Note 1 — Chapter V · WORSHIP OF THE MALEVOLENT DEAD.

Again, those disembodied souls in particular whose departure from the earth occurred under unexpected or specially tragical circumstances are naturally considered to have been ejected against their will from their tenement of clay, and as for many of them the proper funeral rites have not been performed, they carry with them to the next world an angry longing for revenge. As Brand, writing of British ghosts, says, “The ghosts of murdered persons, whose bodies have been secretly buried, are restless until their bones have been taken up and deposited in consecrated ground with the due rites of Christian burial; this idea being the survival of the old heathen superstition that Charon was not allowed to ferry over the ghosts of the unburied, but that they wandered up and down the banks of the river Styx for a period of a hundred years, at the expiration of which they were admitted to a passage.”1