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. We've been eating candy for six weeks straight.
And sure things are getting spoopy in here.
Spoopy.
Spoopy. 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. 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 have had a bit of nostalgia for the old school bedsheet ghosts, and I was like, well, 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 cut real costume occasionally, whether or not you don't have the money to scrape up for like some expensive cop assume, 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 stopn't seeing that. I gotta see it.
It's interesting, like it is art house is it's a very art house like. There's a lengthy scene where Rooney Mara just sits there and eats pie quietly in her kitchen. Like that's a 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 to 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. So we dug into Salon dot com, Tuftinneedle dot 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 seventeenth century Britain when people would wrap their deceased loved ones in white sheets burial shrouds to bury them. They used to do that, you know, just
routinely back in ancient times. But then as we got a little more moderate 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 mm hmm, you would think that they're probably still wearing their burial shroud or the bed sheet that they were buried in, and that 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 asked 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 spooking people that thieves in London and dare I say, Greater England would wear the stuff sometimes. I read some sites that said they would 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, we got the place to ourselves, let's rob.
It either way. I mean, don't you deserve to be robbed? Yeah? Scared? Maybe they were just like, oh god, a robber, and 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 eighteen hundreds, like I think eighteen oh five, maybe there is a very famous case of a person being mistaken for a bed sheet 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 are going around and robbing 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, right, Oh, okay, okay, let's think it.
He but he was 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, okay, well let's talk about it. So the guy we're talking about who died was Thomas Millwood's and this is in Hammersmith, 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 word on the street was there're ghosts out there that are doing harmful things, and that's what brought Francis Smith out.
Yeah, I think you're right, 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 the sheets and doing it. But I think you're dead right. I think he's he was a ghost hunter.
He was, and so he ran across Thomas Milwood, who was I think a bricklayer. 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're not a ghost. And he says, after your labor day, exactly right, it's so ghost, Francis.
You 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 a color, it's the presence of all colors. And the conversation has kept going on like this, but we'll take Yeah.
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 whinde out. 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 nineteenth 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, Millwood was sadly killed and Smith was sentenced to hang. Initially, and King George the Third stepped in and said, Nope, I like the cut of this guy's jib. Let's just give him a full pardon. 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.
So bed sheets with ghosts are 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 anime skeletons that were moving around and talking and scaring people.
They were essentially ghosts. But that bed sheet or that burial shroud or whatever you want to 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 nineteenth century that that really really finally was fully embedded, when well, they didn't use burial shrouds 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 y and wrap you up, tie knots on the ends and thus ingrained the bedsheet ghost.
Yeah, hope you like that floral pattern because you're trapped with it for a turnament.
Right for the star Wars sheets.
So the bed sheet and the dead person was so connected. By the late nineteenth century, when spiritualism, a 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 work. 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 bedsheet ghost on stage than just somebody in like white makeup rattling chains.
Yeah. Leslie, the theater scholar who did the.
Polling 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 bed sheet ghost and made them not scary because these were children's cartoons. There's a really famous example of Mickey Mouse cartoon from nineteen thirty seven called Lonesome Ghosts, and the ghosts are not clearly wearing bed sheets. Because what's interesting, Chuck is if you look at these ghosts, or you look at Casper or the ghost or whatever,
they are white, transparentish and generally featureless. They'll have eyes or a nose or something, but there's no general there's no general shape to them. And it's like the bed sheet covered 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 Richie 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 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 gonna use it as a costume, find an old sheet that's frayed or thinning, because it'll be ten times scarier.
M you know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna get a brand new one and not even iron it so it still has those folded crease markers.
That's the scariest of all.
Yeah, the laziest costume of all.
You got anything else?
I got nothing else.
I got one thing. Happy Halloween, everybody, Happy Halloween. Short Stuff's Out, if.
You should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.