Day of the Medieval Dead

by Deborah Hyde
July 29, 2025

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It would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead should sally… from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living, and again return to the tomb, which of its own accord spontaneously opened to receive them, did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony.

I like a good zombie movie as much as the next guy or gal, but William of Newburgh never did meet Sam Raimi, so where did these undead come from and why did William think the accounts were real enough to write down as fact? Well, there are four of them and they all contain clues.

This first account called The Ghost of Anant, was transmitted by an older monk, and eye witness, who William said "lived in honor and authority in those parts".

A certain man of evil conduct flying, through fear of his enemies or the law, out of the province of York... took up his (new) abode there, and... labored hard to increase rather than correct his own evil propensities. He married a wife, to his own ruin... he was vexed with the spirit of Jealousy.

The man pretended to leave town but actually took up position in one of the roof beams in his marital bedroom to see if his wife had a lover. When he saw that she did, he was so shocked that he fell off the beam and onto the floor. The lover ran away and the wife took the initiative, saying that her husband's fall had confused him.

Seriously injured, he took to his deathbed, at which point William of Newburgh's old monk friend arrived and urged him to make his last confession. The evil man was so preoccupied with what he had seen that he didn't. He died soon afterwards.

But that wasn't the end of the matter.

This awful man started to emerge from his grave at night and wander around his town, pursued by barking dogs. People stayed in their houses in case they were attacked by him. It wasn't long before the whole area was affected by what William calls the "vagaries of this foul carcass" that the population suffered from disease and started to die off.

Two young men who had lost their father to this contagion took matters into their own hands. They went to the awful man's grave and started to dig.

Now William especially mentions that they didn't have to dig anywhere near as deeply as they thought they'd have to, to get to the burial. And when they found it, they were surprised at the body's condition:

they... laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; [they]... inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons.

The dreadful being was burned to ashes and the plague stopped.

In 1988 a man named Paul Barber made an interesting study of Eastern European folklore called 'Vampires, Burial and Death' in which he pointed out that a great many perfectly normal post-mortem changes could be mistaken for life... and often were.

One of them was bloating, which can paradoxically make a person look a little healthier than they had been in life. Another is decomposition products which can look like fresh blood even though they're not. Barber also points out that people have a hard time digging deep graves in the winter and being closer to the surface affects decomposition.

It's a great book and I recommend it. Just make sure you've eaten your dinner first.

The next of William's stories was about a man from a town called Buckingham:

A certain man died, and... was laid in the tomb…. On the following night, however, having entered the bed where his wife was reposing, he not only terrified her on awaking, but nearly crushed her by the insupportable weight of his body.

Does anybody recognize this? Surveys suggest that about 25 percent of you will have experienced something like it.

Sleep paralysis is a very common sleep disturbance where waking and sleep phenomena collide. Folklorist David Hufford has studied it in detail and lists the primary signs as feeling you are awake while strangely being immobile. You can perceive your setting correctly — this isn't some dreamscape — and you may have a deep feeling of dread. Secondary signs include the sensation of a presence and a feeling of pressure on the chest which can lead to a feeling of suffocation.

Sleep paralysis has contributed to a huge amount of folklore and is now understood in neurological rather than supernatural terms. But without a biological explanation you can see why so many people in the past thought they had been visited by demons or the dead.
The townspeople in William of Newburgh's account heard about the widow's encounter and started to experience the same thing themselves. It's not too surprising. Sleep paralysis is strongly associated with disrupted sleep schedules — the kind you get when you're worried that a revenant is going to try to choke you.

Just like the York revenant, the locals wanted to exhume and burn the Buckingham man's body. But a Bishop thought that was very improper. So he wrote a letter of absolution and it was placed on the corpse in the tomb. The menace stopped.

William's third account happened in a town called Berwick, now in the north of England. Just like in the first account this revenant was a man who was morally deficient; William calls him "a great rogue".

