Why Do Ghosts Wear Clothes?

I was thinking about ghosts recently, after watching Presence by Steven Soderbergh and I ran into an administrative issue:

Why are they wearing clothes? Not why are they wearing white. Not even why do they sometimes drag chains around, which I mean just seems inconvenient when your main activity involves walking through walls.

I mean clothes at all.

If I die tonight and my soul leaves my body, I can just about follow the proposed mechanics. Body here. Soul elsewhere. Fine. But my trousers? At what point do they become involved? Are they also immortal?

This has been bothering me a bit too much recently. A ghost is generally understood to be whatever remains of a person after the physical person has stopped being available, right? The body is in a grave, cremated, missing, eaten by wolves, donated to science, whatever unfortunate arrangement the story plot has made. 

Yet when the deceased returns, some version of their wardrobe has somehow survived the transition too?

Does nobody find this suspicious?

A man walks through a locked door at three in the morning and people scream because he is dead. I argue the screams should be because his belt has also acquired a soul or spirit or whatever it is that lives on afterwards.

This is especially odd because storytellers have been doing it for centuries.

Remember when the ghost of Hamlet’s father turns up at Elsinore, he isn’t  some vague glowing King -shaped mist. The men recognise not only the dead king but the armour he is wearing. Horatio says it is the very armour King Hamlet wore when he fought Norway. The armour matters because it helps establish that this thing is him. (Folger Shakespeare Library)

Which means Shakespeare has accidentally given us a much larger problem: The king’s body died. The king survived.

Fine.

But uhhh… his military equipment survived too.

Did the armour die? Was there a second funeral? Is there, perhaps somewhere in the afterlife, a celestial property room containing every single item a dead person may need for future apparitions? Maybe like:

HAMLET, KING.

One suit armour.

Purpose: unfinished business.

Return date: unknown.

And Hamlet’s father isn’t even the worst offender;

Jacob Marley turns up in A Christmas Carol wearing his usual waistcoat, tights and boots. Dickens is very specific about this. Marley is transparent enough that Scrooge can look through his waistcoat and see the buttons on the coat behind him. (Project Gutenberg)

What’s interesting is that this would indicate Dickens actually considered the transparency of the dead man. He considered the visibility of the clothes. He considered the buttons. And then he just kept… writing.

Get over here Charles. We have got a few questions.

If Marley is incorporeal, what exactly is the waistcoat made of? Ghost cotton?

And if objects can become ghosts just because they were attached to a person, where does the jurisdiction end?

Marley has chains, but those at least have an explanation: they represent the life he built from greed, ledgers, cash-boxes, deeds, keys and money. Dickens tells us that explicitly through the objects attached to him. The chains are biography turned into luggage. (Project Gutenberg)

The boots, however, are just boots, which raises several matters that literature has irresponsibly failed to settle;

Do spectacles come along?

Presumably yes, because a short-sighted ghost bumping into furniture would damage the atmosphere. How about dentures? hearing aids? a wig? a wedding ring? false eyelashes? a pacemaker?

If somebody dies with a prosthetic leg, does the leg cross over? 

I feel strongly that it should, but this creates an uncomfortable implication for everyone who has ever claimed that the afterlife contains only the soul, no?

What about tattoos? A tattoo is technically pigment sitting in your skin. If your skin doesn’t come, why does the tattoo?

What if you dyed your hair the day before you died? Is the blond permanent?

The strange thing is that clothes appear almost immediately whenever human beings need to make the dead recognisable.

Shakespeare gives us another useful image in Hamlet: Horatio recalls stories of Rome before Julius Caesar’s death, when graves supposedly stood empty and the “sheeted dead” wandered the streets. (Folger Shakespeare Library)

Sheeted. So even the dead who have abandoned their graves remembered to bring fabric. Good for them!

