The issue of ghost clothes is interesting for historians of the supernatural because, like a loose thread, pulling at it starts to unravel some of the assumptions about matter in spiritualism.
When you think of a ghost, what comes to mind? A ghastly, mouldy winding-sheet? A malevolent pile of supernatural armour? Or a sinister gentleman in a stiff Victorian suit?
Why aren’t ghosts naked? This was a key philosophical question for Cruikshank and many others in Victorian Britain. Indeed, stories of naked or clothesless ghosts, especially outside folklore, are exceedingly rare. Sceptics and ghost-seers alike have delighted in thinking about how exactly ghosts could have form and force in the material world.
Yet by the mid-19th century, with spiritualism and early forms of psychical research spreading across the western world, people began to report seeing ghosts dressed in everyday and contemporaneous clothing. Another explanation was that ghost-seers dress the ghost, automatically, through unconscious processes. And so we see a ghost in its usual dress because that is the mental picture we have of the person, and this choice of garment is most likely to inspire recognition.
For Lang, the clothes of ghosts were the stuff that dreams are made of. The implication of this, that ghost-seers are dressers, but not undressers, seems to reflect a pervading morality of ghosts, whereby most 19th-century spirits were sanitised and chaste. Lang’s odd assumption that there was no nakedness in dreams echoes this.
Clothes identify people and make them capable of representation – nakedness disrupts this means of instantly categorising someone.
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