A pair of shoes placed on the dead might seem like a small kindness, but in many old-world traditions it carried a much deeper meaning.
Across Scotland, northern England, Scandinavia, and parts of Eastern Europe, the dead were not meant to go barefoot into the grave. Even a stranger or a tramp found without shoes might be given a new pair before burial, not merely out of respect, but out of fear.
Without shoes, it was believed, the dead might return.
Their ghosts could come wandering back to the place where they died, searching for the boots they needed for the journey beyond the grave. The road to paradise was imagined as long and painful, crossing thorny plains, burning sands, or marshy ground.
In some places, the shoes buried with the dead were known by a grim and unforgettable name: “hell shoes.”
Dead Men’s Shoes
“Dead men’s shoes” is a common expression, but means much in many parts of the old world, where the boots of the dead are accorded much importance.
In Scotland, in the northern parts of England, in Scandinavia, as well as in Hungary, Croatia, and Romania, the utmost care is taken among the lower classes that each corpse is provided with a pair of good shoes before being laid into the ground.
If the person happens to be a tramp and to have been found dead barefooted, there will always be come charitable soul to furnish a pair of good boots for interment along with the corpse.
An inspector of police in Scotland has been known to purchase of his own accord a new pair of boots and to place them in the grave, reopened for the purpose, of a murdered stranger who had been inadvertently interred barefooted the day before.
This practice, which likewise prevails among the Tsiganes as well an in many parts of Asia, is attributable to the belief that unless the dead are well shod when buries their ghosts come back to haunt the locality where they breathed their last in search of a pair of boots.
The shoes are popularly supposed to be needed to pass in comfort and safety the broad plains which the departed soul must traverse before it can reach paradise. Among some nations, these plains are declared to be covers with furzes, thorns, and morass, while others say that they consist of burning sands.
These plains of suffering are popularly credited with forming a sort of antechamber to hell. It is for this reason that the boots of the dead are called “hell shoes” in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark.
Source: The Richmond Palladium. Richmond, Ind. September 15, 1906.
