In the 1990s, a unique and dying custom in the village of Grimentz, Switerland caught the attention of anthropologists. Villagers kept special wheels of cheese that would be eaten by friends and neighbors at their funerals. Atlas Obscura explains:
Devotion to dairy has taken different forms throughout the Alps’s secluded valleys. “A popular culture of the cow … traverses all moments, objects, and events of the mountain peasant,” wrote Preiswerk. In Grimentz, it manifested in elaborate funerals. After a death, the bells of the deceased’s cows were removed, so that the animals, too, could mourn. Families added a “picnic of the dead” to the casket, which included a bottle of wine, bread, and cheese (as well as sturdy boots, as ghosts were rumored to wander the glaciers after dark).
The same foods comprised the all-important burial meal, which symbolized the reconstitution of the community after its tragic rift. As one of Preiswerk’s interview subjects recounted, the funeral guests were told, “Come to the meal, because the dead man has left enough.”
In a historically poor area, “leaving enough” required advance planning. “There was the ‘cheese of the dead,’” explains Zufferey. “Everyone had a wheel of cheese so that they had something to serve at their funeral.” When the inevitable time came, the chiseled cheese was washed down with vin des glaciers, the local wine.
The practice has largely died out. But Jean-Jacques Zufferey, who is pictured above, has kept a local library of such death cheeses. The one that he is holding is 149 years old.
-via VA Viper | Photo: Molly McDonough
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So the guy in the article decided to save the cheeses instead of serving them at funerals as the deceased people had planned. That's how you get haunted.
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