In my youth there were, as I remember, diamond shape red signs with a white circle with an “X” superimposed on the circle, pretty much all over the American Mid-west. They were put up by some insurance company (maybe State Farm) on the edge of the road right-of-way to mark fatal auto accidents. I haven’t seen any for years – they seem to have gone the way of the Burma Shave signs. When you came up on a cluster of a half-dozen or so of those “X marks the spot” signs it got your attention.
There’s was a memorial on the road to my house that someone decorated with teddy bears. My 6-year-old daughter saw the teddy bear and wanted to stop and take it in before the rain came and got him wet.
The blue-collar farm type people around here do the same thing. A guy at my high school died in a car accident (from driving drunk, apparently,) and memorial stickers for him popped up on lots of cars and trucks soon after. Another guy who drowned in the lake while fishing (I suspect alcohol was involved in that too) also inspired all the people who knew him to make memorial stickers.
The most memorable sticker I can think of is for a guy in my high school class named Dillon Gauthey who died in an accident (the driver survived.) This was caused by a deer in the road and I don’t think any alcohol was involved. Gauthey did rodeo riding and barrel racing and his family bred horses, I think. They made a memorial sticker for him that was a black oval with a gold lasso for the border around it which was extremely well done and classy looking.
This guy had an extremely distinctive truck, a long-bed 1995 F-250 with an extended cab and 9 inches or so of lift. After he died, his parents sold the truck to another young local guy, and he put the sticker on the back of it. I see that truck on the road all the time - it’s fucking weird.
A few years ago, in the next town to where I live, a teenager was walking to school when she was run over by the street sweeper while crossing the street - I don’t think the driver saw her. Her parents sued the city, IIRC. Her friends put up a shrine consisting of some poster board with messages and photos on it, and since the accident happened a block or so away from the high school, the bears/balloons/sympathy cards/flowers/what-have-you left by the many kids who knew her quickly overran the street corner. The city tried to take it down, but it was put back up almost immediately. It’s finally gone, but there are still signatures on the utility pole and the traffic lights nearest the corner.
One time, while Mr. Lucky and I were driving around his (semi-rural) hometown, I noticed a small brass plaque on a wooden fence. It turned out to be a memorial for an acquaintance of his and his sister’s who crashed his car though the fence and landed in a ditch, getting killed in the process. His relatives had the plaque put up shortly after the fence was repaired, according to my SIL.
That’s not the way it works, though. Memorials, or shrines or whatever you call them, consist of objects left by mourners. There’s nothing there that belonged to the deceased.
I don’t think so. Because in the south, it’s way more than Hispanics who do it. And it’s distracting, an eyesore, and frankly, IMHO, very morbid. Why in God’s name (or anyone else’s) would you want your main memory of someone to be where their crumpled, bloodstained body lay waiting for either an ambulance or a hearse?
