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5th Feb: Echo Chamber Season 1 blooper reel on Youtube here
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Well, while I can appreciate your classic look, I don't think anyone has been scared of the 'bedsheet phantasm' ensemble for a long time.
The sheet phantom is a ghost....that materializes as a sheet. I think it's based off the old "hey, it's just a guy with a sheet over him pretending to be a ghost" joke. But the idea of a haunted bedsheet just isn't cool at any speed.
Our Ghosts Are Different, and they look like refugees from the linens aisle.
If ghosts in Western media aren't dressed as the deceased did in life, then chances are they're dressed as the deceased did in death. Originally, this meant grave clothes and a long, white, flowing burial shroud. If the same reasoning were applied to modern burial customs, it would mean that most ghosts would dress in a three-piece suit, but the trope is seen as too cheesy in the present day to be updated in such a logical manner.
Like many images common to modern culture, the Bed Sheet Ghost began as a theatrical convention that has long lost its context. In Shakespeare's day, it was common to portray ghosts in armor on stage (for example, Hamlet's father is often depicted in a full suit of armor in historical depictions.) In Elizabethan England, armor was no longer worn in combat, and the costuming convention at the time was to dress characters in contemporary (Renaissance) clothing. So, by dressing a character in armor, the character was given an out of date look, and recognized as a ghost. However, as special effects became more elaborate, it became common to lower the actor playing the ghost onto stage with a pulley. Of course, the heavy armor clanked loudly, and by the 19th century, the sight of an armored ghost on stage was more likely to bring laughter than fear.
Because of this, by the 1800s, theatres realized they had to create a new, recognizable look for ghost characters, one that would allow the actor to enter and leave silently. Perhaps inspired by traditional burial shrouds or depictions of ghosts as ethereal, misty creatures (both attributes predating the Bed Sheet Ghost), actors began to appear draped in white cloth to portray ghosts.
Over time, as the shroud became emblematic of the ghost, ghosts were depicted as less corporeal by showing the shroud without a body underneath it. Some stories even go one step further by showing the ghost as a whispy blob of ectoplasm, vaguely shroud-like in appearance, ŕ la Casper the Friendly Ghost.
As a result, the white sheet has become pop culture's visual shorthand for spirits of the dead, and a bedsheet with eye holes is the standard costume for fictional characters trying to dress like ghosts. This idea dates back at least to the Post-U.S. Civil War period—the white robes and hoods of the Ku Klux Klan were intended to look ghostly. (This Klan connection, in turn, is why the pointy-headed Bedsheet Ghost is no longer a popular design.)
Klan aside, dressing up as a Bedsheet Ghost is usually indicative of an ill-conceived or apathetic scare attempt, because on their own, a person in a white sheet really isn't that scary to anyone over ten years old. Like the armored ghost before it, the Bedsheet Ghost has long lost its fright appeal, and is mostly comical today. This in turn has led to a common subversion: The characters see what seems to be a person in a white sheet and laugh at the obvious costume. Then they lift the sheet and see there's no one underneath it. Cue running and screaming.
While the Bedsheet Ghost is rarely played straight as an attempt to scare the audience, he can still work as a mournful, sympathetic figure.
Definitely Truth in Television for anyone who's celebrated Halloween: If you haven't dressed as a bedsheet ghost at some point, you know someone who has. Unless you're from the Deep South.
Sub-trope of Stock Costume Traits. Compare Jacob Marley Apparel. The Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl is the rather violent Japanese parallel. Not to be confused with a scene wherein a ghost crawls up from underneath the bedsheet and gets you while you lie on the bed.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- A filler episode of Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch had Yuuri setting up shop in a haunted house. In the end, the mermaids scare her out with bedsheet ghosts.
- Kaworu Nagisa starts out as one of these in Puchi Eva@School.
- Used in an episode of Kirby of the Stars. Dedede actually falls for it and thinks it's a real ghost.
Comic Books
- Parodied in a comic strip (title unknown). In it, a girl tries scaring off her brother by using the old Bedsheet Ghost trick but fails as the brother replies, "What's so scary about a bedsheet on your head?" Then she walks out from the room. Next thing you know, she finally gets to scare her brother... by putting a pillow over her head.
- Brazilian character Penadinho/Bug-a-booo and other ghosts from Monica's Gang (though they just look like white humanoids).
