Bicycle Ghosts
Behind the tea party, up on a grassy knoll, a group of diaphanous haunts ride bicycles around the tombstones. One of them rides a tandem bicycle. They are cloaked in tattered robes, and clutch the handlebars with skeletal hands. In his concept art, Marc Davis depicted them as stereotypical "sheet ghosts" wearing bowler hats, riding in circles around a smiling, anthropomorphic dead tree.
Bicycling ghosts appear in the 2003 film, but are unambiguously the ghosts of former humans.
A bicycle-riding ghost appeared in the October 1969 issue of Walt Disney Comics Digest, in a story called Spooky Tenants (promoting the recently opened Haunted Mansion at Disneyland). In 1887, Jonathan Harker (the name of one of the protagonists in Bram Stoker's Dracula) got so excited during a cross-country bicycle race that he rode off Wandsworth Cliff and into the ocean. His ghost haunted the old Harker house until it was torn down, leaving him without a home. Mickey and Goofy persuaded him, along with a few other ghosts, to move into the Mansion at Disneyland.
Read more about this topic: List Of Haunted Mansion Characters
Famous quotes containing the words bicycle and/or ghosts:
“Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things.”
—William Golding (b. 1911)
“What is it we heartily wish of each other? Is it to be pleased and flattered? No, but to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts and phantoms.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)