by Suzanne Ress
Some years ago, we were having a bathroom retiled on the uppermost floor in the old section of our house. The Sun had gone down, and the tile professional was staying late. I was in the other part of the house when he suddenly came rushing down the stairs and through the corridor, scared.
“I’ve seen a ghost,” he said. “You didn’t tell me you have a ghost up there.”
Actually, both my daughter and I had heard a benign spiritual presence in that part of the house on several occasions, but it was not something I would normally bring up to an unknown handyman.
We talked, and he told me he was very sensitive to spiritual presences and ghosts and gave me a few examples of experiences he’d had in other people’s houses. There was one story he told that opened my mind to the magical mystery of fairy, or spirit, roads.
He was working in an old house situated right beside a straight country road. The house was built at a lower level than the road, so the road passed very close to the second-story window in the room he was working. He had his back to the window, hunkered down, tiling the floor, when he heard the sound of a group of people passing by on the road on foot. There were a few murmuring sounds and some quiet crying, but otherwise these people did not speak. He turned to look and saw a procession of men and women dressed in dark clothes from about a hundred and fifty years ago, walking slowly along the road. None of them seemed to see him. He said all the hairs on his head and arms stood on end because he realized that what he was witnessing was a spirit, or fairy, funeral.
The ground we live on is not only what it appears to be! Below the surface is a wealth of artifact, and, quite possibly, some of the lingering spirits of those who were here before us.
Many people who live in populous areas can remember some place—an empty lot, a wooded area, a dirt road—where they spent happy moments playing and wandering as children. With time, a house was built in the empty lot, the woods were cleared to make a shopping center, and the dirt road was widened and paved for increasing traffic. Although the places may have been transformed physically, in our dreams and memories they live on as the magical places of childhood. To a newcomer, the previously empty lot is just another house, the former woods an abandoned mall, and the once-dirt lane is meaningless asphalt disappearing beneath car tires. If we tell the newcomer what those places used to be like, she might find it hard to believe.
Before your current dwelling existed, what was there? What was there before there were the roads you regularly use to go anywhere? I like to look at old photographs of places I’ve lived or visited and see how things have changed. Imagine stepping back one hundred, two hundred, or a thousand years but staying in exactly the same place. There would be something familiar about it, even if it were hardly recognizable.
We can look at old photographs and at even older drawings and paintings and maps to get an idea of how a place we think we know has transformed, but these visual aids can only take us back to a time when people were there and able to make a representation of a place on a flat surface. Before that, what was there?
Each autumn the leaves fall off the trees, and if no one rakes them up, by the following autumn they will decompose. With help from ants, fungi, and bacteria, the fallen leaves are turned into humus and, eventually, new soil. The new layer of soil will quickly bury any lost object, and you are unlikely to find it again. The earth will bury small items like rings and trinkets, but also larger ones such as dishes, shovels, and toys in just one season. As the years pass, roads, dilapidated sheds, and even abandoned houses are covered over completely with dirt. Entire towns can be buried and lost.
Hidden Histories
Friends around here involved in the field of building and construction tell stories of bulldozers mistakenly uncovering stashes of ancient metal objects, prehistoric pottery, and even crypts. Because obeying historical and cultural preservation laws and reporting these finds would halt construction work for years, such valuable finds are virtually never reported!
At the top of the hill where I live is an ancient chapel, dating to the early 1200s. Previous to being a church it was a Roman tower and fort, and it is believed that it was a Celtic sacred place in the Iron Age and earlier. About forty years ago several ancient stone tombs were found in an underground passageway beneath the church. When the first tomb was carelessly opened, remnants of a perfectly formed, long-dead man immediately turned to dust. Two more tombs were opened with more forethought, and now, under a thick layer of glass, the skeletons of what are believed to be Longobard priests entombed in about the year 600 are on display.
Near the bottom of my hill, in 1886, a farmer was ploughing his field when he came upon an enormous rock. With oxen power and much effort he was able to move it, uncovering, for the first time in two thousand years, the tombs of an Iron Age man and woman. The bodies had been cremated, but the tomb of the woman still contained an iron ring and chain. The tomb of the man contained a beautiful iron sword with a handmade bronze handle and an iron torque, showing he had been an impressive warrior. The items are on display in the archeological museum of Milan.
Throughout much of Europe, fortified dwelling sites that had their origins in the Iron Age used circular earthen works surrounded by a ditch or moat. They were usually on a hilltop and often on or near a natural spring or well. Straight, often invisible, lines connecting such a fort with another sacred dwelling place, such as a well, lake, or pool; an ancient oak grove; or massive erratic rock are known as fairy spirit roads.
