Here’s Why We Always Picture Ghosts in White—And What Paranormal Experts Think They Actually Look Like
From the sheet-draped ghosts we drew as kids to Nearly Headless Nick floating through Hogwarts, we all seem to have the same picture in our heads when someone says “ghost.” Pale, wispy and usually glowing like they’ve never seen a day of sunshine in their afterlife, spirits have been showing up this way in spooky stories and on screens for generations. Even Casper got the memo. But why are ghosts white in the first place? It turns out that our idea of what a ghost should look like has a long—and fascinating—history.
To find out how ghosts became the spectral figures we picture in ghost stories, we spoke with Susan Owens, PhD, author of The Ghost: A Cultural History, and Troy Taylor, co-host of the American Hauntings Podcast. We traced their changing appearance through the ages and even found out what paranormal experts believe ghosts actually look like. (Spoiler: Hollywood may not have the whole story.)
Read on to discover how ghosts got their signature look and why there’s much more to their color than meets the eye.
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Were ghosts always depicted in white?
Nope. Although a pale, translucent figure might be our default mental image of a ghost today, there has never been one universal way to picture the dead. Depending on the culture and context, ghosts and spirits have been imagined as everything from ordinary-looking people to shadowy figures, skeletons and decaying corpses. Some weren’t even depicted in human form.
“Artists have always had to find a way of representing ghosts that makes it clear they are uncanny beings, not just normal people,” says Owens, who was also the former curator of paintings at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. “In the distant past, ghosts were often depicted with a deathly pallor, though not necessarily white. On the other hand, ancient ghost images could equally well be carved in stone or vividly colored.”
In other words, there wasn’t an ancient rule book that said ghosts had to be white. Often, Owens says, “it is the context that reveals a figure’s ghostliness.” And while burial shrouds would eventually play an important role in how people pictured the returning dead, the white, translucent and human-shaped ghost we instantly recognize now took centuries to develop.
How did ghosts turn into the spectral figures that we imagine today?
Ghosts have taken a surprisingly winding path from frightening walking corpses to the pale, see-through spirits that haunt our movies and Halloween decorations. Here’s how their signature look evolved.
Medieval ghosts looked like the dead come back to life
Long before anyone imagined ghosts floating around, ancient cultures had their own ideas about what happened when the dead returned, and that includes the Greeks. In Homer’s Odyssey, for example, when Odysseus encounters the dead in the Underworld, they have a shadowy appearance rather than that familiar glowing white. By the Middle Ages, depictions of ghosts in Britain were considerably more gruesome. “These ghosts are corporeal—they look as though they have climbed out of their graves,” says Owens. “Some are walking skeletons; others are decomposing bodies with scraps of gray, rotting shrouds clinging to them.”
Those shrouds are an important early piece of the white-ghost story. Many representations of ghosts from the medieval period up to the 18th century are very literal and were meant to be shocking. “They were supposed to remind you of the brevity of life and the terrifying closeness of death,” Owens says. “They came with a moral message: Mend your ways, because soon enough you will be like us.”
And there was another ghastly component to these spectral appearances: People believed that a human spirit might temporarily leave purgatory and enter something else to communicate with the living. “There are written accounts of human spirits inhabiting crows, dogs or even bits of tarpaulin seen rolling around in a strange and uncanny way,” Owens says.
Stage productions gave ghosts a supernatural presence
By the 16th century, ghosts were getting starring roles in the theater—and their burial clothes came with them. “Sixteenth-century drama was full of ghosts, and audiences used to laugh at how badly they were portrayed on stage, with actors clad in filthy shrouds, running around and screaming,” says Owens. “It wasn’t very dignified, by all accounts.”
Clearly, a shroud alone wasn’t enough to make a convincing apparition. Shakespeare found other ways to signal the supernatural. The ghost of Hamlet’s father, for instance, appears in armor rather than white fabric, another reminder that there still wasn’t a standard ghost costume. “We never find out, for instance, whether Old Hamlet is who he claims to be, a ghost temporarily released from purgatory—or a bad spirit, leading Hamlet astray,” says Owens.
Theater also posed a practical problem that would eventually transform the ghost’s appearance: How do you put something supposedly otherworldly on stage when the audience can plainly see a flesh-and-blood actor? The answer would eventually involve a lot more than a costume.
The 18th century transformed the ghost
By the late 18th century, ghosts were starting to look a lot more familiar, thanks to an unlikely combination of art and entertainment. Artists like George Romney and John Flaxman began depicting ghosts draped in flowing fabric inspired by ancient Greek clothing. Instead of showing the dead body, they concealed it beneath billowing material, creating an eerie silhouette. “Both artists create the impression of mystery and awe by concealment and a strange silhouette,” Owens says. “It’s a world away from the medieval walking corpse.”
