One of the
oldest tropes in the book: 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:
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.
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 12'th episode of Macross Frontier Alto used 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.
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.
- 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.
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.
Real Life
- 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 PO Ws 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.
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.
