Why ghosts wear clothes or white sheets instead of appearing in the nude Shane McCorristine , Newcastle University When you think of a ghost, what comes to mind? A ghastly, mouldy winding-sheet? A malevolent pile of supernatural armour? Or a sinister gentleman in a stiff Victorian suit? In 1863 George Cruikshank, the caricaturist and illustrator of Dickens’s novels, announced a “discovery” concerning the varied appearance of ghosts. It does not seem, he wrote : That any one has ever thought of the gross absurdity and impossibility of there being such things as ghosts of wearing apparel … Ghosts cannot, must not, dare not, for decency’s sake, appear without clothes; and as there can be no such thing as ghosts or spirits of clothes, why then, it appears that ghosts never did appear and never can appear. Why aren’t ghosts naked? This was a key philosophical question for Cruikshank and many others in Victorian Britain. Indeed, stories of naked or clothesless ghosts,...
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