Why Do Ghosts Wear Clothes?

Recently, I was reading an article that listed questions kids ask about ghosts, and one question was "Why do ghosts wear clothes?"

It's a logical question. After all, if they are disembodied spirits, they obviously don't need clothes. But there are at least two answers I can easily think of.

The first is that most appearances of "ghosts" are not actually disembodied spirits at all. They are residual hauntings, meaning that they are just replaying events that happened in the past over and over, like a kind of psychic movie or hologram. There is no intelligence behind it, and the figures appear just as they did when the event they are re-enacting took place.

If you watch a lot of paranormal shows on television or if you have participated in paranormal investigations or experienced ghostly phenomena yourself, you've probably noticed that when there is actual, apparently intelligent interaction between people and ghosts, the ghost is almost never visible. The living person or persons will hear sounds, feel touched, see things move, but not see the actual apparition, or if they do see something, it's only a shadow.

Most of the time, when ghosts do interact with humans in a visible form, it is to a loved one, especially soon after death. There are exceptions to this, of course. People staying in haunted hotels, for instance, sometimes wake to see apparitions in the room.

So, when this does happen, why are the ghosts dressed the way they are? And, along those same lines, why are so many alleged "spirit guides" Native Americans with funny-sounding names?

I think that the most likely theory is that ghosts appear to us in a form that our minds will be able to accept.

We know from physics that energy is only transformed or transmitted, but never destroyed. So the energy that inhabits our bodies must go somewhere when we die. Most likely, that energy has no actual form other than a blob of light, if it has a form at all. If it is possible for it to manifest as a form (as most researchers believe,) by pulling light from other sources such as cameras and other electrical instruments, then it may well choose to manifest in whatever way it feels the person it is manifesting for will feel least fearful of. (Unless it wants to scare someone, and I think that would be very rare.)

So, since a naked ghost would be a scarey sight indeed, the entity manifests with clothes on and looking as much like it did in life as possible.

As for those Native American spirit guides, there is a widely-held belief that Native Americans were more spiritually attuned than other people. Whether this is true or not, it' s a popular belief, especially in New Age circles. So, it would make sense for spirits who have passed over who want to be helpful to manifest in a form or identify themselves as a form that will be comfortable for the subject they wish to communicate with and through.