Research source

Those who haunt the house are friendly; those who haunt the tomb are unfriendly

Date of account: Second edition published 1896
Source: The Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India, Vol. 2 (of 2)
Reference: The Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India, Vol. 2 (of 2) · selected passage 107
Rights: public_domain
Language: English
Record updated: 2026-08-25

Record summary

Published source text

Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.

Source passage

Source text · mention only

Those who haunt the house are friendly; those who haunt the tomb are unfriendly. Two classes of animals correspond to these two classes of spirits--an at-home, fearless class, as the snake, the rat, flies and ants and bees, into which the home-haunting or friendly spirits would go; and a wild, unsociable class, such as bats and owls, dogs, jackals, or vultures, into which the unfriendly or tomb-haunting spirits would go. In the case of some of these tomb-haunting animals, the dog, jackal, and vulture, the feeling towards them as tomb-haunters seems to have given place to the belief that as the spirit lives in the tomb where the body is laid, so, if the body be eaten by an animal, the spirit lives in the animal, as in a living tomb.

Historical context

Contextual commentary · mention only

This material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.

Modern context

Contextual commentary · mention only

Lattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.

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