_Closing of Rooms on account of Death._--In the _Spectator_, No. 110.,
July, 1711, one of Addison's papers on Sir Roger de Coverley, the following
passage occurs:
"My friend, Sir Roger, has often told me with a good deal of mirth,
that at his first coming to his estate he found three parts of his
house altogether useless; that the best room in it had the reputation
of being haunted, and by that means was locked up; that noises had been
heard in his long gallery, so that he could not get a servant to enter
it after eight o'clock at night; that the door of one of his chambers
was nailed up, because there went a story in the family that a butler
had formerly hanged himself in it; and that his mother, who lived to a
great age, had shut up half the rooms in the house, in which either her
husband, a son, {143} or daughter had died. The knight seeing his
habitation reduced to so small a compass, and himself in a manner shut
out of his own house, upon the death of his mother ordered all the
apartments to be flung open, and exorcised by his chaplain, who lay in
every room one after another, and by that means dissipated the fears
which had so long reigned in the family."
The practice of shutting up rooms in which members of the family had died
was retained up to the end of the last century. I learn from a friend that,
in a country house in the south of England, his mother's apartment,
consisting of a sitting-room, bed-room, and dressing-room, was closed at
her death in 1775. The room in which his grandfather had died in 1760 was
likewise closed. These four rooms were kept locked up, with the shutters
shut, till the year 1793, when the next owner came into possession, who
opened them, and caused them to be again used. Probably other cases of the
same sort may be known to your correspondents, as having occurred in the
last century; but the custom appears to be now extinct.