A New Baby Name Trend Has Pregnant Women Breaking This Age-Old Superstition
Ideas for baby names can come from anything. Where your baby was conceived, what your cravings are, who your favorite football player is (my younger brother’s middle name is “Troy” after Troy Aikman, and I love my mom for that). Now, pregnant women are embarking on a new way to find the perfect moniker for their unborn baby — and it completely goes against this age-old superstition.
The trend in question? Visiting cemeteries!
TikToker Haley Hodge went viral after she revealed that she is finding a name for her soon-to-be baby girl at a graveyard. The pregnant mom-of-3 went baby name hunting at the Smithville Burying Ground in Southport, North Carolina, which dates back to 1972, to find a girl name. (She and husband Rivers are already parents to Finley, 10, Crew, 3, and Banks, 16 months.) In the clip, which has 2.4 million views, she and her kids walk around to look at names on the tombstones. “When cemeteries hold the prettiest names, so you take the family to look for baby girl’s name” she wrote over the video.
Hodge highlights certain names she likes, including, James, Julian, Ella, Galloway, Salem, Bunny, Winnie, Vienna, and Olympus.
“Did you know families used to come to cemeteries to have picnics with their loved ones?” she writes later in the video. Apparently, visiting cemeteries is a family tradition for her. “I know some people might find it creepy, but my mother was a history buff and when we were growing up, she would take us on field trips to cemeteries,” the 30-year-old recently told TODAY.com, adding that her sister Cooper’s name came from a tombstone.
“You can learn so much about cultural aspects of the past,” she added. Listen, flipping through baby books gets monotonous, we get it! But visiting a cemetery just to hunt for names is … a little strange. Not to mention, it’s considered bad luck by many people.
For example, Jewish custom encourages pregnant women to avoid going to cemeteries. Aron Moss, rabbi of the Nefesh Community in Sydney, Australia, wrote for the Chabad-Lubavitch organization that “spiritual and emotional” states of the mother can be sensed by the baby in her womb. “This is why the cemetery is not the right place for a pregnant woman,” he said. “When you are creating life, it is better to avoid contact with death. The morbid and deathly energy of a cemetery is starkly in contrast to the process taking place inside a pregnant woman. Her focus should remain on the beginning of life, not the end.”
People were divided in the comments section of Hodge’s video. “I’ve heard that pregnancies attract ghosts,” one person wrote. “I feel like this is like picking up a ghost at the rescue shelter.”
Another argued, “It keeps them alive you saying their names.” Similarly, this commenter wrote, “Carrying a brand new soul thru a garden of the past. What an clever way to find a beautiful name.”
“Your name? Yeah it was just some dead woman’s name,” one person snarkily wrote. Hodge responded, “Honestly it’s kinda a flex. My name was from a dead dog.”
To each pregnant woman their own! There’s certainly nothing wrong with visiting a public cemetery if that’s what you want to do. But if you’d rather keep with tradition, we have plenty of baby name inspo on our site you can peruse.
From Rhiannon to Bran, here are a few“dark cottagecore” baby names.
