QUEER SUPERSTITIONS IN CONNECTION WITH SUICIDES.

Auckland Star, Volume XXX, Issue 88, 15 April 1899, Page 5 (Supplement)

QUEER SUPERSTITIONS IN CONNECTION WITH SUICIDES.

ESPECIALLY STRONG IN SCOTLAND.

The lawfulness of suicide under certain circumstances is a subject which has often been seriously debated, and any curious reader who cared to study the question in detail would probably be surprised at the amount of literature there is, of one kind or another, relating thereto. Men of note of such diverse characters and views as Sir Thomas More and Lord Bacon, Montaigne and Sir "Walter Kaleigh, have had something to say in favour of suicide; while, of course, an army of writers have wielded more or less effective pens on the other side. But apart from the speculative or theoretical treatment of the subject of self-murder by thinkers and theorisers, suicide has always been regarded by the mass of ordinary people with horror and repugnance. And from this feeling has arisen not a little superstition. It is only within comparatively recent years that the old barbarous method of interring the bodies of suicides has been abandoned. A suicide, as most people know, was formerly buried in a public highway, usually at the point of intersection of several roads, with a stake driven through the body. Readers of Dickens will remember how Quilp, in the 'Old Curiosity Shop,' was buried with a stake through his heart in the centre of four lonely roads,' and Hood's grimly punning lines—

And they buried Ben in four cross-roads

With a stake in his inside, are familiar. Instances of this barbaTism occasionally come to light at the present day. In the course of the excavations for the Blackwall Tunnel, recently completed, a human skeleton was found, with a stake which appeared to have been .driven through the body, on the north side of the river at Blackwall Cross, about eight, feet below the street level. Burial under a road or highway was legally compulsory, but the usual choice of the point cf intersection of cross roads was due to popular superstition. The reasons for such choice cannot be stated with absolute certainty, but it is clear from the circumstances that there existed a very real horror lest the ghost of a suicide should return and haunt the neighbourhood, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the point of intersection was chosen from a feeling that the cross formed- by the, meeting roads would be powerfully effective in preventing the return of the unhallowed spirit. The stake, there can be no doubt, was used with the same end in view. It was driven through the body with the plain and crude notion of keeping the abhorred suicide down. According to ancient legends the use of stakes for this purpose was not confined to suicides. In that wonderful collection of old Welsh legends and fairy tales known as the 'Mabinogion,' it is stated that if stakes of mountain ash be driven through the corpse on a battlefield, they can no longer be animated by demons, but will instantly turn to worms. Sir Walter Scott tells a ghastly story, taken from the Danish history of Saxo Grammaticus, ,of a young man who was buried alive in' the tomb of his dead bro« ther. The dead man arose and attempted —vampire like—to feed on the living brother. After a terrible struggle, the latter vanquished his awful foe by driving a stake through his. re-animated corpse. 'This,' says Sir Walter, 'affords a derivation of the ancient English law in the case of suicides, when a stake was driven through the coffin, originally to keep it secure in the tomb.'

Nowhere, perhaps, has the horror of suicide been more profoundly felt than in Scotland, and especially among the Highlanders. This horror of self-slaughter has sometimes led to strange scenes. About 15 years ago the body of a man who had committed suicide was washed ashore at Little Loch Broom. The neighbouring: crofters quickly made a rough deal box, in which they placed the corpse, and then sank all the tools they had used in the sea. The box was towed by ropes across the loch, and thence dragged up the. hillsides to a lonely nook, where, with the ropes used, it was hurriedly buried. The popular belief, most firmly held, was that if the body had been left in the loch or on shore within sight of it, not a single herring would have ventured near it. In other cases of suicide in the same part of the' Highlands, great difficulty has been found in. getting any carpenter to make a coffin, such an act being commonly considered far from 'lucky.' In curious contrast to the determination of the Rossshire fishermen to get ria at all costs of the tools and ropes that had been used in connection with the coffining and interment of a suicide, is the belief which has been shown elsewhere, not only in the 'luck' brought by such relics, but, repulsive as the idea may seem, in the curative power of touch by a suicide's hand. The latter superstition has' been found in Cornwall, where the touch of a suicide's hand, says Mr "W. G. Black in his interesting book on 'Folk Medicine,' is reported to have cured a young man who had been afflicted with many tumours from his birth. A similar superstition regarding the touch of the dead, and especially of executed criminals, has been widely prevalent, and has often been recorded. Mr Robert Hunt, in his 'Romances of the West of England,' says that he once sa.w a young woman led on to the scaffold .at Newgate in order to have a wen touched by the hand of a man who had just been' executed. At Northampton of old the hangman is said to have had a regular, fee for according a similar 'privilege' to sufferers from like disorders. Even the coffin of a suicide may have curative value. There is a Devonshire belief to the effect that if any one suffering from disease can manage to throw a white handkerchief on such a coffin at the time of its interment the disease will vanish as the handkerchief decays. Much superstitious value has also been attached to the knots of the rope used either by a suicide or in the execution of a criminal.

It is curious to find that this belief, not only with regard to the rope-knots, but also to any instrument used by a suicide, was formerly common in the north-east of Scotland, where the folk, apparently, did not share'the Ross-shire fishermen's fear of such things. In the matter ot burial, however, there was the same horror shown towards suicides. The Rev. Walter Gregor, a well-known authority on the old-world lore of the north-east coast of Scotland, says that it is not much over half a century since a fierce fight took place in a Banffshire churchyard to prevent the burial of a. suicide therein. Early in the morning of the day fixed for the funeral, all the men of the parish, armed with stout sticks, took pos tsession of the churchyard, and manned its walls and gates. Presently, the suicide's coffin appeared, surrounded by an excited crowd of friends, also armed for the most part with sticks, while a few carried spades with sharpened edges. There was a long and fierce fight at the gate, and not a few of the combatants bit the dust. At last the assailants were beaten off, and a grave was hurriedly dug outside the churchyard close beneath the wall, and the coffin laid in it by the victorious party. A final touch of horror was added to the scene by the lifting of the lid and the pouring of a bottle of vitriol over the corpse. The fumes of the

dissolving body rose thickly over the onlookers before the lid could be replaced and fastened down. This was done, we are told, to prevent the body from beinsj lifted during the following night from its resting-place, conveyed back to its former place of abode, and placed against the door, to fall at the feet of "the first member of the family who should open the door in the morning. Banffshire folk also believed that the body of one who committed suicde by drowning would not sink. It would remain floating on the surface of the water. In the west or southwest of Scotland it was often said that the body of a suicide would not- decay, until the time arrived when, in the ordinary course of nature, he would have died. More than one sufficiently ghastly storyhas been told in illustration of this strange belief; but enough, perhaps, has been said to show how deeply fixed and rooted in the popular imagination cmd conscience, however grotesque the outward expression of the feeling may often, have been, is the idea that, in the words of Hamlet, the Everlasting has fixed 'His canon 'gainst self-slaughter.'—'Standard.'