Lemures were, in Roman religion, the malevolent or wandering spirits of the dead, distinguished sharply in Roman thought from the benevolent household ancestors, and the annual festival of Lemuria, held over three non-consecutive days in May, existed specifically to appease and expel them from the household. Ovid's Fasti preserves the ritual in detail: the head of a household rose at midnight, walked barefoot, made a hand sign to ward off spirits, and threw black beans over his shoulder nine times while reciting a formula, then clashed bronze together and repeated nine times the words ordering ancestral spirits to depart, a rite aimed squarely at ensuring lemures left the home rather than lingered to trouble the living family.
The Roman calendar marked the days of Lemuria as religiosi, inauspicious for marriage and other significant undertakings, reflecting how seriously the danger of unappeased household dead was taken within Roman domestic religion, which treated the correct management of ancestral spirits as a matter of ongoing ritual maintenance rather than a concern limited to the funeral itself.