The Strange and Unusual Podcast
Sep 30, 2026 · 1 hr 2 min · 19 segments
For centuries, Britain's dead traveled ancient paths to reach their final resting places. In this episode, we follow the forgotten corpse roads and the eerie folklore they left behind. Hosted by…
Alison HorrocksHost
This is a strange and unusual podcast with Alison Horrocks, and welcome to this week's episode, The Corpse Roads, Forgotten Paths of the Dead.
There are roads made for armies, and others that connect cities, cross mountains, follow rivers, and carry travelers.
Old tracks can still be found bearing names like Corpse Road, Coffin Way, Beer Road, Like Way, Lich Way, or Burial Road.
For centuries, many small settlements didn't possess burial rites of their own.
If someone died in a remote farmstead or hamlet, their body might have to be transported miles across the countryside to the parish church and its consecrated burial ground.
Their families and neighbors carried them over mountains and moors, through bogs and rivers, sometimes for 10 miles or more.
They spoke of phantom funeral processions, strange lights, ghostly travelers, and roads the dead continued to use long after the last coffin had passed.
They became boundaries between the land of the living and the land of the dead.
And to understand why these places became haunted in folklore, we first need to understand something surprisingly complicated.
Today, when someone dies, an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes infrastructure begins moving around them From hospitals, funeral homes, hearses, cemeteries, modern refrigeration, embalming, and professional funeral directors For most of history, almost none of this existed.
This is a strange and unusual podcast with Alison Horrocks, and welcome to this week's episode, The Corpse Roads, Forgotten Paths of the Dead.
There are roads made for armies, and others that connect cities, cross mountains, follow rivers, and carry travelers.
Old tracks can still be found bearing names like Corpse Road, Coffin Way, Beer Road, Like Way, Lich Way, or Burial Road.
For centuries, many small settlements didn't possess burial rites of their own.
If someone died in a remote farmstead or hamlet, their body might have to be transported miles across the countryside to the parish church and its consecrated burial ground.
Their families and neighbors carried them over mountains and moors, through bogs and rivers, sometimes for 10 miles or more.
They spoke of phantom funeral processions, strange lights, ghostly travelers, and roads the dead continued to use long after the last coffin had passed.
They became boundaries between the land of the living and the land of the dead.
And to understand why these places became haunted in folklore, we first need to understand something surprisingly complicated.
Today, when someone dies, an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes infrastructure begins moving around them From hospitals, funeral homes, hearses, cemeteries, modern refrigeration, embalming, and professional funeral directors For most of history, almost none of this existed.
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