The crossroads burials are the ones with which I'm the most familiar; the theory behind it that the restless spirit would be confused by crossroads and have no idea where to go. It was in all the fairy tails and ghost stoies with which I grew up (mainly British Isles). It was fairly easy to come up with some reasonable cites on Google: http://www.britarch.ac.uk/BA/ba25/ba25feat.html http://www.sourcetext.com/lawlibrary/guernsey/01.htm<http://www.sourcetext.com/lawlibrary/guernsey/03.htm> http://www.victorianweb.org/books/suicide/01.html If you want more..."folklorish" and less academic cites: http://www.sacred-texts.com/etc/fcod/fcod11.htm http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/c/crossroad.html http://irelandsown.net/crossroads.html And of course there appear to be dozens of great cites over at Google Scholar ( http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=suicide+burial+crossroads&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Search) but they seem to be pay-to-play journal articles and the like. Hope some of this helps. On 9/9/06, geoff carver <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > Somewhere in dickens a suicide is mentioned as still being buried at the > crossroads > If it's any help, I can dig up the reference > >