Page:The Melanesians Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore.djvu/310

288 before he begins to move about the place. A new arrival is greeted by a dance; for the husband, wife, or friend of one already there they raparahi bolo, go through an elaborate performance. The ghosts of those who have died violent deaths keep together; those who have been shot with the arrow sticking in the body, those who have been clubbed with the club fixed into the head; those also who have died of cough keep together. When a ghost comes down with the instrument of death upon him, he tells who killed him, and when the murderer arrives the ghostly people will not receive him; he has to stay apart with other murderers. To the question how one is received who has killed another in fair fight no certain answer can be given. As to the food of ghosts in Banoi there is a difference of opinion; some say they eat nothing, some thàt they eat excrement and rotten erythrina wood; probably the ghosts rejected by the happier crowd have the dismal food. Ghosts haunt especially their burial-places, and revenge themselves if offended; if a man has trespassed on the grave-place of a dead chief the ghost will smite him, and he will be sick. Ghosts seen appear like fire. My informants tell, me that no fragment of food is offered to a ghost, a doubtful statement; but if they see bananas or other food rotting in a dead man's garden, they say it is the ghost's food, not meaning so much that the ghost eats this, as that as is the man so is his food.

It remains to notice what practice there appears to be in these islands of burying the living with the dead. A case is remembered at Saa, where the wife of a chief killed in fighting asked for death that she might follow her husband, and was