- In the graphic novel Odd Is on Our Side (a tie-in to the Odd Thomas novels) a young girl killed by poisoned candy appears to Odd still wearing her bedsheet Halloween costume.
- The Dark Horse character Ghost has a cape/hood ensemble for her costume that evokes shades of this.
- German detective Nick Knatterton once disguised an one - but there are also real ones looking like this!
Film
Literature
- Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost originally popularized this trope.
- It's Older Than Feudalism: Julius Caesar: "The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets."
- The M.R. James story "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad" has...something that manifests itself in the sheets of the unused bed in the hero's hotel room. It's implied that the thing has next to no physical form of its own.
- The TV adaptation plays it straight and makes it work.
- There's something darkly comical about it all. The hero, Parkins, is a po-faced academic who has very definite views on ghosts, so it's deliciously ironic that the thing that terrorizes him chooses to manifest itself in a bedsheet. Not that it makes the story any less terrifying.
- Clive Barker's Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud uses this as an intentionally ridiculous core premise for what can either be read as a fairly serious horror story or a black comedy. The main character manages to come back as a ghost by transferring his spirit from his body to the shroud used to cover him at the morgue.
- In Clifford D. Simak's The Goblin Reservation, the character of Ghost (yes, that's how he's called) is depicted this way.
- One of the solve-it-yourself mysteries of the Clue books features Mr. Boddy's six guests all dressing up as ghosts to try to scare each other, which makes them all feel a little silly—until they notice there are seven ghosts in the room, and one of them doesn't have feet...
- The Harry Potter tie-in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has a creature called a Lethifold that is described as being very like this. It floats into your room at night and smothers you to death.
- And then it eats you. It apparently leaves a bit thicker than before while there is nothing left of you behind. This is one of the reasons nobody can determine the number of Lethifold victims.
- It should be noted, though, that the Lethifold is black, not white, and it doesn't float at all; it just slithers through the ground.
Live-Action TV
- In the Father Ted series 3 episode "The Mainland", Father Noel Furlong wears a bedsheet when he confronts Father Ted and Dougal in the caves.
Father Noel (in bed sheet): Ooooo! Oooooo!
Ted and Dougal: *scream*
Father Noel (throws off bed sheet): Ted!
Ted and Dougal: *scream louder*
- In the British kids' show The Ghosts of Motley Hall, the ghosts want to scare off some people who've been hanging around their house, but the problem is they're invisible to most humans. Solution: One of the ghosts covers himself with an old bedsheet. In other words, a ghost dressing up as a ghost.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Willow was originally going to go out on Halloween in a sexy outfit that she and Buffy made. She chickened out and, mostly to cover up, went as a Bedsheet Ghost instead. Then all of their costumes were enchanted to turn them into the things they were dressed as. Cue scantily clad ghost Willow.
Willow: I'm a ghost!
Giles: Yes. Um... the ghost of what, exactly?
- In Big Bad Beetleborgs, the girl turned invisible in one episode, she tried convincing someone she was a ghost by donning one of these and watching them laugh at her... till it was pulled off and there was no one underneath.
- Referenced in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode Cave Dwellers: when The Hero is fighting an invisible enemy, he tosses his cloak over the foe to reveal his location. Cue Crow: "Ah! Now they're really scary! Booga booga booga!"
- Subverted in Pushing Daisies where in a flashback, young Ned is shown on Halloween in a sheet with fire engines on it.
- However, Chuck shows up in a white sheet later that episode.
- The Janitor on Scrubs dresses up as one of these to haunt pediatrics.
- Subverted in Malcolm in the Middle: Dewey appears to be dressed up as a bedsheet ghost, but he claims to actually be a marshmallow.
- Ace Lightning plays this trope absolutely straight in one episode - and the bad guys are terrified by a kid stuck under a bedsheet.
- Low-budget sci-fi serial "Rocky Jones: Space Ranger" brings us one of the stupidest examples. A Fat, Sweaty Southerner in a White Suit IN SPACE! is trying to steal the land rights to some sort of space gold-mine, and is thwarted not by the Space Rangers, but by a couple of kids throwing a sheet over their remote-control airplane so he thinks it's a ghost. Keep in mind, this is hundreds of years in the future, in a civilization on par with Star Trek...
