San Francisco's Corpse Roads

San Francisco CA

01 November, 2021

2:00 PM

Description

By Beth Winegarner, Mission Local October 30, 2021 If you've ever visited remote parts of England, you may have come across old footpaths marked "church way" or "corpse road," once used by pallbearers to bring the dead to church cemeteries for burial. These pathways became magnets for superstition and tales of ghosts and ghouls. San Francisco may not have the same traditions, but many of our most heavily-used streets were once used to convey the dead to cemeteries throughout the city. Some of them were improved specifically to make it easier to get to San Francisco's graveyards. In medieval times, English pastors established footpaths exclusively for the purpose of carrying the dead to the graveyards attached to their churches. This served two purposes: it kept the dead within the church community, and raised money, through burial fees, for the churches. But corpse roads didn't always lead to the closest church; you might attend one several miles from home. These were long, exhausting journeys for the pallbearers, who walked for hours or days across difficult terrain to lay their loved ones to rest. Earlier this year, I attended an online talk by British writer SJ Farrer on corpse roads. Medieval Brits took care to keep the spirits of the dead from using these roads to return home, she says. They swept these footpaths regularly to remove spirit energies, and many lych ways crossed creeks and rivers, because people believed that spirits could not cross running water. I couldn't help wondering which paths San Francisco's European settlers — many of whom came from England and Ireland — might have used to bring their dead to local cemeteries. To read the full article, click here. Mission Local covers San Francisco from the vantage point of the Mission, a neighborhood with all of the promise and problems of a major city. You can support Mission Local here.