A segment of the corpse way on Otmoor between Noke and Islip, now part of the Oxfordshire Way. Image: Paul Devereux
Stepping stones known as the “Cataloo Steps” across the River Tavy on Dartmoor’s famous corpse road, the Lych Way.
Posted on 07/22/2007 5:43:01 AM PDT by Renfield
GGG ping.
A segment of the corpse way on Otmoor between Noke and Islip, now part of the Oxfordshire Way. Image: Paul Devereux
Stepping stones known as the “Cataloo Steps” across the River Tavy on Dartmoor’s famous corpse road, the Lych Way.
Deep stuff. I’ll need an evening with some Jagermeister to sort this one out.
Bkmarked.
Lych-gate and coffin plinth at Chilmark church, Wiltshire, with corpse road beyond. Image: Paul Devereux
Early pioneer graveyards in America are frequently off the main route of modern roads. There's usually a farm or other piece of property between them and the roads. Landowners trapped between a road and a grave must provide access anyway.
It's likely earlier human societies had the exact same problem. As land was bought and sold, and with changes in economic activity, density of population, and the redrawing of political lines, numerous gravesites must have become isolated from the every changing more modern routes of travel.
These grave paths would have provided a valuable public service.
Just got a chill.
A few years ago, a friend living in a rented house in MA, decided she had to move when bureau drawers kept sliding open or slamming shut, then a bedroom window flew up or down. Her dog barked madly at something he saw, but she didn’t see. (8I wonder if the house was in a ‘fairy path’.) Another friend in Maine lived across a field from a graveyard and her dog would go nuts, staring out the window and barking at the gravestones. He saw something going on that she didn’t.
My cousin owns a 170 year old plantation house, reputed to be haunted. She’s seen and heard some things. OTOH I’ve stayed there a few times, including once all by myself. Nothing ever happened out of the ordinary while I was there.
My mother who was Irish, ‘saw’ things, including, on one occasion, a woman lying dead in a coffin. She heard organ music and smelled flowers. At the moment she had this vision, the woman was standing in front of her, fit as a fiddle.
Another friend and her husband renovated an old tavern in MA, where they lived for a number of years, and she saw things, including a feather that appeared out of thin air and floated to the floor. She’d smell flowers, when there were none in the house, and one day when they came home...having left their twelve year-old son home alone...he met them at the door and wanted to know who the old man in the nightshirt was. Evidently he’d been on the front stairs when the old man passed him, climbing upward, carrying a candle.
Only later on did the owner of the house admit to his wife that the first night they’d slept there, he’d waked up to see an old man flanked by two women in old fashioned clothes standing at the foot of their bed, staring at them. After a moment, they faded away...having checked out the new owners!
Well, what happened? Did she die shortly thereafter?
bump for later
Yes, I perused Watkin’s book on leylines years ago. Been to most neolithic and iron age sites in England. A favorite site is Carnac, Brittany. Years ago tourists were rare. Now I think these places are packed. I saw Stonehenge before it was roped off, those were the days when you could ‘touch it’.
The above author ties in a lot of commonalities. But...as he said were these commonalities d/t ‘brain wiring’ or a migrating concept from one place to another?
My mother never knew the woman’s name, so she couldn’t check the obits. But I’m sure she died. My mom knew when it would snow, when the car wouldn’t start...she had the sixth sense or whatever. Sometimes I’ve seen or heard things, too. No lottery numbers, alas! A few times I’ve gotten warnings about people. Don’t laugh. A voice said, ‘neither one of them should go anywhere near stairs’. At the time I was putting letters in a mailbox belonging to an elderly couple who lived by a lake. So I sat there for a second, wondering what was going on, who’d just spoken to me, etc.—I did’t get an answer to that one — so I took the mail out of the box and went down the stone steps leading to the front door and put all of it behind their screen door.
Three days later, I was talking to the man across the street, who asked if I’d heard that Mr. F. had died. Stunned, I said, no and asked what had happened. Well, the couple had come home from the store and Mr. F. had gone indoors and fallen down the stone steps leading to the cellar. He’d suffered massive head injuries, and two days later, died. Horrific.
Not surprisingly, I was consumed with guilt for several years. Should I have said anything to them when I heard that voice? They’d have thought I was nuts, and he’d have gone right down those stairs anyway. But I made it a point to help Mrs. F. in any way I could, and five years later when she said she’d stopped having nightmares about his death, I told her what I’d heard. She sighed and said it wouldn’t have made any difference. Stone stairs in that house were a fact and unavoidable, and maybe he’d had a stroke at the top of the cellar stairs. Either way, it seemed unavoidable, which leads me to wonder why I was told beforehand. What did it matter?
Similar feather appearance here following the death of a son on a winter day with the house closed up. It just floated down while my wife was thinking about him.
Here’s another MA story. A friend who owns an antique shop had moved into an old house on the town green. Not long afterward, she got shoved in the back and almost fell down the stairs in her house. (She was alone in the house at the time.) She caught her breath...at the foot of the stairs, and had a talk with whoever had pushed her. Assuming it had been a former owner, long dead, she said, “Look, we’re living here now and I promise we won’t do anything to the house that you don’t like. But please let us live in peace.” Evidently it worked, because since then she hasn’t been shoved in the back on the stairs. But she certainly believes in ghosts.
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