Dead as a Doornail

Used by-

Shakespeare in Henry VI:

Look on me well: I have eat no meat these five days; yet, come thou and thy five men, and if I do not leave you all as dead as a doornail, I pray God I may never eat grass more.

Also by Dickens in A Christmas Carol:

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

And by Anniemay in a poem:

Dead as a doornail
Clenched like a fist
Hammered in hard
Holding together
The door of a church
Or a house or a barn

And by Anniemay in this image of a Doornail and it’s fading ghosts.