There are many beliefs regarding death, but usually there is some concept of the Otherworld where the soul dwells for a period of time before it returns. Instead of being reincarnated, the soul is transformed into an animal, human, or spirit form. The spirit of the deceased is thought to be transported to the Otherworld through a variety of means. A link often occurs between the flight of birds and the departing of the souls of the deceased. This is reflected in the Lancashire tradition of the Seven Whistlers that portend death, as well as the general association of death with birds such as geese, ravens, and sparrows. In Finland, the Estonians even regard the pathway through the night heavens by which the dead travel as being the Bird's Way or the Way of Souls, which is marked by the astronomical phenomena which is known as to us modernly as the Milky Way.

It is believed that on the Cross Quarter-Days (most commonly known as: Halloween, Candlemas, May Day, and Lammas), the ancestral spirits traveled on invisible lines that linked together burial places, graveyards, and mounds. Each culture had its own name for these lines:

• Insular Celtic: faery-roads
• Dutch: death-roads
• English: church-ways, coffin-ways, corpse-roads, trod
• German: geisterweige
• Holland: dood wegan
• Saxon: daeda-waeg

During these times the boundaries between the two worlds are thought to be lessened, and so communication is easier. This time occurs during the transition from one year to the next, which in the Insular Celtic is Samhain, within the Germanic it is the Twelve Days of Yule, and in the Roman it is Anna Perenna.