Unfortunately it is all to easy to get Google to come up with a plethora of cites on suicides and cross roads etc.. 

My original request was for a lead through this plethora, if that is a proper metaphor.

The lead needs to be highly specific - digging suicides up and depositing them in museums. The background literature suggested to me that 1842 was a bit late for a suicide to have been buried at the cross roads and thus be a target for unauthorized exhumation.

Whitney Sprague cited a lead to Barbara Gates' _Victorian Suicide_, which I have not seen and I shall follow that lead.

I rather think my request will slip under the radar but am wondering whether there are any museum curators who monitor this list, have come across the skeletons of suicides in boxes and wondered why and when they got to their museum.




> I have a question relating to the digging up of suicides and the depositing
> of their skeletal remains in museums.
>
> A particular case is in Australia in 1842, but I am looking for historical
> background in the English speaking protestant world.
>
> Is there any decent history on the idea of sacred ground and suicides?


>
>Subject: Re: history of attitude to burial of suicides
>   From: Whitney Sprague <[log in to unmask]>
>   Date: Sat, 09 Sep 2006 13:48:54 -0400
>     To: [log in to unmask]
>
>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
>>
>>