When her husband forgot to bury her in her shoes, the woman came back to haunt him, doomed to wander the land of the dead barefoot.
In the Emmental region in the heart of Switzerland, where green hills surround the village of Hindelbank, an venerable belief rang through the valleys: if a woman died before her newborn child was six weeks venerable, her soul would never rest.
Condemned to walk barefoot on thistles and thorns in the gloomy land of the dead, she will be forced to suffer from the unfinished bond of motherhood. Unless the living remembered to give her one last gift, which was shoes.
Lost in the abyss and in the land of the dead
This is a ghost story found in P. Keckeis, M. Waibel, Legends of Switzerland. Bern, Zurich 1986 and tells about this amazing custom from Switzerland. Although it is said to be a tradition or folklore, there is not much information about it to confirm this.
It was said that placing the dead mother's shoes in the coffin would ease her painful journey through the underworld, where the mothers' spirits wandered among the nettles and thorns until their children were in danger for fear of their souls. Infant Limbo is a hypothetical lasting status of the unbaptized who die in infancy, too newborn to have committed actual sins, but have not been freed from original sin in Catholicism.
There has been a lot of debate about this and a lot of folklore about how to combat it. But in the still village of Hindelbank, this last act of compassion was tragically forgotten.
Ghost without shoes
After the sudden death of a newborn mother, her grieving husband was left to mourn with his infant child. Distraught and overwhelmed, he buried his wife without her customary footwear. Shortly after the funeral, a strange sound disturbed his nights with a piercing, persistent knocking on the window, always around midnight. No matter how he searched, no one was found outside. But the knocking came back again and again, more and more insistent with each passing night.
Desperate and scared, the man finally confided in his neighbors. The woman was probably trying to contact him, not out of malice, but out of pain. Her feet were bare. Her soul could not rest. “Put her shoes by the window,” they told him, “and she will take them.”
He carried out the order that same evening. He took her shoes and gently placed them on the window sill. When morning came, the shoes were gone. And the knocking never came back.
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Hindelbank's Ghost Shoes: A Mother's Journey Beyond the Grave
When her husband forgot to bury her in her shoes, the woman came back to haunt him, doomed to wander the land of the dead barefoot.
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From: P. Keckeis, M. Waibel, Legends of Switzerland. Bern, Zurich 1986.
Image Source: Pixabay.com
