The Modern Western Ghost and Its Zombie Origins November 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, Modern , trackback
This month’s Boggart and Banshee podcast is on ghosts and shrouds (Shrouded in Mystery: The Origins of the Iconic Sheeted Ghost). As often with Chris’s choices I didn’t at first get the point: I can only get so excited about textiles… But my attention picked up as I realised (ever the slow learner) that the shroud explains our image of choice for the ghost: the ridiculous sheet that Halloweeners throw over their heads.
But there is something about the ghost with a sheet/shroud on that doesn’t quite make sense in cultural terms. Most people who see ghosts in western societies see the spirit as he or she was in life: the mother wearing her coat; the nasty neighbour with his trilby on… It is actually, as Chris, stresses, relatively rare to see the ghost as they were post mortem, with cut hair and coffin rouge. The whole point of the ghost in modern western tradition is to bring back the living person as ether.
So where does the shrouded ghost come from? There is one easy solution, though given the poor state of our evidence it is beyond proof. In northern Europe, including Britain, there was a strong medieval tradition of revenants or zombies: the dead who would not rest but who got up and left their graves to harass the living. These were physical not spiritual forms and they wore coffin clothes. I’ve looked at examples over the years including this one in Berwick; for a source book, meanwhile.
Isn’t the easiest explanation for the sheeted/shrouded ghost that this is one last echo of a medieval Germanic tradition of the walking physical dead?
Other thoughts: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com
