(Out of curiosity... can we ever see what everyone ELSE did? I think ours ROCKS!)
That said, though... a method and ritual surrounding burial kept cropping up during our research that didn't have so much to do with preventing the return of the dead... but rather to confound and generally make the inevitable return of the dead (typically if not in most cases a spirit or revenant or ghost).
Bear with me... this takes a bit a meandering twist.
Back in the 'olden days', a common punishment for traitors, murderers, highwaymen, and pirates - thanks to the Murder Act of 1752 in Britain was not ONLY execution, but 'hanging in chains'... more commonly known as the gallows.
This fantastic 'preventative' was reserved for the truly dastardly and unrepentant and who were guilty of the most heinous crimes... and once they were executed, their bodies were strung up in metal cages on a major road or thoroughfare - typically a crossroads - so as to be able to show the populace the end-result of a life of crime.Now... a crossroads was ALSO the typical burial place of murderers, as such outcasts were not likely to enter the gates of heaven and were thus buried in a place where their spirits would be forced to wander indecisively for eternity.
http://www.ushistory.org/oddities/gibbet.htm
To bury a criminal at a crossroads did a number of things: first, it might have safeguarded the populace, as the shape of the traditional crossroads (a literal cross) created the impression of consecrated ground, as suicides were denied a normal Christian burial; this however seems to not be consistent with the burial of murderers at a crossroads... as anyone evil that was buried and without a proper Christian burial tended to unhallow the ground around them. The concept was... if the ghost thought it was hallowed ground (being a cross and all) then they would be less inclined to be angry at their unChristian burial... it worked in theory...
A second idea was to protect the populace from the wrath of the maligned spirits for not burying them in the traditional Christian method... and it was believed that the crossroads would confuse the spirits as to which direction those who wronged them lay. Further to the point, the crossroads were believed also to be a waystation for the spirits of the dead... with four different directions in which to travel, it was surmised that the maligned spirits of the dead would disperse along the roads leading from the crossroads and not be content to malinger in one spot... for TOO long, at any rate...
You see... crossroads - as a general rule - ended up getting a bad rap... and stories abound of ghostly legends, demons, the Devil, witches, fairies, and other paranormal phenomena all participating in their respective 'nefarious deeds' at a crossroads. So one surmises that the spirits of the departed didn't 'disperse' quite as readily as some people might have otherwise hoped.
Just to make sure I got it all straight... a criminal gets displayed in a gibbet after being executed... and then is (presumably) buried (in an UnChristian manner) at the same crossroads where he was displayed (records are somewhat vague on these details)... small wonder then that urban legends and myths about of restless spirits at a crossroads... I'd be a bit 'put out' as well, if MY body had been put on display after my execution, then buried without a proper Christian burial at a crossroads so I can't figure out which way to go... yet since the body was not buried properly, heaven isn't an option ANYway, so the spirit might as well stick around on earth... and since it can't figure out which road to travel on for all eternity (and let's face it, who wants to do all that walking?) the spirit might as well stay put.
It's rather like a self-fulfilling prophesy, really...
As an aside (or perhaps to bring the entire post full-circle), the world's only known complete gibbet was intended to have housed the decomposing remains of convicted pirate Thomas Wilkinson in 1781 once he had been hanged. Through a bizarre twist of fate, the gibbet was never to actually be used; Wilkinson actually escaped his fate due to the sympathies of a number of wealthy and influential townspersons, and the gibbet itself - after being moved to storage and then hung in Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia as a warning to the prisoners - now resides at the Atwater Kent Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (and is shown in the picture above).
One can only surmise how angry a spirit might have become having spent time in THAT iron monstrosity...
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