Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Bed Sheet Ghosts

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

The simple bed sheet has provided countless kids and adults with an easy go-to Halloween costume. But why do we associate white sheets with ghosts anyway?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

13 Days of Halloween Penance Season 4 of the award-winning horror fiction podcast presented in immersive 3D audio. If I am under arrest, you have to tell me what I'm charged with. Starring Natalie Morales of Parks and Recreation and Dead To Me. Please, you've been some kind of mistake. I'm not supposed to be here. How do you know? I'm innocent.

Are any of us truly innocent? Premiering October 19th, ending Halloween. Listen to 13 Days of Halloween on the I Heart radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here and we're all jacked up because Halloween's coming and we've been eating candy for six weeks straight. Short stuff. And things are getting spooopy in here.

Spooopy? Spooopy. It's a word. It means not quite spooky. A lighthearted version of spooky. Is that like your own word? No. It's a real thing. You can look it up and we'll wait. Okay, hold on a second. Yeah, your story checks out. It's a real thing. You can look it up and we'll wait. Okay, hold on a second. Yep, your story checks out. It's a real word. All right, well let's talk about bedsheet ghosts then, because I picked this one out when I was looking for something spooky, and I just, I kind of had a bit of nostalgia for the old school bedsheet ghosts,

and I was like, where in the world did that come from? Who started doing that? Because it's a thing. You see people still do it as a real costume occasionally, whether or not you don't have the money to scrape up for some expensive costume, or if you're just lazy. Either way, it's great. And it's also been in a gazillion pieces of pop culture, like Beetlejuice and Scooby-Doo and Charlie Brown.

And all kinds of stuff. Our friend Toby produced a movie that it featured in recently a ghost story. I stop it seeing that. I gotta see it. It's interesting. Like it is art house. It's very art house. Like there's a lengthy scene where Rooney Mara just sits there and eats pie quietly in her kitchen. I like that scene. It's really interesting, but it's cool.

It's a cool concept, but the ghost is just wearing a bed sheet the whole time. Yeah, it's iconic. Exactly, I think that's the point. And I never stopped a question that. I think that was a great question that you had in your head. And it's really, I love things where you just stop and think, where did this come from?

And there's a definitive answer that makes complete sense. And this happens to be one of those things. Yeah, I love those. So we dug into salon.com, tuftinetal.com and the daily beast and everyone's story is the same. So it has to be true. But it comes from the fact that back in olden days, and specifically, I mean, we can go back to the time of Jesus, if you'd like to.

But specifically, forward a bit to 17th century Britain, when people would wrap their deceased loved ones in white sheets, burial shrouds, to bury them. They used to do that just routinely, back in ancient times, but then as we got a little more modern and coffins came around, if you had money, you could still go with a coffin, but if you didn't,

you were still using that linen sheet probably. Yeah, and it's actually come full circle again, because one of the hallmarks of a green burial is using a burial shroud instead of a coffin. That's right. So a burial shroud is associated with dead people. And if a dead person returned from the grave, i.e. a ghost, you would think that they're probably still wearing their burial shroud or the bed sheet that they were buried in. And that is how bed sheets became synonymous with ghosts.

Yeah, and we could stop there. This could be the shortest short stuff. Yeah, but it gets even more interesting if you ask me. It does because all these great websites found some pretty cool stories to tie into this. And this is something I never knew. It was so synonymous with uh... spooking people

that thieves and london and uh... dare i say greater england would wear the stuff sometimes i read some sites that said they would uh... wear it just to scare people sometimes and rob them on the street and i also saw sometimes they would scare them from their home

so they could then just be like all right right, we got the place to ourselves. Let's rob it. Either way, I mean, don't you deserve to be robbed. It's like, yes, scared you. Maybe they were just like, oh God, a robber. That's really why they were running out, not that they thought it was a ghost. Sure. And he's wearing a sheet, so he must be dangerous.

So clearly by this time, sheets and ghosts were fully in the mind of the pop culture, I guess, right? Yeah. The thing is, is at this time, around this time, in the early 1800s, like, like, like 1805, maybe, there is a very famous case of a person being mistaken for a bedsheet wearing ghost who paid with their life, basically for walking around wearing a white outfit and refusing to wear anything but that. Yeah, because here's what happens. People, thieves are wearing these things, they're going around and Robin folks and scaring them out

of their house to rob them. And so of course, what's going to happen is well-intended angry citizens are going to rise up and they're going to be like street cop ghost hunters. And they're going to walk around trying to ghost bust. Yes, but this particular case, the guy who is responsible for the death, his whole defense was, I thought that was a ghost. Oh, okay. Okay, let's dig in. But he was ghost hunting criminals though at the time. That was his defense. He thought it was a ghost.

But I thought that they knew they were criminals. That was the whole point. No? Not in this particular case, no. Oh, okay. Well, let's talk about it. So the guy we're talking about who died was Thomas Millwood. That's right. And this is in Hammer Smith, which is in a neighborhood in West London. And Francis Smith is the guy that you're referring to who was out

hunting ghosts. And I think what you're talking about is there were a bunch of reports of ghosts attacking people, not necessarily killing somebody. But that the the word on the street was there's ghosts out there that are doing harmful things and that's what brought Francis Smith out. Yeah, I think you're right and it's funny because I looked over this quite a few times. And every single time my read of it was he was a criminal vigilante and he knew that ghosts people were putting on these sheets and doing it, but I think you're dead right. I think he's he was a ghost on her He was and so he ran across Thomas Milwood who was I think a brick layer and Thomas Milwood was well known for wearing white pants white shirt white apron and

His wife was even like dude. You know, there's like a ghost panic going on out there You probably should wear something that's not white so people know, you know, you's like a ghost panic going on out there. You probably should wear something that's not white. So people know, you know, you're not a ghost. And he said, it's after Labor Day. Exactly. Right. It's so ghost, Frances. You got to put away that searsucker suit and all your white stuff. Exactly.

