Vetala

The vetala is a spirit of Indian tradition that animates corpses in the cremation ground. Unlike most walking dead it is highly intelligent: in the famous story cycle the corpse it inhabits outwits a king twenty-four times before warning him of a sorcerer's plot. The underlying idea, a dead body moved by something that is not its original owner, runs from Indian tantra to the Tibetan ro-langs. It gives South Asia a corpse-animating being centuries older than the Caribbean zombi.12