Folklore: Step on a grave = death

Genre: superstition, American

Peggy Green, female, 31
nurse practitioner

American, born in Chico, Ca.
Sept 17, 2001
Collected in a car on the Bay Bridge, San Francisco (we were going to the Azores)

“Don’t step on graves”

Peggy, who now lives in Nicasio, West Marin, Ca., said: “When I lived in Chico, Ca., during the 1970s (until she was 17), my granny, Jane Mayfield, who was from Missouri, we’d go for walks in the cemetery. It was pleasant and calm. She would always say, ‘you’re not supposed to walk at the front of the graves, it’s disrespectful.” She made it sound so sacred, so holy. It was holy ground. She enjoyed it. It was very serious for her. I still won’t do it. We would pull weeds and discover new markers, she’d say, ‘It was somebody’s child,’ or ‘Never step on a grave.’ There were rules with perimeters.”

Peggy interrupts her story with a joke her granny told her: “You know why the have fences around the graveyards? ‘Cause they’re all dyin’ to get in!” Peggy said her granny would laugh and laugh. She’d sit in the mausoleum. She wasn’t afraid to examine that aspect of death, it was tradition. Dying seemed desirable. Rest and calm. Weightless, nothing. She was a hypersensitive woman and didn’t handle things well emotionally. She died in ‘82 and she was buried in that same graveyard. She had a plot all picked out, but she died in ‘82. The Chico cemetery in the middle of town. The Bidwells are buried there. The Kennedy plot had a mausoleum.”

I asked Peggy if her grandmother was religious, and if so, what religion she was raised in. “Religious? You bet. The Church of Christ, it was Pentecostal. I’m sure she believed in ghosts. She never discounted how someone would feel if you stepped on her grave. She knew she was gonna go soon too. She wrote a note with the date. It was a nice day to go, fair weather too. She was right too.”

UC Berkeley Folklore Collections
Kroeber Hall, Dr. Alan Dundes