We’ve known each other for decades, from college days on, and yet when our friends Tom and Shirley visited recently, we learned incredible details about what growing up in Jamaica was like for Shirley, and about some interesting funeral traditions.
She was one of eleven children and grew up in a home with no running water or electricity. Can you imagine taking care of all those babies with no running water?
To bathe, they would follow a path through the forest, down to a nearby river.
Fast forward to when we first met Shirley. She had immigrated to the United States and was working on her Masters Degree. After getting that degree, she began a professional career working with environmental engineers.
One of the most fascinating stories she told us was about the time she had an encounter with a ghost!
When she was a teenager, she walked home on the path she took every day, but this time it was after dark. Every time she stopped by a tree, it sounded like rain was hitting nearby leaves, or even more like someone was throwing sand towards the tree. Yet, she couldn’t see any signs of rain, sand, or pebbles anywhere.
By the time she got home, she was pretty scarred because this happened every time she’d stopped. When she told her mother what had happened, her mother said she it was probably the man who had been buried with pockets in his suit.
Shirley had no idea what her mother was talking about, so her mother explained! She also told Shirley never to walk that path after dark again.
Among the many funeral rituals and superstitions, some still followed today, was the belief that “if the deceased was a man, [you were to] cut out or sew up all the pockets in the burial suit in case the ghost came back with stones [or sand] to throw at the house and make mischief.” Jamaica Observer
Once I started researching this and Jamaican funeral traditions, I was blown away by the number and types of rituals. If you’re interested in learning more, here’s a good reference: Jamaican Superstitions.
To hear this ghost story and details about Shirley’s life first hand was fascinating!
