The never ending nightgowns of Ghost Whisperer (2005-2010)
A recap of season 1 of Ghost Whisperer in outfits except it's just Melinda Gordon's nightwear drawer
My name is Sara, and I’m a chronic devotee of comfort television. I’m in perpetual search of the next procedural that will keep me company while I do puzzles or work from home. I was raised by Gil Grissom and Catherine Willows! I cried at the end of every episode of Cold Case!
Currently, I’ve found myself watching through Ghost Whisperer. Jennifer Love Hewitt plays Melinda Gordon, an antiques store owner who strives to cross over the Ghost of the Week. It’s nearly perfect as a procedural - a few longer strings of lore here and there, but mostly a silly mystery each week. And for my purposes, Melinda Gordon’s outfits are out of this world.
I am not a fashionable woman! I did read a lot of gofugyourself at an impressionable age, and I was in middle school during some of the worst years for fashion imaginable. And I’d like to officially declare Melinda Gordon a fashion icon. Middle school Sara would have absolutely frothed over these outfits. No other characters ever comment on Melinda’s getups, but I find my jaw on the floor with alarming regularity. It all fell into place when I saw her wearing this:
No one bats an eye at Melinda crying alone on a park bench in a fringed (?) periwinkle full length button-up jacket-top with sheer lace detail paired with lace hem white capris and heeled white booties, crying on a bench in the Grandview Town Square. She wears this outfit for several scenes! She confronts multiple ghosts and multiple real people!
I attribute Melinda’s dress sense to her canonical interest in old things and her working at an antique store (called “Same As It Never Was”). It is charmingly in-character that she likes bits of lace detailing and flared skirts but never in the context of a full rockabilly outfit or vintage vixen silhouette.
As someone who sleeps in underwear and an old t-shirt, I am especially drawn to Melinda’s never-ending collection of nightgowns. I imagine every time one of these comes to her store via an estate sale or private collection, she immediately grabs it for herself. Her collection is enviable. Unfortunately a lot of it is seen in dim lighting, because Melinda does a lot of ghost confrontations when jostled from a dream.
I found myself collecting every nightgown featured in the first two seasons of Ghost Whisperer for prosperity but since I don’t know how to make a fan edit on tiktok, you get this instead.
Our first Melinda nightgown moment is in the very first episode of Ghost Whisperer, which co-stars Wentworth Miller as the ghost of a soldier who went MIA in Vietnam. This is mostly relevant in my life because my sister is in love with Wentworth Miller, but also because of this stunning full-length nightgown Melinda wears in a dream sequence. The lace detailing is very delicate and it’s a nice way of building her character out. She very rarely wears a silhouette like this, and the costume department should have done it with more than just nightgowns - it’s hot! Body tea! Etc etc.
We miss out on nightgowns in the next few episodes because the show was finding its feet. I guess they did not realise that its feet were actually supposed to be sticking out from beneath a floor-length nightgown.
Finally we start hitting the good stuff in the episode Lost Boys, which yes, did make me cry a bit. This episode focuses on some ghost children who died in a house fire, so of course Melinda has to do what she does so often sartorially, emotionally, and colloquially speaking: mother.
This nightgown is a lot more modest - appropriate, as she wouldn’t want to be too sexy in front of these children who died in a fire at an orphanage. She mostly has sleepovers with them and shows them how great the world is, so for that she needs a much more billowing silhouette with a less defined waistline. In fact, she comes back again to mother once more:
I like to think that here she’s decided to really lean into her newfound schoolmarm position, hence the huge lace ruff and ruffled sleeve trim. She looks like a ghost herself.
We do have some nightgown moments woven throughout the next episodes, but they’re often fleeting scenes of Melinda in bed with her doting husband Jim Clancy. This is when he has long hair (his prime). Jim seems to accept the reality of ghosts as inevitable and unavoidable, and supports Melinda with every fibre of his being (and also all of his finances, because that antique store is demonstrably not raking it in). Episode 5 also sees them gain a ghost dog, although he exists when the show remembers.
Aside from glances at her straps during pillowtalk with Jim, we don’t get a good look until what I’d describe as the nightgown-heavy episode 15.
Melinda gets into bed with Jim wearing this unassuming black number, the kind of thing you’d expect to see in the wardrobe of a classy lady in 2005. But in her dreams, like in my dreams, she’s wearing something much more elaborate:
This nightgown is so elaborate that it could very well be a wedding dress!
Melinda spends this episode being haunted by the ghost of a child she went to school with, played by Abigail Breslin. Abigail spends a lot of time visiting Melinda after bed, so we also get to learn that Melinda’s robe collection is perfectly paired with her nighties:
Lest you think she’s all about the coverups, she also rocks a twee babydoll for a heart to heart with ghost Abigail Breslin (where she explains that ghost Abigail Breslin is dead and that she should move on, yada yada).
And a set - black satin nightgown with pink piping, matching robe - to wear for a debrief with Jim when they decide that crossing ghost Abigail Breslin over might take reuniting her estranged parents.
So you can see why I started to think “huh, she’s really got a thing about nightgowns!” after watching this episode.
In episode 20, we meet a cast of the regular ghosts Melinda sees in her day to day routine before they subsequently vanish. This becomes a part of a recurring plot about a dark entity stealing and trapping souls and honestly I don’t care about that at all because I’m only here for the procedural elements, but I am here for Melinda’s slinky little red number. She and Jim probably had date night.
Several angles had me thinking this was a repeat of the long babydoll from episode 15, but this is definitely a new one - slightly longer ruffle to the sleeves, no tie detailing at the neckline. Maybe this one is the one she only busts out when she has to recover from a head wound.
The final two episodes of the season follow the tragedy of a plane crash and the ghosts that both predict this (the pilot and flight attendant who die before the crash) and follow this (the rest of the plane and the victims on the ground). There’s some genuine horror here, and it becomes the first major tragedy in Grandview that we witness. It’s really a wonder anyone lives in Grandview, which by season 3 has sustained a gas pipe explosion, plane crash, several building collapses, multiple haunted houses, a very high youth mortality rate, a near mass casualty at a memorial event, and a very weird lady running the local antiques store.
Melinda dons this flowy, tied-at-the waist version under one of her many fluffy robes to find a dead dove, which is a bad omen or something. She might even have popped it in the fridge for later, for all I know.
She wears this stunning robe and gown combo in a dream sequence but I’d be trying to get my hands on it ASAP if it wasn’t already in the closet because I’ve been thinking about this since I saw it:
That’s the last notable nightgown of season 1 of Ghost Whisperer, but Melinda Gordon’s sleepwear shenanigans only heighten as the seasons progress. I’m knee-deep in season 3 right now and I’ve been saving screencaps like a woman possessed.
This doesn’t even touch on the kind of things Melinda wears when she’s leaving the house. I can’t headcanon the antiquing logic onto this outfit, Melinda!
My plan is to recap on an episode by episode basis, but I’ve had the sleepwear on my mind, so this seemed like a logical place to dive in. Stay tuned for more ramblings about this show and others through the lens of someone paying way too close attention to the outfits.
All images courtesy of Kiss Them Goodbye
The S1E15 nightgown is craaaazy...definitely a bridal gown