Folklore: Stumbling = Death

"The one who stumbles (in the grave) is the next to go"
and a variant,"they're grabbing after you."

In 2001, my third cousin Mary Kate Walsh and her sister came to visit us in America, from Bantry Bay, Co, Cork, Ireland, and we had a big party at the Sullivan's on Skyline in SSF. As everyone was catching up on who was still alive and who was dead, the talk gravitated toward stories of death and the supernatural.

What was interesting was their avoidance of the words "death" and "grave," it was suggested with pauses in speech. Mary Kate didn't elaborate on the saying, it was "understood," rather than spelled out. When we asked her about it, she meant, stumbling anywhere—as opposed to only on graves.

This sign superstition seems to be a fairly common one as several of my sources used variants of it. The idea being that you invited death in by stumbling on the graves of the dead. What intrigued me, this particular saying didn't even mention the word "grave" at all, so theoretically, the act of stumbling anywhere could be a portent of a death to come. Which made one think about being doubly careful about walking around.

Suddenly the taboo zone of danger exponentially broadened to include everywhere, not just graveyards. So many times when an elderly person falls and breaks a hip, it is the beginning of the end, and many do die within the year. It as if the act of stumbling is akin to dying, and that you're always a step away from the grave.

From the UC Berkeley Kroeber Hall Folklore Files.