“Grain should be sowed in the up-going; meat butchered in the down-going will shrink in the pot.” But my worthy neighbors do not appear to know what it is that is going up and going down. I infer, of course, that it is the moon. Is it not remarkable that my neighbors should be so attached to book-farming? I knew a woman, born among Friends, but in a Pennsylvania German settlement, who was lamenting the smallness of the piece of meat on the table. “What a little piece, and so big before it was cooked! How it has shrunk! It is in the down-going. And those strawberries, too, that I preserved, that went away to so little; they were done in the down-going.” But one of her family spoke up, bravely, “Just so, mother; that must be it. Now I know what’s the matter with my portemonnaie, that it shrinks away so; it’s the down-going.”
These beliefs in the influence of the heavenly bodies must be the relics of astrology remaining in the almanacs, and never drawn now from actual observation of the weather and the planets.
Mrs. Nevin relates the following (Philadelphia Press, June 2, 1875): “There are several superstitions connected with death and funerals in the country, which are a strange blending of the ludicrous with the mournful. One is that if the mother of a family is dying, the vinegar-barrel must be shaken at the time to prevent the ‘mother’ in it from dying. Said a man once in sober earnest to me, ‘I was so sorry Mr. D. was not in the room when his wife died.’ ‘Where was he?’ ‘Oh, in the cellar a-shaking the vinegar-barrel; but if he had just told me, I would have done it and let him been in the room to see her take her last breath.’”
Mrs. Nevin adds: “Another superstition is that the last person that goes out of a house at a funeral will be the next one to die, and as the audience begins to thin, you may see people slip very nimbly out of a back or kitchen door to avoid being that last one.”
The belief in spooks or ghosts is not lost in “Pennsylvania Dutch” land. In some of his verses Mr. Schantz tells (Allentown Friedensbote) of an abandoned school-house standing near a sand-pit, beside some woods. He says,—
“kam mir zu Ohr
Vom Sandloch Schuhlhaus am Kreuzweg
Was Lesern ich nicht gern vorleg.
S’ hen lent g’sad ‘Am Sandloch spukts!’
En mancher hot oft g’frogt, ‘Wie guckt’s?’