Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/407

Rh each single seed before they could enter. It is most likely the same idea when a broom flung across a door prevents a witch from coming in. Another variation of the same idea is to hang up an old worn-out cart-wheel. If flax-seed is strewn, the ghost before it can enter must find and count every seed; if it is a cart-wheel, it must run through all the ruts that wheel has been through, and in that way the night passes, and at cockcrow the dead must return to their graves.

From whence this idea of counting and reckoning has its origin I cannot explain, but one meets with it in many places. To this may be added another which Mephistopheles mentions in his interview with Faust: "Wo wir hinein, da müssen wir hinaus!"—a saying which is here used t'other way about, that where the dead goes out, he must return the same way, or else remain outside.

Why the dead cannot take "a short cut" I do not know, but it is evident that they cannot, and traces of this belief can be found in numerous burial customs. The dead are always carried out feet-foremost; were they carried head-foremost they would see their home and the door, and find the way back. In Sweden it is said that all the gates along the road through which a corpse has been carried to the churchyard are hung upside down, so that they open the opposite way. And if a ghost has begun to haunt a house, it is generally sufficient to alter the position of the door, then he has to remain outside. It is impossible for him to find his way in again.

Whilst on the subject I will mention a custom of earlier times when burying suicides; the dead person was not carried through the churchyard gate, but lifted over the outer mound, dragged down on the opposite side, and placed to the north of the church. In times still further back a rope was attached to the body, it