‘Someone is walking over my grave’ is said when a sudden, unexplained shiver runs through you. It comes from a folk belief that the shiver means someone has walked over your future burial place, and it was in print by 1738. The goose and rabbit versions of it came later.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Someone is walking over my grave’? - the quick version
The phrase “someone is walking over my grave” comes from an old folk belief that a sudden cold sensation is caused by someone walking over the place that one’s grave was eventually going to be. This belief is thought to have originated in the Middle Ages, when the distinction between life and death was less clear than it is today. People then believed in communication between the afterlife and the physical world, and believed that a person’s final resting place was predetermined.
The earliest known record of the phrase in print is in 1738, and it is still used today, sometimes in the form of “a goose (or occasionally, a rabbit) walked over my grave”. The modern-day scientific explanation for sudden unexplained shuddering and goose pimples is that they are caused by a subconscious release of the stress hormone adrenaline. However, the medieval version of the belief, although more fanciful, is somehow more appealing.
That 1738 record is Jonathan Swift’s A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, in which a character shudders and says the line. The belief that lies behind it was written down as a superstition by Francis Grose in 1787.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Someone is walking over my grave’? - the full story
‘Someone is walking over my grave’ seems a rather odd thing for a living person to say when experiencing a sudden shudder, so why is it said?
The 18th saying derives from an earlier folk legend that a sudden cold sensation was caused by someone walking over the place that one’s grave was eventually going to be. This belief is in line with the workings of people’s minds in England in the Middle Ages, in which the distinction between life and death was much less clear than we see it now. There was then an unambiguous belief in the everyday communication between the afterlife in heaven or hell and the physical world of the living.
When someone dies in our day and age we are likely to hold a commemorative gathering where we talk about the deceased person. Medieval mourners would hold wakes, in which they spoke to the deceased, in the belief that their words were being heard and understood. A person’s final resting place would also have been understood to be predetermined and ‘someone has walked over my grave’ would have been said in the belief that a real person had actually walked over the ground where the speaker would be interred.
The earliest known record of the phrase in print, which is of course an indication of the earliest date that we can prove that the phrase was in public use, is in Simon Wagstaff’s A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, 1738. (Simon Wagstaff was one of the many pseudonyms of the celebrated writer Jonathan Swift):
Miss [shuddering]. Lord! there’s somebody walking over my Grave.
That first edition was published in London by Motte and Bathurst, but the writing is older than the printing. George Saintsbury, introducing the text in his edition of Polite Conversation in Three Dialogues, says the book “is beyond any reasonable doubt identical with the ‘Essay on Conversation’ which Swift noted as written or planned in 1708-10”. The whole point of the book is that none of its lines are new. Wagstaff promises the reader “there is not one single witty Phrase in this whole Collection, which hath not received the Stamp and Approbation of at least one hundred Years”. The hundred years is a joke, but the direction is right: Swift set the line down because people were already saying it.
The belief itself was written out plainly fifty years later. Francis Grose collected it in A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions, 1787, under the heading ‘Sympathy’. In the modernised spelling of the later editions it reads:
A person being suddenly taken with a shivering, is a sign that some one has just then walked over the spot of their future grave.
Grose then took the belief apart in the very next sentence:
Probably all persons are not subject to this sensation; otherwise the inhabitants of those parishes, whose burial grounds lie in the common foot-path, would live in one continual fit of shaking.
The belief was not confined to England. A list of Dutch folklore sent from Amsterdam and printed in Notes and Queries on 17 May 1851 has it in almost the same words: “If you feel on a sudden a shivering sensation in your back, there is somebody walking over your future grave.”
The old folk belief is recorded by the Yorkshire novelist Harriet Parr, who also used a pseudonym, that of Holme Lee, in Basil Godfrey’s Caprice, 1868:
Joan shuddered - that irrepressible convulsive shudder which old wives say is caused by a footstep walking over the place of our grave that shall be.
The expression is sometimes found in the form of ‘a goose (or occasionally, a rabbit) walked over my grave’. These are later and chiefly American variants and the ‘goose’ version at least appears to be a back-formation, derived from ‘goose bumps/goose pimples’ which are associated with a sudden feeling of chilliness.
The goose form was in print by the 1840s. The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine of March 1843 has a lady speaking “in the words of an old saying, and with a slight shudder as from cold, ‘I feel as if a goose were walking over my grave;’ the origin, we may suppose, of the term ‘cold goose-pimple.’” The magazine was guessing, and guessing in the opposite direction, but two things in the passage are not guesses: by 1843 the goose version was already old enough to be called an old saying, and it was in use in New York. Word Histories, the etymology site, quotes a further sighting from The Massachusetts Spy of 9 May 1849, which called it “a saying common in Ireland”.
The modern-day scientific explanation for sudden unexplained shuddering and for goose pimples is that they are caused by a subconscious release of the stress hormone adrenaline. This may be as a response to coldness or an emotional reaction to a poignant memory. Fanciful it may be, but somehow, I prefer the medieval version.
The reaction the phrase covers is the same one behind ‘makes your hair stand on end’. Both give a speaker something to say about a physical reaction that arrives with no obvious cause.