…after his death [he] sallied forth... out of his grave by night, and was borne hither and thither, pursued by a pack of dogs with loud barkings; thus striking great terror into the neighbors, and returning to his tomb before daylight... The town procured ten young men renowned for boldness, who were to dig up the horrible carcass, and, having cut it limb from limb, reduce it into food and fuel for the flames.

Now that the returning corpse was ashes, the visits stopped. But then a great plague swept through the town. William draws a causal relationship between these — the cremation and the plague. He says the same disease didn't rage as much elsewhere which carries the clear implication that it did occur elsewhere. Contagious death is a common theme the world over in folklore to do with supernatural predators.

William's fourth revenant was a clergyman to a noble lady in Melrose, in Scotland.

This man, having little respect for the sacred order to which he belonged, was excessively secular in his pursuits, and... so addicted to the vanity of the chase as to be designated by many by the infamous title of "Hundeprest," or the dog-priest.

So the priest was a keen huntsman, and William is clear to draw a link between this frivolous pastime and the supernatural punishment which awaited him in death. He rose from the grave every night, terrified his colleagues in the monastery and also went to his former employer, making "loud groans & horrible murmurs around her bedchamber".

Four men waited in the cemetery one night to see if they could intercept the horrible walking corpse. But when nothing happened by midnight only one of them stayed.

The inevitable clash between the walking dead and the one brave man resulted in an axe wound to the corpse which was discovered when it was exhumed the next day.

So what do we make of these four accounts? William wasn't gullible but he did insist that these stories were true.

The discovery of a wound on somebody later is such a frequent narrative device — a 'prover' if you like — that I think it's clearly been slipped in after the fact. It's fair to say that all these reports have been optimized into easily transmissible forms.

William also placed a great deal of weight on how frequently stories were told and the social status of the people who told them. But these days we know that even the most educated and important people suffer from the same cognitive failings as the rest of us.

And all of William's stories involve an element of moral lapse. In the first account, the evil man had left his Lord and moved to another. Twelfth century England wasn't a capitalist culture — you didn't just move to a better boss. William was conveying that the man lacked character by doing something as immoral as leaving the group to whom he owed loyalty. These days, we could so easily miss this important part of the account.

Anthropologists will tell you how hard it is to leave your own suppositions, your own mental shortcuts, when you're observing a different place. History is a different place.

William lived through an English Civil War that is now known as The Anarchy. It lasted a couple of decades, was incredibly brutal and affected all sections of society. Many historians have suggested that William's structured and traditional values were a reaction against the disorder he saw around him.

There's another strange part of twelfth century England that might not occur to us. It was completely divided across class lines. William the Conqueror had established a new aristocracy decades prior. They came from northern France, had a different culture and spoke a different language from the peasant class they now ruled. Our written records come from that upper class, but the lower classes may well have thought of the returning dead as corpses rather than ghosts, a left-over from Scandinavian belief in creatures called 'Draugurs'. Draugurs are frequently connected with bronze-age burial mounds, and England isn't short of those.

We could also ask ourselves whether William had the intellectual framework to tell the difference between myth and reality. How did people in the twelfth century think?

Well, they did know the difference between what they would call miracula and mirabilia. Miracula were wonders caused by a supernatural agent like God, a violation of the normal rules. Mirabilia were wonders — things that people might not understand but were nonetheless natural.

The twelfth century was an interesting time. It's often called a 'mini-Renaissance'. The Crusades had reconnected North-Western Europe with the Byzantine and Muslim Worlds. The learning from Classical Times that had disappeared for a few centuries was back. Arabic developments in science and maths were now available. That included Arabic numerals with that vital concept 'zero' from India. There could never have been good science without them — just try doing large calculations in Roman numerals!

Society was centralizing and stratifying. They could now afford to establish a specialist class of people who could do nothing but study and teach.

The hard work of precisely differentiating between religion, magic and science had started. The philosophy of the modern age had begun. And that is where William of Newburgh's undead stories live. They're a combination of reasonable misunderstandings of physical phenomena, popular folklore, narrative embellishments, and assumptions that anyone in his era would have made about the way the world naturally works.

By Deborah Hyde