Green = ghost?

December 29, 2023 10:47 AM

What’s the first instance of the spectral dead being described as having a green tint or light? I can think of some 1960s movie examples, and probably 1930s-40s comic books, but does it go back further? What colors are ghosts around the world?
posted by curious nu to Media & Arts (8 answers total)

Like People, Ghosts Come in Many Colors
posted by pracowity at 11:19 AM on December 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

With regards to depicting ghosts with a greenish tint, in the 19th century the French Impressionists often tinted fairies and supernatural spirts with the green shade of absinthe in their paintings, probably due to its name "the green fairy" and purported hallucinatory effects. Some background details from the Tate: The drink that fuelled a nation's art.
posted by RichardP at 11:23 AM on December 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Green has long been associated with the supernatural and magic in the western tradition, going back to at least the 14th century and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
posted by bluedaisy at 11:35 AM on December 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm not knowledgeable about this, but didn't the Egyptian god Osiris have green skin and was associated with the afterlife? Could it have stemmed from there?
posted by iamsuper at 12:35 PM on December 29, 2023

Bioluminescence is generally green.
posted by zamboni at 3:29 PM on December 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

I can give you one data point which is that in Elizabethan/Jacobean England, ghosts do not glow. They just look human. In literature of the time, you often can’t tell they are ghosts until they either tell you, or weaken or vanish when a cock crows, or when you make the sign of the Cross.

Elizabethan ghosts do wear sheets (the shroud in which they were buried, often the bedsheets in which they died). Or they wear the clothes they were wearing at death, or some symbolic apparel (a white robe for a virgin or martyr, or for example Hamlet’s father who appears in armour even though he didn’t die wearing it, which Hamlet takes for a bad omen.) They appear by night. But they don’t glow.

What does glow are will o’ the wisps (ignis fatuus/ Irrlicht/ feu follet). These are “wandering fires”, which can be anything from bubbles of marsh gas to bioluminescence of various sorts to swooping owls glimpsed by moonlight. The illustrations on the wiki page are both green, but undated, so that’s not much help.

For ghosts (strictly visible souls of dead people) who glow, I would be inclined to look at the late Victorians/Edwardians and their habit of holding séances in darkened rooms. Wiser heads than mine can find first person accounts of “spirits” seen at séances and what they are said to have looked like. 19th/early 20th century Gothic fiction would be another good place to look.
posted by Pallas Athena at 5:59 PM on December 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

I recently learned that it wasn't until the Victorian period and the development of early photo projectors (Magic Lanterns) that ghosts were thought of as translucent and oddly colored. Prior to then, ghosts were thought to look like regular people or animals but did not follow the same rules (walking through walls, appearing and disappearing, etc). So your inquiry has at least a date range of 'since the Victorian period'
posted by ananci at 5:38 AM on December 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

There's a strange eye witness account from the 1982 Falklands war where the author (Simon Weston, Walking Tall 1989 - CW somewhat horrifying cover - has done a lot of good for burn victims since) survived a missile strike on his ship and didn't lose consciousness, he said he saw everyone around him die, and multi-coloured forms emerge from /move away from their bodies.
posted by unearthed at 12:41 AM on December 31, 2023 [1 favorite]