A childhood belief about people

When I was a kid, my mother told me to hold my breath whenever we passed a graveyard. This was every day as there was a graveyard between home and school. The reasoning I was told at the time was that if you held your breath the whole time as you passed, you could make a wish and the dead would grant it. Later, I'd asked her about it (realizing after all that time that it was kind of weird) and she said it was so the dead wouldn't like... get you, or something.