People Hardly Ever See A Naked Ghost. Illustration: Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach (1851-1913).

What’s The Reason Ghosts Come Clothed?

On first thought, it seems to make little sense for ghosts to wear clothes. After all, one advantage of being disembodied is that you wouldn’t have the physical needs of finding food to keep from going hungry, or wearing clothes to stay warm and otherwise protected from the elements. Then there’s the metaphysical conundrum of the ghostly clothing itself. Where would it come from? Are the garments ghosts in their own right, as well?

In his book, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts, author and academic Owen Davies gathers several centuries of debate on this interesting issue. He quotes 19th century writer and hauntings expert Catherine Crowe as pointing out that there are other reasons for clothing aside from warmth and sex appeal. She adds that if ghosts are able to recreate the images of their living selves in order to appear before their survivors, there is no reason they couldn’t also recreate their clothing: If a spirit could “conceive of its former body it can equally conceive of its former habiliments, and so represent them, by the power of will to the eye, or present them to the constructive imagination of the seer.” [continue reading…]

Shakespeare’s Hamlet Encounters His Father’s Ghost. Illustration: Henry Fuseli (1741-1825).

Literary Ghosts: The Importance Of Hamlet’s Ghost

European playwrights and poets have incorporated ghosts into their work at least since the time of Homer. But until the time of Shakespeare, most literary ghosts had two things in common: 1) They were generally served up as “light fare” whose main function was to pleasantly frighten or otherwise entertain the audience rather than to deepen the audience’s understanding of the human mind and imagination, and 2) They were meant to be taken literally as ghosts; in other words, the audience was given no reason to think that the ghost was anything more or less than the actual shade of a departed person.

Then came Shakespeare, who along with his other astonishing innovations was one of the first Western writers to offer the possibility of a psychological ghost as opposed to a literal one. In Hamlet, most notably, Shakespeare leaves open the possibility that the armored ghost of Hamlet’s father may at least in part be the product of Hamlet’s own mind—specifically, a manifestation of his guilt at his failure to take action against his father’s murderer. [continue reading…]

Illustration For Washington Irving’s The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow. Artist: Frederick Simpson Coburn (1871-1960.)

What Does A Ghost Look Like?

Aalthough we don’t know for certain whether ghosts are real, we do know what they look like thanks to scientific surveys of 1,800 people who claim to have seen them. The surveys were conducted in 1968 and 1974 by Britain’s Institute of Psychophysical Research, and the results were reported in the 1975 book Apparitions, by Celia Green and Charles McCreery.

The researchers found that over 80 percent of ghosts were in the form of people, with the remainder taking the shape of animals and, occasionally, inanimate objects. The vast majority of animal ghosts were cats.

One surprising result of the surveys was that, rather than being transparent or translucent, most ghosts were described by people who had seen them as opaque—in other words, solid enough to block the view of whatever was behind them. The majority of apparitions also contained some color. However, a minority of ghosts are translucent or transparent, and it is also common for an opaque ghost to fade to transparency as it begins to disappear. [continue reading…]