appears that the place is simply abandoned to the ghost. In Old Calabar it was customary for the son to leave his fathers' house to decay, but after two years he might rebuild it, the ghost being thought by that time to have departed;[1] the Hottentots abandoned the dead man's house, and were said to avoid entering it lest the ghost should be within;[2] the Yakuts let the hut fall in ruins where any one had expired, thinking it the habitation of demons;[3] the Karens were said to destroy their villages to escape the dangerous neighbourhood of departed souls.[4] Such proceedings, however, scarcely extend beyond the limits of barbarism, and only a feeble survival of the old thought lingers on into civilization, where from time to time a haunted house is left to fall in ruins, abandoned to a ghostly tenant who cannot keep it in repair. But even in the lowest culture we find flesh holding its own against spirit, and at higher stages the householder rids himself with little scruple of an unwelcome inmate. The Greenlanders would carry the dead out by the window, not by the door, while an old woman, waving a firebrand behind, cried 'piklerrukpok!' i.e., 'there is nothing more to be had here!';[5] the Hottentots removed the dead from the hut by an opening broken out on purpose, to prevent him from finding the way back;[6] the Siamese, with the same intention, break an opening through the house wall to carry the coffin through, and then hurry it at full speed thrice round the house;[7] in Russia the Chuwashes fling a red-hot stone
- ↑ Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 323.
- ↑ Kolben, p. 579.
- ↑ Billings, p. 125.
- ↑ Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien.' vol. i. p. 145; Cross, l.c., p. 311. For other cases of desertion of dwellings after a death, possibly for the same motive, see Bourien, 'Tribes of Malay Pen.' in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 82; Polack, 'M. of New Zealanders,' vol. i. pp. 204, 216; Steller, 'Kamtschatka,' p. 271. But the Todas say that the buffaloes slaughtered and the hut burnt at the funeral are transferred to the spirit of the deceased in the next world; Shortt in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vii. p. 247. See Waitz, vol. iii. p. 199.
- ↑ Egede, 'Greenland,' p. 152; Cranz, p. 300.
- ↑ Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 323; see pp. 329, 363.
- ↑ Bowring, 'Siam,' vol. i. p. 122; Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien.' vol. iii. p. 258.
