Why are they dressed as ghosts?

Currently doing the rounds on the blogosphere and rating highly at reddit.com is the following image from Canon City, Colorado, 1926—one assumes not a hotbed of culture and intelligence.

Unless…

More than the photo itself, my sense of the absurd was aroused by the following comment:

Why are they dressed as ghosts?!

A comment possibly, hopefully made in all sincerity, I savoured it for a moment, imagining the childlike innocence required to see the world this way, thinking our world a better place if such an innocence really exists.

On the other hand it could be the work of a playful, albeit darkly shaded sense of humour, and that would almost be just as good.

But what if they were ghosts? What a nice world that would be!