Historical ghost traditions are much messier than the standard Halloween figure suggests. Martha McGill’s study of ghosts in eighteenth-century Scottish popular culture finds everything from returning corpses and dead lovers to white ladies, violent spectres, headless creatures and ghosts used for warnings, moral lessons, comedy and family stories. There has never even been one universally agreed design for a ghost (Cambridge Resolve).

Which makes the persistence of clothing even more interesting. Because perhaps the clothes are not there for the ghost. Perhaps they are there for us.

Imagine your grandmother walks into your bedroom tonight. Not an approximation of her. Her. You know immediately because she is wearing that dress. You know the one.

Every family has versions of this. The brown coat my father wore for twenty winters. The ridiculous slippers somebody in your family is yet to replace. The church hat. The cardigan. That worn-out handbag that appeared in every photograph from 1987 to 2004. The shirt your mother owned in three colours because once she finds something that fits, then apparently manufacturing innovation is no longer required.

Take the clothes away and you have a human figure.

Put the cardigan back on and you have her.

Clothing is doing more work in memory than we think, it seems. We (mostly I, to be fair) like to pretend clothes are external to us because they can be removed. The body is the person; the shirt is an object.

But we, human beings don’t actually remember one another that neatly.

Think of someone you haven’t seen in twenty years. You may remember a jacket before you remember the shape of their head, or the sound of their bracelet(s) before you can picture a wrist.

A dead person’s possessions become especially intriguing this way. There is nothing supernatural about opening a wardrobe after someone dies, still we all understand why it can be difficult.

There hangs a coat. It contains nothing of the person, while containing far too much of them.

Maybe that’s the trick storytellers discovered.

A believable ghost cannot merely look human. It needs to carry enough evidence to be recognised.

Hamlet’s father’s armour is essentially identification: This is the king.

Marley’s waistcoat says the same thing: This is Marley.

The clothes are credentials.

Once you see it that way, the question changes. It isn’t really:

Why do clothes survive death?

It is:

How much of a person was actually contained by their body in the first place?

Because our idea of a person already includes objects. There are people whose glasses are so much a part of their faces that seeing them without them produces a small shock. Wedding rings leave dents after decades.

There are people recognised from half a street away by one coat.

None of those things are the person.

All of those things are the person.

And this creates an even worse ghost problem: Suppose I appear after death, which version of me arrives?

Do I appear at the age I died? That does seem unfair to anyone who makes it past ninety, no?

Do I get my healthiest body, my favourite body, or the body other people remember?

If I lose a leg at thirty and die at eighty, does my ghost have two legs? If yes, then the ghost is not a copy of my final body. If no, then amputation modifies the soul.

Neither answer gets us out cleanly.

I conclude that clothes reveal the cheat because they make visible something ghost stories usually get away with hiding: a ghost isn’t really the dead body continuing.

It is a person reconstructed. Age. Face. Voice. Hair. Clothes.

The dead return looking like themselves because somebody among the living has to recognise them. Nakedness would make death far too biological. Too much corpse, not enough person. Maybe that is why ghosts are dressed.

Here is the king in the armour in which men knew him.

Here is Marley dressed like Marley.

Here is the woman on the staircase in the gown the household remembers.

Here is your father in the coat that should still be hanging downstairs.

The clothing makes the impossible specific, which is what makes a ghost frightening.

Not a dead man is standing in my kitchen. That is bad, but:

My dead father is standing in my kitchen wearing the blue shirt we buried him in.

That is a different sentence. The blue shirt is the main issue. Even if you tell yourself you were mistaken about the face, you know the shirt.

There may also be a kinder explanation.

If we are going to invent a world in which the people we lose are somehow still themselves, of course we give them their things. It would be cruel not to. Nobody wants eternity to begin with being informed that your favourite coat was considered non-transferable.

So perhaps somewhere Hamlet’s father still has his armour.

Marley still has the waistcoat.

Your grandmother has her cardigan.

And the afterlife contains the largest lost-property office in existence. Maybe, that is the simple, yet correct explanation.