pening. They think that
if they were to carry a corpse out by the door, the ghost would soon
return and fetch away other members of the family.[753] On the same
principle, as soon as the Indians of Tumupasa, in north-west Bolivia,
have carried a corpse out of the house, "they shift the door to the
opposite side, in order that the deceased may not be able to find
it."[754] Once more, in Mecklenburg "it is a law regulating the return
of the dead that they are compelled to return by the same way by which
the corpse was removed from the house. In the villages of Picher,
Bresegard, and others the people used to have movable thresholds at the
house-doors, which, being fitted into the door-posts, could be shoved
up. The corpse was then carried out of the house under the threshold,
and therefore could not return over it."[755]

[Sidenote: Some people only remove in this manner the bodies of persons
whose ghosts are especially feared.]

Even without such express testimonies to the meaning of the custom we
may infer from a variety of evidence that the real motive for practising
it is a fear of the ghost and a wish to prevent his return. For it is to
be observed that some peoples do not carry out all their dead by a
special opening, but that they accord this peculiar mode of removal only
to persons who die under unlucky or disgraceful circumstances, and whose
ghosts accordingly are more than usually dreaded. Thus we have seen that
some modern Hindoo castes observe the custom only in the case of people
who have died on inauspicious days; and that in Germany and the
Highlands of Scotland this mode of removal was specially reserved for
the bodies of suicides, whose ghosts are exceedingly feared by many
people, as appears from the stringent precautions taken against
them.[756] Again, among the Kavirondo of Central Africa, "when a woman
dies without having borne a child, she is carried out of the back of the
house. A hole is made in the wall and the corpse is ignominiously pushed
through the hole and carried some distance to be buried, as it is
considered a curse to die without a child. If the woman has given birth
to a child, then her corpse is carried out through the front door and
buried in the verandah of the house."[757] In Brittany a stillborn child
is removed from the house, not by the door, but by the window; "for if
by ill-luck it should chance otherwise, the mothers who should pass
through that fatal door would bear nothing