_Death-bed Superstition_. (No. 20. p. 315.).--The practice of opening
doors and boxes when a person dies, is founded on the idea that the
ministers of purgatorial pains took the soul as it escaped from the
body, and flattening it against some closed door (which alone would
serve the purpose), crammed it into the hinges and hinge openings;
thus the soul in torment was likely to be miserably pinched and
squeezed by the movement on casual occasion of such door or lid: an
open or swinging door frustrated this, and the fiends had to try some
other locality. The friends of the departed were at least assured
that they were not made the unconscious instruments of torturing the
departed in their daily occupations. The superstition prevails in the
North as well as in the West of England; and a similar one exists in
the South of Spain, where I have seen it practised.
Among the Jews at Gibraltar, at which place I have for many years been
a resident, there is also a strange custom when a death occurs in the
house; and this consists in pouring away all the water contained in
any vessel, the superstition being that the angel of death may have
washed his sword therein.