A recurrent theme in literature is the dead being angered by being “disturbed”. Like moving a grave, or accidentally digging a corpse up. Now, given that the soul (in most religions) has nothing t do with the body (after death), why should a dead person care what happens to its body? Still writers talk about the dead’s “rest” being disturbed-and revenge against the living who disturb the dead.
any cases of a dead person getting pissed off enough to do something in revenge?
Any cases of a dead person doing anything besides decaying slowly?
If it’s the truth, there must be a lot of angry dead guys out there. Cemetary caretakers routinely dig up corpses to make space for the youg’ns. The old bones are then indexed and filed in tidy ossuaries.
Yes, that means the tomb you lay flowers on may or may no be empty. And yes, that means the Zombipocalypse is going to involve a lot of puzzles and general bitching about “Who stole my third metacarpal ?!”
I’ve watched John Edward and Sylvia Browne enough to know that the dead seem to be the most mellow people on Earth. I don’t recall them ever being pissed at anybody. They mostly play charades (“His name starts with a P… or an R… could be a D… or there’s a P or an R or a D in it somewhere”) and then the message is always the same: “They’re at peace and they forgive you and love you and are always watching you… so try not to think of that when you’re straining for a bowel movement or having an episode of erectile dysfunction.”
Maybe if you die with anger in your heart, you can’t play charades.
But yeah, you hear all the time in urban legends and read in bad fiction the curse of the tomb or the Indian burying ground or the old cemetery. I can’t imagine why they’d much care. Maybe a pharaoh who’s treasure has been robbed and now has to beg change in the afterlife, but most people, they were screwed before they ever got onto the barge.
I go “gravehopping” a good bit, meaning that I enjoy going to old cemeteries. It’s usually genealogy related, and some are quite dull, but occasionally there’s just some really intriguing finds (a particularly gorgeous statue in an otherwise run of the mill cemetery, or a woman buried between her father and her stepmother (that’s in one of mine) or even something sad but still moving such as the couple where my father’s buried who are surrounded by 10 infants [when I finally saw the grave of an adult that said “daughter of the couple with the infant graves”, even though she like her parents had been dead for a century it was still a “well thank God they didn’t have to bury them all” moment.
Anyway, I’ve had hard to explain experiences that I’ll call supernatural (in that they don’t seem to be naturally explained by information that’s available) but never once have I gotten chillbumps or felt creepy or in any way been “icked” out by a cemetery. In fact they’re some of the most peaceful places on Earth, because if there is post-mortem existence it’s probably a place that they’d never go. I actually take a friend with me gravehopping occasionally and we’ll dance in the cemetery, which is fun: our logic is that if there are spirits there then they only see people crying as they bury someone else or at very most they’ll see a groundskeeper (and many not even those), but they never see anybody dancing or having a good time, so it’s our public service to them.
If one ever asks to cut in I’ll stop.
I think most religions throughout history have had some idea that what happens to the body after death affects the departed soul-- Egyptians didn’t build those pyramids because they thought it’d be good for the tourist trade 5000 years later. Being buried in hallowed or unhallowed ground was an important distinction in Christian burial for many centuries. If your culture also accepts the idea of ghosts, it only makes sense that dead people would be pissed when you disturb them.
As it turns out, this is absolutely true. I knew a guy who worked as a medical orderly; he once was trying to remove the intubation apparatus from a recently deceased patient, when the corpse’s jaw reflexively closed and bit him on the thumb.
So yes, the dead don’t like it when you move them, or try to steal their dentures.
There’s always the Curse of the Pharaohs:
Terry Pratchett wrote a series of books starting with this premise. See “Johnny and the Dead”.
They’re dead. They don’t do anything. You could walk up to a corpse and piss on it and the corpse would not do anything nor care in the least, no more than your toilet minds being pissed in.
The dead don’t take jokes very well. Tends to be a pretty stiff crowd.
I’ve heard the dead know only one thing. It’s better to be alive.
ralph, it is only a plot device.
Don’t listen to them Ralph! The dead will mess you up big time. Writers don’t just make stuff like that up. Whatever you’ve got in mind that involves moving the dead around, think twice.
I think if it were possible for me to be pissed at anything when I’m dead it would be not being able to move.
You can move em fine…just for gawds sake don’t roll em over when you do it 
The legend is correct. The dead really, really do not like being moved from one location to another.
Which is why you have to have sex with them where they lay.
Right. I’ll make a note of that.
The only thing that might bother them, according to Sam Kinison, would be necro buttsecks.
There is a local Shaker cemetery that has only one grave. There used to be many more, but they were all moved many years ago to a new cemetery, leaving only this one poor brother. When I learned about it, I wondered if he was sorry at being left behind and didn’t want to join his brethren and sistren, or if he felt he was guarding the post.
There’s a grave in my dad’s (and other ancestors’) graveyard with “NOT TO BE OPENED” written on it.