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A character is stuck in a room for any reason. The room has a bed and a window. The prisoner makes a rope using the sheets of the bed and climbs out the window.
The first snag in this plan should be a guarantee that there's enough length to reach the ground. It never happens, whether you're in a second-story bedroom or in a cell in the Evil Tower Of Ominousness.
The second snag that never occurs should be getting the window open. Has no one ever heard of glass, locks or bars?
The third snag should be doing it without being seen. Good thing The Guards Must Be Crazy.
Examples:
Anime
- In Yu-Gi-Oh, Mokuba attempts to escape from Pegasus' castle by climbing down a bed sheet rope. It doesn't work, as he runs out of sheets a fair way up the tower. As he panics two of the sheet's knots slip, and he plummets. However, in a bit of standard cartoon magic, he survives. This despite the fact he clearly falls from above the height of the trees.
- In the 12th episode of Macross Frontier, Alto used a bedsheet ladder to escape the custody of a rogue Zentradi group. It looked somewhat realistic because they were kept on a second floor only, in a very makeshift cell, guarded by not terribly determined guards, and all that on a military base full of 20-meter-tall soldiers armed to the teeth.
- Euphemia uses one in her debut episode of Code Geass. It's about two stories too short, so of course she falls into the arms of her future romantic interest.
Comic Book
- Nicely subverted by Modesty Blaise, she carefully keeps track of the guard rotas and uses equipment specially smuggled in her bra to saw through the bar. When the guard sees the Bedsheet Ladder and rushes into the cell, she brains him from behind with the cut out bar. Now she has the run of the place to reccy the real escape before hiding in the neighbouring cell.
Film
- Subverted in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Prince Herbert puts together a bedsheet ladder to escape from the tower, but is stalled by Lancelot's hesitance until his father cuts the rope and sends him plummeting to his doom. Of course, as we all know, he was Not Quite Dead.
- In The Great Race, Natalie Wood's character makes one of these out of her clothes. It doesn't work, but we do get to enjoy several subsequent scenes of her in period lingerie.
- Done in An American Tail to escape from a sweatshop.
- In Up, Carl tries to lower down Russell with one of these. Then it breaks. Fortunately, it was an Imagine Spot.
Literature
- In World War Z, one of the anecdotes is an Otaku telling the chronicler that he escaped from his high rise in Japan by making a Bedsheet Ladder...it was slow going and extremely dangerous given that he was weaponless, the high rise was full of zombies, and he had to break into a new apartment every couple of floors to get more sheets.
- In Stephen King's Eyes of the Dragon, a prince attempts this with individual threads of the napkins. Guess whether he succeeded or not.
- This being Stephen King, he has to jump the last 50 feet or so.
- In the Discworld novel The Fifth Elephant, Sybil Vimes escapes a room via this method; it was one of the more useful things she learned while attending her all-girls boarding school.
- An Encyclopedia Brown mystery revolved around this trope - a starlet said that a big, masked intruder broke into the room, knocked out her bodyguard, grabbed a diamond-encrusted statue, and climbed out the window from a bedsheet ladder tied to one of the bedposts. However, Chief Brown and his son proved them to be lying by asking Bugs Meany (who happened to be around at the time) to climb up the bedsheets so he could meet the starlet - when he did so, his (significantly less than the alleged intruder) weight pulled the bed from the wall and released a fountain pen trapped in between.
- How come the oldest known case of this hasn't been mentioned!? In the good book itself, Michal helps her beloved David escape her father, King Saul's, wrath with this trick.
- Perhaps because one, it's not one of the more well-known passages, and two, because it isn't clear from the text that this was the method by which she let him down from the window. She did, however, cover an image so that when the messengers went to bring him to the king, Michal could tell them he was sick so they wouldn't get close enough to find out he wasn't there.
Live Action TV
- A rare subversion occurred on Jeeves And Wooster when Gussie wanted to use Bertie's sheet to escape. Bertie refused to let him, as much because it wouldn't work as because he didn't want his sheets dirty and knotted.
- To be fair, Bertie's been known to use his sheets for the same purpose. At least in the books.
- Threes Company's trio tried to do this when trapped in Jack's bedroom by diamond thieves (yes, really,) but they ended up throwing the whole sheet out the window.
- This was tested by the Myth Busters and confirmed- Grant was able to climb down a 14-storey building using a rope made from prison bedsheets. Kari did it with human hair plaited into a rope, while Tory did the same thing with toilet roll.
Western Animation
- Bloo tries it in an episode of Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends, but forgets to tie the other end down.
- Daffy Duck does it to escape from gangsters in the Looney Tunes short Golden Yeggs, but the bottom half of the ladder turns out the be the gangsters themselves.
- Did anyone else find it particularly funny that, as a duck, there's no real reason for him to bother with the rope in the first place...
- In Porky Pig's Feat, Daffy and Porky use one to try and escape a hotel without paying. The hotel manager catches them at the bottom and gives Porky a hotfoot that sends them flying back up the Bedsheet Ladder to their room.
- In the Mickey Mouse cartoon Ye Olden Days, when rescuing Princess Minnie Mickey is surprised to find that there is no prearranged rope in the tower she's locked away in, so he constructs one out of lady in waiting Clarabelle Cow's many articles of clothing. The couple is caught on their way down while passing the King's window.
Real Life
- This troper and some friends tested this myth in action. It's certainly possible (and fun) but harder than they make it look on television.
- Estonian thief Martin Vaiksaar used knotted bedsheets to scale 3 23-foot walls to escape from a jail near Finland's capital city of Helsinki. Despite the facility being brand new with a (presumably) recent staff, it took them an entire day to notice that he had escaped. The tale gets weirder in that he managed to get back to Estonia to find that the police were not interested in the fact that Finnish and Estonian authorities were both meant to be after him.
- In May 2008, a thief named Aaron Stephen Forden escaped a New Zealand prison
 . Bonus points for referencing this wiki.
- Two Polish POWs almost escaped this way from Colditz Castle in Saxony in 1941. They were in solitary, the bedsheet rope was supplied by accomplices on a higher story, and the escape route took them through the attic of a guardroom. They were caught only because they made too much noise trying to get down the outer walls.
- Gruffydd ap Llywelyn Fawr, son of one of the last ruling princes of independent Wales, was imprisoned by the King of England in the Tower of London. He attempted to escape in the night using a rope of knotted clothes and bedsheets, but the rope broke and he fell almost a hundred feet to his death. He was found the following morning with his head rammed into his neck cavity.
- Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, escaped a bomb planted in his house via a chair tied to a line of bedsheets. Unfortunately (for Henry, at least) while he made his escape he ran right into the people who planted the bomb and they promptly strangled him.
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