Why Do We Picture Ghosts Wearing White Sheets?

Humans have believed in ghosts for thousands of years. Across cultures and centuries, people have told stories about the dead returning to the world of the living, whether as ancestor spirits or unsettling apparitions. But it wasn’t until the Middle Ages that shrouded figures became a familiar way of depicting spirits.

Why did ghosts take this form? It’s how the deceased once looked when they were buried.

Today, coffins are widely used in many parts of the world, but this wasn’t the case before the 1800s. For centuries, the European norm was to lay the deceased to rest in thin fabric wrappings called burial shrouds, sometimes without a coffin. These death garbs were typically white, a color symbolizing purity and the spiritual world, and could range from plain cloths to elaborately decorated coverings. Poorer families, however, generally opted to use what they had: the sheet off the deathbed.

In the Middle Ages, ghosts were often seen as messengers from beyond the grave. When people imagined a fear-inducing spirit coming back to deliver a message, they pictured it dressed in its burial shroud, creating a clear continuity between corpse and spirit.

Art and folklore pushed this narrative, too. In The Psalter of Robert de Lisle from the 1300s, for example, the story of “The Three Living and the Three Dead" depicts three skeletal corpses wrapped in linen who warn the living about mortality. By the 1400s, it was common for people reporting apparitions to describe them wearing burial shrouds.

The shrouded ghost image was so prevalent that a group of 15th-century English thieves donned sheets to scare and rob people. In 1584, English scholar Reginald Scot even mentions this nefarious practice as an explanation for some ghost sightings in The Discoverie of Witchcraft, his exposé against witchcraft and magic. Scot wrote that “some one knave in a white sheet hath cozened and abused many thousands,” suggesting that at least some supposedly supernatural encounters could be explained as hoaxes.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, ghosts in theatrical plays were sometimes dressed in armor instead of shrouds, such as the ghost in Shakespeare’s "Hamlet." By the 19th century, white-sheeted ghosts became a familiar theatrical image alongside other stage effects used to create apparitions. Victorian “spirit photographers” also picked up on this scare factor, using tricks to create spooky images of shrouded ghosts haunting everyday people.

Bedsheet ghosts would fully shift from frightful to amusing by the early 20th century, thanks in part to children’s cartoons like Disney’s The Lonesome Ghosts (1937) and Paramount’s The Friendly Ghost (1945), which turned the feared sheeted figure into something silly and familiar.

It was also during the Depression-era years that Halloween established its modern form, where children go door-to-door to trick-or-treat while dressed as their favorite characters, bedsheet ghosts included.