Revenant (medieval England)

Twelfth-century English chroniclers, among them Geoffrey of Burton, Walter Map and William of Newburgh, record a cluster of cases in which a buried corpse walked at night and brought death to its neighbours. The stories are told as recent local news, with named bishops and archdeacons called in to rule on them. The remedies, digging up the body and beheading, burning or absolving it, are the same ones later used against vampires in central Europe. Scholars read these revenants as the product of a failed death, a person stuck between the living and the dead who has to be forcibly moved on.12