So Thomas said, no, nay, stay out of my business. I wear white and I like it. It's my signature color. And she's like, it's not just the colors, the out of my business. I wear white and I like it. It's my signature color. And she's like, it's not just the colors, the presence of all colors. And the conversation has kept going on like this, but we'll take our leave of it. That's right.

And very sadly, he was killed because of that. They were at the trial, I believe. They found out that Millwood had supposedly scared this couple in a carriage. But I'm unintentionally... Whiteout, yeah, yeah, not like I'm trying to rob you, just like everyone thought he was, I guess, a ghost, even though it wasn't a sheet, because he was wearing all white. I'm kind of worrying about, wondering about 19th century London all of a sudden. Yeah, same here as a matter of fact.

I mean, talk about superstitious. So the long and the short of it is though, Millwood was sadly killed. And Smith was sentenced to hang initially. And King George III stepped in and said, nope. I like the cut of this guy's jib, but let's just give him a full pardon. Pretty nice.

Pretty nice. Pretty nice. Shall we take a break? Let us take a break, yeah. All right, we'll be right back with more bed sheet ghosting. A brand new historical true crime podcast. The year is 1800, a city hall, New York. The first murder trial in the American Judicial System. A mass-ass trial for the charge of murder. Even with defense lawyers, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr on the case, this is probably the most

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Escape. Listen to 13 days of Halloween on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, bedsheets with ghosts have been around for quite a while, but there was like a... there have been diversions off of that straight path from then to now. For example, ghosts were synonymous with wearing suits of armor, particularly Hamlet. Hamlet's father, when he comes back, he's wearing a suit of armor, or Jacob Marley was just wearing his regular clothes that he died in, or was buried in, but with chains. Or another one that lasted for a really long time were just straight up skeletons,

like animated skeletons that were moving around and talking and scaring people, they were essentially ghosts. But that bed sheet or that burial shard or whatever you wanna call it, draped over a dead person, that being a ghost, that's the one that's really kind of become universal. Yeah, and it was the 19th century that that really, really finally was fully embedded when,

well, they didn't use burial shards by that point. Most people were in coffins at this point, but if you didn't have a lot of money, you were still in that same position, but instead of like a linen shroud, they would just wrap you in the sheet on the bed that you died in basically. Yeah. And wrap you up, tie knots on the ends,

and thus ingrained the bed sheet ghost. Yeah. Hope you liked that floral pattern because you're trapped with it for a turn. Right, or the Star Warsheets. So the bedsheet in the dead person was so connected that by the late 19th century when spiritualism and mediumship became really popular. If you took a double exposed photo with a person wearing a bed sheet and you superimposed it next to the living person you were

taking a ghost photo of, they would see that and be like, oh my God, there's a ghost right behind me. A person wearing a bed sheet, they would take to believe as a ghost. Yeah, so of course, psychics and mediums and people that did stuff like that, they would have all sorts of rigs to make it look like the ghost was in the room with you. And it seemed like it worked.

I guess they were making enough money doing it. Of course, some people got in trouble for that kind of thing occasionally. So eventually it moved to the stage and they found some theater scholars from the time that said, you know, we did some polling and we found that people are more scared when we use the bed sheet ghost on stage

than just somebody in like white makeup rattling chains. Yeah, that was Leslie, the theater scholar who did the polling. Yeah, from the candy company. Leslie gets around. Right. I think that the time when it became not scary was when children's cartoons kind of took over the idea of a bedsheet ghost

and made them not scary because these were children's cartoons. There's a really famous example of Mickey Mouse cartoon from 1937 called Lonesome Ghosts and the ghosts are not clearly wearing bedsheets because what's interesting, Chuck, is if you look at these ghosts or you look at Casper, the ghost or whatever, they are white, transparentish, and generally featureless. They'll have eyes or a nose or something, but there's no, there's no general, there's no general shape to them.

And it's like the bedsheet cover ghost has now morphed into a ghost made out of something like a bed sheet. Yeah. Like Casper isn't a weird kid wearing a bed sheet. Right. Casper is made of bed sheet. If you look closely though, I'm pretty sure it is richy rich under there. Right. Oh man, I never thought about that. That's, I think you might be right. I am. Never made that connection. So I think Chuck, we've proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that bed sheets are associated with ghosts. Yes, and you know what? I might do that this year. I'm kind of short on

costumes. That's great. Well, one of these sites that you that you came across suggests that if you're going to use it as a costume, find an old sheet that's frayed or thinning because it'll be 10 times scarier. Mm, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna get a brand new and not even iron it, so it still has those folded crease marks. That's the scariest of all. Yeah, the laziest costume of all.

Mm-hmm. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I got one thing. Happy Halloween, everybody. Happy Halloween everybody. Happy Halloween. Short stuff's out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts to my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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