Jamaica's Everyday Dead

Duppy is the standard Jamaican and wider Anglophone Caribbean term for the ghost or spirit of a dead person, a folk belief deeply embedded in everyday speech and custom rather than confined to specialist ritual, so that "duppy know who fi frighten" and similar sayings are common idiom well beyond any explicitly religious context. Belief holds that a person leaves behind more than one spiritual component at death, echoing broader West and Central African cosmological patterns carried across the Atlantic during the slave trade and reshaped in the Caribbean, and that improper burial or funerary neglect can allow the shadow or spirit to linger as a duppy rather than settling.

Traditional Jamaican funerary custom historically included specific protective measures, such as covering mirrors, stopping clocks, and conducting a nine-night wake with music, food and storytelling meant both to honour the dead and to ensure the spirit departs properly rather than remaining to trouble the living, a practice that persists today in modified form as a significant community and family event independent of its original protective function.