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
>
>