The crosses you see on the side of the road mark the spot where someone died, almost always in a traffic accident. They’re placed by family members or friends as a memorial, not by the government or a church. This practice has roots going back more than 500 years, and today it’s one of the most recognizable forms of public grief in the world.
What Roadside Crosses Actually Mark
A roadside cross marks the exact location where a person lost their life. Unlike a gravestone, which marks where someone is buried, the cross marks where they died. In many traditions, this distinction matters. The belief, traced to Spanish Catholic customs, is that when death comes suddenly and unexpectedly, the soul lingers at the site. Placing a cross or shrine gives the soul a way forward and gives the living a physical place to direct their grief.
While a cross is the most common marker, not every roadside memorial is religious, and not every one marks a car crash. Some honor pedestrians or cyclists. Some memorialize victims of violence. You’ll also see flowers, stuffed animals, photographs, candles, and personal items alongside or instead of a cross. Depictions of the Virgin Mary, particularly Our Lady of Guadalupe, appear frequently at memorials in Latino communities, sometimes with rosary beads draped over the marker.
A 500-Year-Old Tradition
The practice traces back to 16th-century Spain, in the years following the Council of Trent. In the rural provinces of Spain, stone crosses called “cruzeiros” in Galician were placed at dangerous curves and cliff edges along travel routes. These served a dual purpose: protecting travelers by warning them of hazards, and providing spiritual protection along the journey.
Spanish colonists brought the custom to the Americas, where it merged with Indigenous traditions. Catholic funeral processions played a key role. Pallbearers carrying a coffin from the church to the cemetery would stop to rest along the way, and at each resting spot they placed a cross or a pile of stones. In the Spanish-speaking Southwest of the United States, these markers are called “descansos,” meaning resting places. Over time, the tradition evolved from marking procession stops to marking the sites of sudden, unexpected death, particularly along roads.
Why Families Place Them
Roadside memorials serve a psychological function that cemeteries often can’t. When someone dies suddenly in an accident, the location of the death carries enormous emotional weight for the people left behind. Memorial sites transform painful experiences into a recognizable symbol that is physically anchored to a specific place. For many families, visiting the cross feels different from visiting a grave because it connects them to the last moment of their loved one’s life.
Visitors to roadside memorials often behave much like they would at a cemetery: leaving fresh flowers, stones, letters, or small personal objects. These rituals give people a sense of agency in the face of something they couldn’t control. The act of tending the memorial, refreshing the flowers, or adding a new photo becomes a way of maintaining a relationship with the person who died. Researchers who study memorial culture describe these sites as bridges between personal and communal pain, places where private grief becomes visible to the wider community.
There’s also a communal dimension. When a teenager dies in a crash, classmates may build the memorial together that same night, decorating it with silk flowers and personal mementos. The shared act of building something together reaffirms the bonds within a group that’s been shattered by loss. These aren’t grim warnings. They’re acts of love.
Do They Affect Driver Behavior?
You might assume that a cross marking a fatal crash would make passing drivers slow down. Research suggests otherwise. Studies using eye-tracking technology found that drivers do notice roadside memorials and are more likely to look at them than at other objects on the roadside. But the glances are brief, and the memorials don’t measurably change how fast people drive. Placing a memorial on a freeway did not influence the speed of passing traffic in controlled studies. The memorials also didn’t create a meaningful distraction or pose a safety risk for other drivers.
So while some states have justified regulating memorials on safety grounds, the evidence doesn’t support the idea that they’re dangerous to passing motorists.
Laws Vary Widely by State
There’s no single national rule on roadside memorials. Each state, and sometimes each highway authority, sets its own policy. Some states are permissive, allowing families to place memorials with few restrictions. Others are strict. New Jersey’s turnpike authority, for example, requires anyone who wants to install a memorial to contact the authority first and arrange an escort to the site. Memorials are removed after 10 days, stored for another 10, and then discarded. Adding new items doesn’t reset the clock.
Several states have created official alternatives. Illinois runs a Fatal Accident Memorial Sign Program that installs standardized blue-and-white signs reading “Drive With Care” or, in cases involving a reckless homicide conviction, “Reckless Driving Costs Lives.” Families can request an additional plaque with the victim’s name and the date of the crash. These programs try to balance families’ desire for a lasting tribute with state concerns about visual clutter and maintenance on public rights-of-way.
In practice, many families place memorials without permits, and many highway departments quietly leave them alone unless they block sightlines or become safety hazards.
Ghost Bikes and Other Variations
Crosses aren’t the only form this tradition takes. If you’ve seen a bicycle painted entirely white and chained to a signpost or railing, that’s a ghost bike. These mark locations where cyclists were killed by motor vehicles. The movement is decentralized, with no official organization overseeing it. Anyone can build and install a ghost bike. They’ve appeared in cities across the United States and internationally, serving both as memorials and as quiet protests calling attention to cycling safety.
Other variations include small shrines built from wood or stone, collections of flowers and candles at a utility pole or guardrail, and painted messages on the road surface itself. The form changes with the community and the circumstances, but the underlying impulse is the same: to say that something terrible happened here, and someone was lost who mattered.