Early funeral practices: From lingering spirits to reanimated corpses

RAVENA — Lingering spirits, reanimated corpses, bodies coming back from the dead. Think this is about Halloween? Think again.

The Ravena Coeymans Historical Society recently held a presentation by Shelby Mattice, curator at the Bronck Museum in Coxsackie, discussing death and funeral customs by people living in this area during the period 1650-1750.

With funeral props — including a mock corpse from a “funeral” — scattered around the Ravena Coeymans Historical Society Museum, organization trustee John Bonafide introduced Mattice and her background in early Dutch history in New York.

“Coeymans, Coxsackie, New Baltimore and Bethlehem — we all share this heritage and roots, but we don’t know a lot about the traditions that were brought forward,” Bondafide said. “One of those interesting traditions, to me, is the culture of death and dying, and how we obtain a lot of the traditions we have today.”

To bring that history to life, Bonafide said, the Bronck Museum each year conducts a mock Dutch funeral, and with Halloween just around the corner, the subject seemed timely for the historical society.

“We were thrilled to be able to get [Shelby Mattice] here for the Halloween season to give us a little background on a macabre subject, but a very interesting subject,” Bonafide said.

Mattice described her historical specialty as “social history” — interpersonal relations, traditions and customs, particularly in the years of early America.

“People in the 1600s and into the mid 1700s, they are not us in funny clothes,” Mattice explained. “Almost every experience of their life differed markedly from our own — their approach to interpersonal relationships, children, spouses. Their value systems were very different from ours. A lot of people in the general public look back at history and think they are people like us who just lived 200 years ago. They weren’t just like us — they had a very different approach from us.”

Not only the way they lived, but the way they died differed from modern times. In the years 1650-1750, men, women and children died in roughly the same proportions, and from all kinds of causes — accidents, diseases, animal attacks, infections, even simple ailments like influenza or an abscessed tooth. Kids, too, were at risk.

“Children were considered miniature adults, and they were not given the level of supervision they are given today,” Mattice said, “so they were occasionally trampled by farm animals, they fell into cess pits and wells. Young women died in childbirth, and almost always that led to the infant’s death as well, and then they were buried together.”

Beyond the day-to-day dangers of these early colonial days, superstition played a big role in society, and especially in funeral customs. The Bronck Museum, Mattice reminded the audience, was already 30 years old when the Salem witch trials took place.

“Superstitions were almost as strong a motivator as religious belief,” Mattice said. “In the mid 1600s, people were perfectly willing to believe things we would regard as superstition.”

With regard to death and funeral customs, one of their biggest concerns was lingering spirits and even reanimated corpses. They were terrified of the possibilities.

“They believed the spirit of the dead hovered over the dead body for an indeterminate period of time, and it took interest in the daily activities of those around them,” she said. “There was a lot of concern about not having the spirit of the deceased attach themselves to a living person in some way.”

For the Dutch in the early years of America, there was nothing sacred about a dead body.

“Most believed once you died, your body was simply an empty shell that was dangerous,” Mattice said, because it could spread disease, and rot and lead to noxious odors. “The body was not sacred, it was just a hollow husk that could do damage, smelled bad, and most people really just wanted to dispose of the body in the quickest possible way and in a decent fashion.”

Because of the lack of our modern respect for a deceased body, in the late 1600s New York City even had to pass laws making sure neighbors would check a dead body for signs of murder. They were also expected to make sure the body was properly buried because “sometimes bodies were just thrown in out-of-the-way places,” Mattice said.

The deceased were not buried in sanctified ground and usually clergy did not officiate — it was just done quickly and in a “decent manner.” Beyond that, there were other concerns at the time.

“First and foremost, everybody was concerned that the person was actually dead,” Mattice said. “The Dutch had a functionary for everything, so when a Dutch family expected the death of a member of the family, there was a public official called the ‘consoler of the sick.’ It was that person’s job to spend much of the last few hours or days with the person who was moving on to his reward, helping him prepare for death.”

The consoler of the sick did not perform a religious function, but a practical one, making sure finances and other issues of concern were taken care of. Once the person died, a close family member would kiss the body and then “they would put a mirror close to the mouth to see if there was any breath emanating from the body,” Mattice noted.

Neighbors would be asked by the family to serve as “wade,” or “shroud,” neighbors, and by law this was a request that could not be refused. The wade neighbors would sit with the corpse for the next 48 hours, at minimum, to look for signs of life. They would also prepare the body, clean it and comb the person’s hair. The person was then dressed in a garment they had also worn on their wedding night, and the needle used to sew it was broken in half and placed inside the nightgown. The origin of this custom is unclear.

In preparation for burial, the body would be kept in the best room in the house, and the wade neighbors would not leave its side.

“That is where you get the tradition of the wake,” Mattice said.

Wealthy people would be buried in a shroud, typically, but poorer people were often buried in no clothing at all.

“Clothing was very valuable, and to put it in the grave was a waste of precious resources when the living could make use of that clothing,” she noted. “Many people were buried without clothing of any sort.”

That drew both a groan and a chuckle from several in the audience.

During the 48-hour period in which the dead body was in the house, shutters were closed, mirrors and paintings were covered or turned toward the wall, and shiny objects were removed. They didn’t want to attract the lingering spirit of the dead person to remain in the house.

For the same reason, people at funerals did not wear jewelry or shiny materials like silk.

“They believed that the wandering, disembodied spirit would be attracted to things like shiny objects and reflective surfaces,” Mattice said. “People firmly believed this was reality.”

Outside the home, a display of items like skulls or bones — yes, they frequently had access to them — would be placed by the door, letting everyone know a death had taken place there recently. Dutch widows would wear their clothes differently — with the outermost layer of the petticoat pulled over their head — to indicate they were in mourning. Prospective suitors would watch your dress to see “when you would reenter the marriage market, to use a modern term,” Mattice said. Widows generally remained in mourning for under a year.

There was another funeral custom that would likely be surprising to modern people.

“There was a functionary called a ‘sin eater,’” Mattice explained. “Typically, the function of the sin eater was to consume, in a symbolic way, all the sins of the deceased.”

Sin eaters were usually marginal members of society — the intellectually challenged or the very poor — people who had either little understanding or little choice in what they were doing.

“Theoretically, they were consuming the sins of a sizable portion of the population over time,” Mattice said, adding that these were people who truly believed in sin and sin eaters made their living in this way.

A loaf of bread, a container of salt and beer would be placed on the corpse’s chest, and “presumably that food would absorb the sin and the sin eater would eat it, thereby absorbing into his body the sins of the deceased,” Mattice said. “In some communities, at this point, the sin eater would be beaten and chased away from the house.”

Once the body was readied for burial, the burial site was usually within view of the family’s home, typically on a little-used site of land. Many did not have markers, and there was usually no religious service conducted.

Following the burial, superstition continued to be a factor.

“People left the graveyard in a very different direction from which they came,” Mattice said. “They thought the spirit was hovering around the body, and that if you left in a different direction from the one in which you came, the idea was to confuse the spirit so they wouldn’t follow you back to your home.”

The Bronck Museum is located on State Route 9W in Coxsackie. The site’s final event of the 2018 season will be the “Chilly Willy Winter’s Eve Tours,” held Nov. 17 and 18, at 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., where you can learn what it was like surviving a winter in early America. For more information, please visit www.gchistory.org.