An ancient yet ongoing belief is that disembodied spirits—whether those of the deceased, of fairies, or of live people traveling out of body—always move in straight lines and between sacred landmarks. This is a universal belief, similar to the timeless sensation of traveling down a dark, straight tunnel toward the light in a near-death experience.
Native American shamans travel spiritually by flying in straight lines. These spiritual paths are represented in many cases by physical roads. The Nazca lines of Peru are dozens of arrow-straight lines drawn into desert pampa. They crisscross at hillocks and other possible sacred places and are worn down by foot traffic. Similar spiritual path lines have been found in Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico and in California, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and more.
In New Mexico, as part of the lost civilization of the Ancestral Puebloans, there are broad spiritual roads that continue for hundreds of miles and never vary from dead straight—no matter whether they must cross over mountains or any other natural obstacle.
Peoples of the Hopewell tradition in Ohio also built straight spirit roads. The longest of these discovered so far travels sixty miles from geometric earthen works in Newark, Ohio, to the famous burial mounds in Chillecothe. It is now believed that these straight, sacred roads’ primary use was symbolic and spiritual travel, although they were also used as regular roads if necessary.
Australian Aboriginal song lines, or dream tracks, are invisible roads connecting known landmarks. It is believed that Aboriginal shamans can send spiritual messages through the air along these song lines, something like wireless Internet!
In the Chinese feng shui tradition, dragon lines are straight veins of energy running through the earth on which spirits travel. It is considered extremely bad luck to build a house where a dragon line ends.
Out-of-body spiritual travel is pure freedom. All obstacles have been removed, so naturally, the chosen path is always straight!
Fairy Road Lore
From medieval times throughout Europe, special roads were used to transport coffins carrying the dead from the churchyard to the cemetery. The coffins were carried by pallbearers, and the roads between the two places often extended several miles in distance. Corpse roads were used only for carrying the body to burial, and it was considered bad luck to use them for any other purpose.
With the advent of horse-drawn hearses, and then motorcar hearses, the old corpse roads fell out of use. In some cases they came to be used as footpaths, bridleways, or shortcuts, and their original purpose was soon forgotten. In other cases the corpse roads became overgrown with weeds, grass, and trees, and were forgotten. Later on, other buildings may have been constructed right on the corpse way.
Nevertheless, even when the physical corpse road was no longer visible, local legend, passed from generation to generation, spoke of enchantment, haunting, and curses happening along these now-forgotten corpse roads.
Closely tied with corpse roads are fairy roads. Sometimes places where old corpse roads once were are now recognized as fairy paths, and other times fairy paths are not remembered as ever being anything but fairy roads.
In Irish tradition fairies are confused with, and often the same thing as, spirits. It is believed that fairies accompany corpses to burial and even that they held their own fairy funerals, which often foretold a real funeral for a specific person.
Traditionally, fairies were believed to be the lingering spirits of those who, for one reason or another, were barred from entering the afterworld. They were restless spirits, perhaps the spirits of those who committed suicide or murder. Fairies were not spirits to be fooled with.
Sometimes fairies tread on the ground, but more often they move by hovering just above the ground, and, as spirits, they prefer to travel in straight lines. Blocking a fairy path by building a house on it brings ill luck to those who dwell there.
Descriptions of fairies by people who have seen them vary widely, but there are a few traits that all fairy spirits have in common: they can travel invisibly, above ground, and in straight lines, and they can shape-shift. They demand respect, and a lack of it can cause them to retaliate by doing anything from playing harmless pranks to inflicting real hardship and even death.
Fairies are believed to inhabit prehistoric burial mounds. They might have a path going between a natural wellspring and a burial mound, for example. The sides of fairy roads are often marked by hawthorn trees.
Some visible fairy roads have been identified as ley lines. These were originally noticed by Alfred Watkins in the English countryside in 1920. They are straight lines connecting ancient sacred places, such as churches, burial mounds, tree groupings, marker stones, and wells. Watkins surmised that these mysterious straight tracks were designed by Neolithic ley men to help in finding their way over long distances. Later, enthusiastic ley hunters noted the similarities between fairy roads and ley lines and assigned ley lines a spiritual significance they may or may not have had initially.
Fairy paths, dragon lines, shamanic routes, dream tracks, and burial roads are all similar to one another, despite coming from cultures quite varied and distant. Much about all of them remains mysterious to modern humans, but what they all have in common is that they are straight, they connect two or more spiritually important landmarks, and obstacles should not block them. We can surmise that they were all meant primarily for spirit travel. Even when they are invisible, they are a real and important part of our magically human spiritual heritage.