Goosebumps Mean Someone's Walking Over Your Grave
"A sudden, unexplained shiver or goosebumps means someone is walking over the spot where you'll eventually be buried."
Rooted in medieval English belief that a person's final resting place was already predetermined, and that the living and dead stayed in quiet, constant contact. The earliest recorded version of the saying, "There's somebody walking over my grave!", appears in Jonathan Swift's 1738 book A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation. An American variant swaps in a goose, occasionally a rabbit, walking over the grave instead of a person. Science has its own, much less eerie explanation for the physical sensation itself: an involuntary release of adrenaline.
Myth vs. FactThe shiver is real, an adrenaline response, but the grave-related explanation for it is medieval folklore, not a documented cause.
Sources: Jonathan Swift, A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation (1738).