Burial customs were shifting too. As traditional shrouds gave way to white linen burial clothes, ghosts began appearing in similar garments in popular illustrations. But what about the whole see-through thing? That came from phantasmagoria, an early form of horror entertainment where magic lanterns projected ghostly figures that seemed to float, move and disappear. “The idea that ghosts are see-through seems natural, since it signals simultaneous presence and absence,” Owens says. “But in Britain, ghosts only acquired this attribute in the late 18th century.” Before then, ghosts were generally described as solid figures, even when they did things like walk through walls.
By the 1800s, ghosts were becoming recognizable
By the early 1800s, the sight of someone dressed in white was enough to spark a ghost scare. “The Hammersmith Ghost episode of 1803–04 is probably the best example of a ghost in a white sheet,” says Taylor. “People around Hammersmith, London, reported a terrifying apparition that was generally described as tall and dressed in white.” The panic got so bad that locals organized armed patrols. On Jan. 3, 1804, Francis Smith mistook bricklayer Thomas Millwood, who was wearing white work clothes, for the supposed ghost and shot him dead. “As it turned out, it was no ghost,” Taylor says.
Meanwhile, literature was giving ghosts an even more otherworldly look. In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), Jacob Marley appears so transparent that Scrooge can actually see through him. Ghosts weren’t just dead people walking around anymore. They could look human while defying the rules of the physical world.
Victorian technology made ghosts even more spectral
If the 18th century introduced the transparent ghost, Victorian technology made it more convincing than ever. Photography brought us spirit photographs, which supposedly captured faint, ghostly figures alongside living people. Then, in the 1860s, came Pepper’s Ghost, a theatrical illusion that used glass, lighting and a hidden performer to make a transparent figure appear on stage.
Developed from an idea by engineer Henry Dircks and popularized by showman John Henry Pepper, the trick allowed ghosts to seemingly materialize, fade and stand beside living actors. It was quite a leap from performers running around in dirty shrouds.
Then, over in the world of ghost stories, writers like Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and M.R. James explored “the terrifying idea of the past that will never stay in the past, but keeps bursting into the present,” Owens says. And there was no longer one way for a ghost to look or behave. “In this period, there was a lot of competition, and writers became immensely inventive about the forms in which their ghosts appeared,” Owens explains. Ghosts could be solid or transparent, human or monstrous. But the pale, white-draped, barely there figure we recognize today had become a familiar part of the supernatural imagination.
Movies and cartoons solidified the ghosts we know today
By the 20th century, the sheet ghost was getting its big break in pop culture. And according to Taylor, movies and cartoons helped make the image stick. The 1920 silent comedy Haunted Spooks, starring Harold Lloyd, was an early example. It played with the idea of people manufacturing ghostly appearances in a supposedly haunted house.
Disney helped take things further. “The most important cartoon when it comes to the ghost in a sheet image is undoubtedly Disney’s Lonesome Ghosts, which came out in 1937,” Taylor says. The cartoon features four floating, semi-transparent spirits who summon Mickey, Donald and Goofy to their haunted house. Then came Casper the Friendly Ghost in 1945, with his rounded white body and floating silhouette, followed by Charlie Brown’s sheet ghost costume in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown in 1966.
“Cartoons and comics didn’t invent the idea of the ‘white sheet ghost,’ but they certainly cemented the idea in popular culture,” Taylor says.
What color do paranormal experts believe ghosts actually are?
There’s no official ghost color, and historical reports suggest white isn’t even the norm. “Most historical reports find that apparitions are fully or mostly lifelike,” says Taylor. Witnesses often describe figures that look like ordinary people, right down to their clothing, facial hair and accessories. Some appear so solid that they’re initially mistaken for someone living.
But what about color? Taylor says witnesses have described apparitions as “grayish, white, sepia-toned or lacking in color,” particularly in poor lighting. Others report dark, human-shaped shadows or, less commonly, figures that seem to glow.
And some accounts are even stranger. Psychical researcher G.N.M. Tyrrell examined reports of figures whose reflections appeared in mirrors, whose footsteps could be heard and who sometimes even spoke or gestured, much like living people.
So, according to the reports, ghosts can be solid-looking, transparent or even luminous—but there’s no evidence they have one actual Halloween color. And scientifically, of course, none of these accounts proves that ghosts exist in the first place. We’ll leave that answer up to you … and whatever goes bump in the night.
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At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. For this piece on why ghosts are depicted as white, writer Mariah Thomas tapped her experience covering history, holidays and more for Reader’s Digest. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
Sources:
- Susan Owens, PhD, award-winning writer, former curator of paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and author of The Ghost: A Cultural History; email interview, Oct. 6, 2026
- Troy Taylor, paranormal expert and co-host of the American Hauntings Podcast; email interview, Oct. 7, 2026
- PSI Encyclopedia; “Ghosts and Apparitions in Psi Research”
- UVA School of Medicine: “The Contribution of Apparitions to the Evidence for Survival”
- Regency Fiction Writers: “The Hammersmith Ghost”
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