Music Videos
Stand-Up Comedy
Tabletop Games
- As mentioned in the Head Injury Theater quote above, Dungeons & Dragons has the Sheet Phantom, which is an actual Bedsheet Ghost. As with some of the other actual Bedsheet Ghosts, the explanation given is that the being's spirit is imbued into his bedclothes as he dies.
- Undead cloakers from the Ravenloft setting somewhat resemble this trope, although they were never human, but ghosts of creatures that resemble flying manta rays.
Video Games
- One of enemies in second Painkiller in wonderfully creepy orphanage level is child playing as bedsheet ghost. Do not let them to get close to you.
- A certain variety of mook in the Donkey Kong 64 world "Creepy Castle".
- The ghosts from Pac-Man are even further abstracted. They look like jellyfish with eyeballs.
- When Pac-Man chomps the ghosts in Hanna-Barbera's Animated Adaptation, they get new ghost suits in the appropriate colors out of Mezmaron's closet.
- The second and third cutscenes in the original Pac-Man game demonstrate this: in the second, Blinky chases Pac only to catch his ghost suit on a nail, and in the third, he chases Pac again, but his crappy repair job didn't stay. In both instances, we see part of the creature under the costume.
- The boy who controls Spectre in Twisted Metal: Small Brawl appears dressed as this.
- In Geist, this strategy actually works on someone, scaring her enough to allow you to possess her. Not that there aren't considerably more effective methods used throughout the game...
- To be honest, it's a bit scarier than usual, although the accountant literally sees the sheet rise up off the bed. Raimi-as-a-bedsheet-ghost has an empty dark hood and dives after her, after all.
- You actually get to play as one of these in the Self Explanatory Adventure Game Ghost In The Sheet. Justified in that his "boss" tells him that if the sheet's taken off, what's left of him will scatter away and be lost forever (He died under an incoming bus, which was "very messy"). Actually, the "boss" put the sheet on his definitely-not-fragmented body in order to prevent him from phasing through objects and getting too much information. It doesn't work, of course, as he still manages to get said info...
- Many games feature an approximately spherical version, such as the Boos from Super Mario.
- The series also has literal Bedsheet Ghosts in Yoshis Island and the Paper Mario series.
- One thing that's never made clear about Boos is whether they're actual ghosts who are the remaining spirits of people who are dead, or just a species of ghostlike spirit-beings. Which may or may not be relevant to this trope, but it's worth thinking about; does it count as a bedsheet ghost if it's not actually a ghost?
- One of the puzzles from Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis had Indy dressing up as a bedsheet ghost to try and scare another character. It didn't work very well until the bed sheet was supplemented with some other items.
- In Sonic And Knuckles, Sandopolis Zone Act II featured bedsheet ghosts that appeared as the torches burned down. To start with would be one small one, floating at the top of the screen in a less-than-threatening manner. Then a second one appears and they grow in size and their eyes gain an angry look. When the torches go out completely a third one appears, and all three get bigger and grow horns. If the torches are left off for too long they start swooping down and menacing Sonic. Since the level contains a section where it's very easy to get stuck in a loop and remain stuck well after you've realized you're IN a loop (or even if you were prepared for the loop), these guys can get a little distressing.
- The Sega Genesis version of Ghostbusters uses this in the form of white tablecloth ghosts. As in: the tablecloth floats off the table, comes toward you, and "ties you up" if you don't eliminate it.
- While I'm not sure if any of the other ghosts in the series used this kind of design, the Axe Ghosts in Wario Land 4 are pretty much this... with the pointy hood style that's gone out of fashion for most other media.
- The True Final Boss of Aero Fighters 2 is a tablecloth ghost.
- RuneScape does this twice. Once with a green bedsheet (to fit in with green ghosts) and once with regular bedsheets for a Christmas Carol parody.
- The Pokémon Gastly and Haunter actually both resemble this type of ghost.
- Uninvited specifically invokes this, with a ghost who, according to the narration, "looks like the classic spectre" that comes out of the sky and kills you.
- A sort of one-time deal so far: Kirby can get a "Ghost" ability in Squeak Squad (it has to be unlocked though). He basically takes on this kind of appearance and can possess enemies. It looks silly on him but also cute.
Web Animation
Web Original
Webcomics
Western Animation
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