Gjenganger

The gjenganger is the walking dead of Norwegian, Danish and Swedish folk belief and the direct heir of the saga draugr. Early accounts make it a solid, violent corpse that torments its own family; later ones turn it into a carrier of sickness whose pinch leaves a mark that spreads to the heart. Burial customs across Scandinavia were designed to keep it in the grave. Its slow change from corpse to ghost tracks the wider European retreat of belief in the bodily dead.12