Kiel’s sheet doesn’t have eyeholes, but the seven castaway ghosts do have them. I suspect Kiel was using a parachute and you don’t want to punch holes in a rental ‘chute.
The path of scientific discovery continues! And seven times better.
October 31, 1951:
You might find it in the Peanuts comic strip. The last strip on this page was first run on Oct. 31, 1956. I also recall one where Charlie Brown has a problem using a fitted sheet for a ghost costume.
Just got ninja’d with an even earlier strip!
What year were the Porky Pig/Sylvester haunted house cartoons? Pretty sure the ghost had eyeholes.
I checked. Scaredy Cat (1948) has no ghost at all, just deranged mice. The 2nd and 3rd in the trilogy were in 1954 and 1955.
I would bet you big bux the Little Rascals/Our Gang shorts would have a ghost/haunted house story.
I think you’d lose!
Our Gang, “Spooky Hooky,” 1936 — sheet ghost, no eyeholes.
RIght, I saw that, doesn’t quallify!
I’m confused; what are we looking for?
Oh, sorry, I think I responded way upthread to sheet with eyeholes, not just sheet.
Gotcha! Back to the drawing board.
I did that part. Getting them just right was a one-shot challenge.
IIRC, wasn’t the KKK’s white robe and hood outfit originally conceived of as a ghost costume for the purpose of “pranking” superstitious freedmen?
As historian Elaine Frantz Parsons has written in Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan , while some early Klansmen did wear white, and later Klan mythology would claim they’d dressed up as Confederate ghosts, they usually drew on folk traditions of carnival, circus, minstrelsy, Mardi Gras—or the mid-century “Calico Indians,” hooded and masked farmers rebelling against upstate New York land laws. Klansmen wore gigantic animal horns, fake beards, coon-skin caps, or polka-dotted paper hats; they imitated French accents or barnyard animals; they played guitars to serenade victims. Some Klansmen wore pointed hats suggestive of wizards, dunces, or Pierrots; some wore everyday winter hoods, pillowcases, or flour sacks on their heads.