Folklore: Shivers = grave; Steal a seat = death

Genre: superstition, Irish and Irish-Scots

Neil O’Neill, male, 47
English-speaking Irish-Scots American
Lecturer, UC Berkeley
Dec 7, 2001
Collected in Oakland, CA (residence)

"Someone is walking on my/your grave."

and

“would you take my grave as quickly?" 

Neil O’Neil said, “My mother told me that when you got the shivers it meant that someone was walking on your grave.” His mother Beatrice lives in Scotland (b.1926), but is of Scots-Irish descent. 

Neil said, “I was probably about ten or eleven, it was 1962-63, somebody came in from the rain with wet clothes on, and they took them off to dry and they put on a sweater, and sat down by the fire and then, started shivering. That’s when my mother said it. She said her mother told her that when she was a kid in Johnstone [Scotland], and that it was an Irish saying.

Neil also said that if someone steals your seat in your absence, the reply would be: “would you take my grave as quickly?" 

Neil said, “I heard that at work, at CIBA Geigy, in Pasley, Scotland, in 1971. Jemima Watson, a co-worker, left her stool in the lab, I borrowed it, and she came back in and said to me, ‘Would you take my grave as quick?’ 

I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and she said, ‘You stole my chair!’ She was being light-hearted about it but I gave her back her chair. I thought it was an instance of black Scottish humor.”

Neil elucidated, “It’s about confusion, it’s about death. You’re stealing their chair, you’re taking their seat. It’s an extreme comparison. You won’t ever take their chair again. Think about the symbology of a seat, it’s one’s home, one’s life, one’s castle, and can represent position in society. You can compare it to Rosa Parks on the bus. It’s a subversion of someone else’s property. It’s a breach of social propriety, and it highlights a collision of ownership. Who owns what. That’s a direct relationship to the power relations between people in a given society.” 

What's interesting to me is that shivering is a sign of a future foreboding—that may or may not happen, God forbid. Shiver, and you might die, and cause your own death. 

And the stealing of one's seat also portends a future death. (And an implied curse). How many of us have reserved our seat position when we run to the loo, or called dibs on a free seat, or yell "I'm riding shotgun!" It's about hierarchy and pecking order as well.

UC Berkeley Folklore Collections
Kroeber Hall, Dr. Alan Dundes