Ghost

English ghosts did not usually wear sheets. Francis Grose, quoted in Brand’s Popular Antiquities, wrote that ghosts “commonly appear in the same dress they usually wore whilst living”, and that those “clothed all in white” were chiefly “the churchyard ghosts”, who seemed to appear only “to scare drunken rustics from tumbling over their graves.” A verse Brand quotes has villagers who “espien a corse in a white sheet”.

The sheet could be deadly for the living. In the winter of 1803–4 there had been talk for about five weeks of a “ghost” in Hammersmith, and a witness said “sometimes it appeared in a white sheet, and sometimes in a calf-skin dress, with horns on its head, and glass eyes.” One man who had seen it and chased it said it wore “a white sheet or table-cloth”. On the night of 3 January 1804 Francis Smith, who had said he was going to search after the ghost, shot dead Thomas Millwood, a bricklayer in his white working clothes: linen trousers, a flannel waistcoat and an apron. A relative by marriage he lived with told the Old Bailey she had begged him to wear his great coat over them, “as there is a piece of work about the ghost”. The jury returned manslaughter; the judge would not accept it, and Smith was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death.