Meaning of Her Favorite Saying?

[hydrolad]

As if I didn't have anything else better to do, I was sitting here thinking of a saying my Grand-Mother used to say all the time when I was a little boy.

I would be with her and for some reason she would shiver (most of us do) and she would say to me "Someone just walked over my grave!"

And I remember thinking, 'What grave, you're not even dead yet?'.

This was before my belief in Reincarnation which came later as a young teenager.

In spite of being a staunch Christian (WCTU and all that) in retrospect, she almost sounded like she was voicing a belief in Reincarnation?

Or as most of us do, we often repeat sayings out of habit.

One other thing, years later, my Aunt (my Grand-Mothers step-daughter) would state basically, that she thought I was her Brother reborn in this life (he died when he was 13 in 1924).

Just thinking about it now gives me the shivers, anyone else heard of this saying and it's actual meaning?

 

[Nightrain]

I would be with her and for some reason she would shiver (most of us do) and she would say to me "Someone just walked over my grave!"

I do remember hearing this phrase at an early age, but I can't remember where. Curiously, I never gave it much thought, but stranger still, I understood the meaning that it implied an unseen and ongoing connection between the dead and the living. It is strange to me that I accepted the psychic meaning behind such comments, while utterly disbelieving some of the claims made by the nuns who taught me during my school years. It is interesting that I would resist one superstition while accepting another.


I think that the saying could possibly be traced back to Irish mysticism, because there were many such phrases like this repeated by my mother and her mother and friends. There was a strong hint of what I now recognize as Druidism among them -- without the human sacrifice, of course. And, my grandmother's family seemed to have been regarded as some sort of "royalty" back in old "Corktown" Detroit. I believe the original meaning has been lost; yet the phrases often seem to persist to this day.

 

[hydrolad]

I agree, my Grand-Mother's side of the family was strongly Irish (and Scottish), in fact they were "Lace Curtain Irish" (Celtic roots) with Red hair, not "Black Irish" (early Spanish influence).


As a child I had Red hair with a Father whose name and side of the family was German, needless to say I was very confused in the beginning!


In my opinion I think my Grand-Mother secretly believed in Reincarnation, but had to deny it because of her upbringing, her religion and the times we lived in.


How sad to have to deny our beliefs to ourselves (and to others!)

 

[Nightrain]

In my opinion I think my Grand-Mother secretly believed in Reincarnation, but had to deny it because of her upbringing, her religion and the times we lived in.

I have read that Ireland was, somehow, able to maintain its Pagan roots and beliefs more easily than most cultures along the conversion path. I wish that I could point out specific references, but those sources are too many and too far into the past for me to remember. However, those sources indicated that even Christian priests in the northern areas continued to practice Druidism--County Donegal in particular. You may have noticed, yourself, how superstitious the Irish can be, and how many legends have been passed down by oral tradition.

 

[Tinkerman]

Found on internet search:

According to phrases.org.uk
It is a response to a sudden unexplained shudder or shivering.


About the origin:


'Someone is walking over my grave' seems a rather odd thing for a living person to say when experiencing a sudden shudder, so why is it said?


The 18th saying derives from an earlier folk legend that a sudden cold sensation was caused by someone walking over the place that one's grave was eventually going to be. This belief is in line with the workings of people's minds in England in the Middle Ages, in which the distinction between life and death was much less clear than we see it now. There was then an unambiguous belief in the everyday communication between the afterlife in heaven or hell and the physical world of the living. When someone dies in our day and age we a likely to hold a commemorative gathering where we talk about the deceased person. Mediaeval mourners would hold wakes, in which they spoke to the deceased, in the belief that their words were being heard and understood. A person's final resting place would also have been understood to be predetermined and 'someone has walked over my grave' would have been said in the belief that a real person had actually walked over the ground where the speaker would be interred.


The earliest known record of the phrase in print, which is of course an indication of the earliest date that we can prove that the phrase was in public use, is in Simon Wagstaff's A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, 1738. (Simon Wagstaff was one of the many pseudonyms of the celebrated writer Jonathan Swift):


The earliest known record of the phrase in print, which is of course an indication of the earliest date that we can prove that the phrase was in public use, is in Simon Wagstaff's A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, 1738. (Simon Wagstaff was one of the many pseudonyms of the celebrated writer Jonathan Swift):


Miss [shuddering]. Lord! there's somebody walking over my Grave.


The old folk belief is recorded by the Yorkshire novelist Harriet Parr, who also used a pseudonym, that of Holme Lee, in Basil Godfrey's Caprice, 1868:


Joan shuddered - that irrepressible convulsive shudder which old wives say is caused by a footstep walking over the place of our grave that shall be.


The expression is sometimes found in the form of 'a goose (or occasionally, a rabbit) walked over my grave'. These are later and chiefly American variants and the 'goose' version at least appears to be a back-formation, derived from 'goose bumps/goose pimples' which are associated with a sudden feeling of chilliness.


The modern-day scientific explanation for sudden unexplained shuddering and for goose pimples is that they are caused by a subconscious release of the stress hormone adrenaline. This may be as a response to coldness or an emotional reaction to a poignant memory. Fanciful it may be, but somehow, I prefer the mediaeval version.

 

[Nightrain]

A current new-age belief is that one feels a shiver when a spirit walks through ones body.


Whatever the case, I haven't ever heard any medically-based explanation for shivers that happen out of the blue. Being cold, however, is quite another matter. I get them all the time, because my wife is, well...let's say, she's always playing with the thermostat.


:freak: