legends · 4 min read ·
Keeping the Door
A Victorian custom guide and one widow's account explain why the keeper of the door must not look.
**From Customs of the Upper Dale (compiled by the Rev. J. Hale, 1893), section on Death**
*When a person is dead in the house, these things are done in order.*
1. The clock is stopped at the hour, and the looking-glasses are turned or covered.
2. The windows are opened, a little, that the soul may go out.
3. A person is chosen as **keeper of the door**. The keeper sits by the door of the room from the death until the burial, and may not sleep, and may not leave, and may not speak to the dead.
4. The keeper is to let in whomever knocks, and to let out whoever rises, but not to look at either.
5. At the burial, the door is shut and the keeper is released.
*In some houses the keeper is paid. In some it is the nearest kin. It is said the office is hard, but that the dead rest easier for it.*
· · ·
**Account of Ellen Marsh, who kept the door for her husband, October**
My husband died on the Monday morning at ten past six. My sister stopped the clock and covered the glass in the hall. The undertaker's man had been, and gone, and left Arthur in the front room in his good suit with the window open an inch.
I said I would keep the door. I did not want anyone else.
I sat on the hall chair with my back to the room. I was told to. You do not look at the dead, and you do not look at those who come. It is a rule, and I did not ask why.
· · ·
**Monday night**
About eleven there was a knock on the front door. A small knock, with a knuckle. I said, as the book says, "Come in." Nobody came in. The latch did not move. But I heard a footstep in the hall, on the boards, quite near, and the air was cold, and then the door of the front room, which was ajar, creaked, and was still.
I sat with my eyes on my hands. After a while the footstep came back. It passed my chair. It went out. The hall door shut softly.
I did not look.
· · ·
**Tuesday**
They came in the night, one at a time, never two. There was a woman in a long skirt, which swished. There was a man who coughed. There was one whose steps were so light I thought it was a woman, and then I knew it was not.
Each time I said "Come in" and each time they passed me and each time they went into the room. Each time, they came out.
I did not look. It is hard not to. The air in the hall changed with each of them. It smelled of rain, or tobacco, or hospital soap. A smell of a person. By morning I could have told you the names of nine.
· · ·
**Wednesday, the eve of the burial**
My sister came at noon with soup and said I should rest. I said no. She said: "You look terrible, Ellen." I said I would sleep when he was in the ground.
That night, at the same hour, the knock came once more. This time I knew it. It was Arthur's knock, two taps, the way he came home from the allotment, to say he was at the door and had his hands full.
I said, "Come in." My voice was steady.
The latch lifted. The hall door opened. Cold came in, and with it the smell of earth on a spade. A step. Another. Not on the boards, but on the mat. They came as far as my chair and stopped.
I kept my eyes on my hands.
A hand, warm and dry, lay for a moment on my shoulder, and I heard his voice, very low, near my ear. "You've kept it well, love. Now let me out."
· · ·
**Thursday**
The undertaker's men came at ten. They carried the coffin out of the front room, and I stood up at last and looked. The room was empty. Not the coffin. Arthur was in that. But the room was bare, the window wide, and a chair stood in the middle with its back to the door.
My sister said, "Who sat there?"
I said I did not know. I told her I had not turned my head the whole time.
It was only after the funeral, when I went back to the hall, that I saw what the rule is for. The hall chair, where I had sat for three days, was by the door. Against the wall behind it, at the height of a head, the wallpaper was marked. A long pale smear of grease. A hundred small prints of fingers, all up and down the wall, as if all those who had come to the door had steadied themselves against it, to rest, before going out.
And next to the chair, on the boards, at the place where my feet had been, there was a second pair of footprints, smaller than mine and bare, close beside them. They faced the door.