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Hey, and 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 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. Yeah, 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 kind of had a bit of nostalgia for the old school bedsheet ghosts, and I was like, 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 real costume occasionally. Whether or not you don't have the money to scrape up for some expensive costume 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 stopped at seeing that. I got to see it.

It's interesting. It is art house. It's very art house. Like, there's a lengthy scene where Rooney Mara just sits there and eats pie quietly in her kitchen. It's really interesting, but it's cool. It's a cool concept. But the ghost is just wearing a bedsheet 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 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 those. So we dug into Salon.com, Tuftandeedle.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 17th century Britain when people would wrap their deceased loved ones in white sheets, burial shrouds, to bury them. They used to do that just routinely back in ancient times. But then, as we got a little more modern 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, you would think that they're probably still wearing their burial shroud or the bedsheet that they were buried in. And that is how bedsheets 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 ask 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 this 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 ourself, let's.

Rob it either way. I mean, don't you deserve to be robbed if a ghost scares you? 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, at this time, around this time, in the early 18 hundreds, 18 five, maybe, there is a very famous case of a person being mistaken for a bedsheet 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. They're 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 ghostbust.

Yes. But this particular case, the guy who is responsible for the death, his whole defense was, I thought that was a ghost. Okay, let's dig in.

But 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.

That's right.

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's ghosts out there that are doing harmful things, and that's what brought Francis Smith out.

Yeah, I think you're right. And it's 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 ghost people were putting on these sheets and doing it. But I think you're dead right. I think he was a ghost hunter.

He was. And so he ran across Thomas Millwood, who is, I think, a bricklayer. And Thomas Millwood 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're not a ghost and it's after Labor Day. Exactly right. It's so ghosh, francis, 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 our leave of it.

That's right. And very sadly, he was killed because of that. At the trial, I believe they found out that Millwood had supposedly scared this couple in a carriage. White outfit. 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 wondering about 19th 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 II 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 Bedsheet.

Ghosting.

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Bedsheets with ghosts have been around for quite a while, but 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 animated skeletons that were moving around and talking and scaring people. They were essentially ghosts. But that bedsheet 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 19th century that that 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, 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 eternity, right.

Or the Star Wars sheets.

So the bedsheet and the dead person was so connected that by the late 19th century, when spiritualism and mediumship became really popular, if you took a double exposed photo with a person wearing a bedsheet 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 bedsheet they would take to believe is 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 worked. 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 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, that was Leslie, the theater scholar.

Who did the polling from the candy company. Leslie gets around.

Right. I think the time when it became not scary was when children's cartoons kind of took over the idea of a bedsheet ghost and made them not scary, because these were children's cartoons. There's a really famous example of a Mickey Mouse cartoon from 1937 called Lonesome Ghosts, and the ghosts are not clearly wearing bedsheets. Because what's interesting, Chuck, is if you look at these ghosts or you look at Casper 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 shape to them. And it's like the bedsheet covered ghost has now morphed into a ghost made out of something like a bedsheet.

Yeah, like Casper isn't a weird kid wearing a bedsheet.

Right.

Casper is made of bedsheet.

If you look closely, though, I'm pretty sure it is Richie Rich under there.

Right?

Oh, man, I never thought about that. I think you might be right. I am never made that connection.

So I think, Chuck, we've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that bedsheets are associated with ghosts.

Yes. And you know what? I might do that this year. I'm kind of short on costumes.

That's great. Well, one of these sites that you came across suggests that if you're going to use it as a costume, find an old sheet that's frayed or thinning, because it'll be ten times scarier.

You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to get a brand new one and not even iron it so it still has those folded crease marks.

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.

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