Halloween Countdown 2017, Day 30

(Art by FateAmenableToChange.)

Here’s some news you can use from “On Preparing a Corpse in Ireland” by Jeremiah Curtain:

…In arranging the corpse in the coffin the feet are generally fastened together to keep them in position. This is done frequently by pinning the stockings [to] each other, but however done, the fastening is removed before burial and the feet are left perfectly free. The corpse is not bound in any way or confined in the coffin. That it is held necessary to free the feet of the corpse is shown by what happened once in Cahirciveen. A man died and his widow forgot to remove the pins fastening the stockings to each other. The voice of the dead man came to the woman on the night after the funeral, telling her that his feet were bound, and to free them. Next day she had the grave opened, took the pins from the stockings, and left the feet untrammelled.

It is firmly believed by some people that the dead rise in their graves time after time, each by himself, independently, as it is by others that all men will rise ages hence at one call and be judged for their deeds simultaneously. Besides the separate movements of each dead person we have the great social apparition on the night of All Saints, when the dead come to the houses of their friends and sit by the fire, unseen of all save those who are to die within the coming year….  

- Published in Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World collected from Oral Tradition in South-West Munster (1895); Quoted from A Halloween Reader: Poems, Stories, and Plays for Halloweens Past, edited by Lesley Pratt Bannatyne (2004)