Folklore from all over Europe features tales of walking corpses, bodies that refuse to stay dead and leave the living in peace. Take a look at the...
- Revenant
- Draugr, Aptrganga or Haugbúi
- Vampire, Strigoi and Upyr
- Nachzehrer
- Vrykolakas or Vourkolakas
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| Revenants refused to stay in their graves... (Kvnga) |
Revenant
The word revenant comes from the French "revenir" or "to return." That's pretty appropriate since revenants were corpses that refused to remain in their graves. They didn't just make a cemeteries untidy though - they frequently meant disaster or death for the living.
The 12th century book "De nugis curialium" by Walter Map contains
the tale of William Laudun, an English knight who sought to rid a village of a revenant.The story goes that a man who died "unchristianly" rose from the grave four days later and took to visiting the village at night. Each time, he would call the name of a villager... and they would sicken, dying three days later. On the advice of the Bishop of Hereford, Laudun had the corpse exhumed, put a spade through its neck and sprinkled corpse and grave alike with holy water. Despite the knight's best efforts, the revenant returned and called Laudun's name three times... but our hero gave chase to the walking corpse and cleaved it from the head to the neck as it fell into its grave, ending its reign of terror.
The idea of a revenant was very real to people in medieval times, when people would go to great lengths to prevent the evil dead from rising to spread pestilence or otherwise work their mischief on the living. An example of this can be seen in the deserted village of Wharram Percy in Yorkshire, where researchers uncovered remains that had been methodically dismembered, broken and burned!
Draugr, Aptrganga or Haugbúi
Nordic folklore has its own take on the revenant in the form of the aptrganga or again-walker, haugbúi or mound dweller and draugr. They were animated, intelligent bodies of the dead that often displayed magical talent... and encountering one usually meant terror, misfortune or death.
The Icelandic Grettis Saga features the fearsome Glámr or Glam, a herder killed by a wight who returns from death as a draugr.*
The undead herder spends his time terrorizing the farm of Thorhall. His gaze drains the strength of those who encounter him (causing them to swoon) and he kills a burly man hired to replace him by breaking every bone in his body.
His nighttime confrontation with Grettir sees the draugr try to drag the hero off into the night, only for the cunning Grettir to overbalance him and destroy the undead with a swift sword blow... but before the strike can land, Glam curses Grettir to never grow stronger and to suffer terrible fortune for the rest of his days.
Another example comes from the Eyrbyggja saga, in which Thorolf Halt-Foot returns from death to haunt his former home, killing animals and even incautious humans. He proves particularly hard to get rid of - even when his body is eventually burned, the saga implies that he has somehow possessed a young bull to do further harm!
*The saga doesn't explicitly say Glámr is a draugr, but it's generally accepted to be the case. |
| Many stories of the undead have them active only at night... (Ankhesenamun) |
Vampire, Strigoi and Upyr
Well, I couldn't really leave these ones out, could I?
The word
vampire is thought to have come from the upyr (there are a whole nest of similar terms) of Slavic folklore, with possible links to the Turkish ubir as well. The word turned as it passed through Germany, France and the UK, where authors like Lord Byron, John Polidori and Bram Stoker spread it throughout popular culture.
The modern idea of a vampire draws heavily on the folklore of its predecessors, but it's usually polished into something a little more glamorous Upyr sought out and drank blood, but often took the form of a bloated walking corpse, often ruddy with stolen blood. Strigoi could return to torment the living, had tails, could transform into wolves, dogs or other animals and
had an aversion to garlic.
Belief in creatures like this was common throughout medieval Europe, with "vampire burials" (where measures were taken to prevent the dead from rising being surprisingly common. For example, the four-century-old body of "Zosia" was discovered in an unmarked Polish cemetery with a padlock on her toe (thought to prevent the dead from walking) and
a sickle placed with its blade across her neck... presumably to decapitate her body if it attempted to reach the surface. Zosia seems to have had a few physical abnormalities and may have been subject to fits as well as suffering a fairly early death - all things that could have marked her out as a potential vampire in the folklore of the time.
On a slightly darker note, some places do still practice anti-vampire measures. In 2004 six Romanian men
desecrated the body of Petre Toma, an accident victim suspected of becoming a strigoi and attacking his kin. They exhumed the body, burned his heart (which was then used to prepare a tonic for his alleged victim) and sprinkled garlic on his remains.
Nachzehrer
The name of this strange Germanic undead means night-consumer or after-consumer, and in many ways they resemble a particularly lazy vampire!
Those who became a nachzehrer (often as a result of an untimely death - be it accident, sickness or self-inflicted) were thought to
"chew" in their graves... which had the side-effect of attacking the living. They began by consuming their burial shroud, then started eating their own flesh - which by magic,
would drain the lifeforce of their living kin!
Because this particular form of undead needed to consume its shroud and then body, it could be foiled by blocking its mouth with soil, stones or metal -
a technique found in other European "vampire" graves. Interestingly, burial shrouds often rot around the face (as though they'd been chewed) when bacteria and fluids from the decaying body leak out of the mouth!
Vrykolakas or Vourkolakas
One could become a
vrykolakas by being excommunicated or buried in unconsecrated ground - in some legends, merely eating the meat of a sheep wounded by a wolf could be enough to condemn the incautious diner.
Vrykolakas would feed on human victims - they would crush victims to death by sitting on them as they slept (
which sounds suspiciously like the hallucinations produced by sleep paralysis) then consume their flesh and liver. As you might expect given their method of killing and diet, these creatures were not the pale and slender vampires of modern media. Instead, they were stocky and often had a ruddy complexion.
One particular superstition around the vrykolakas is its habit of knocking on doors. The story goes that corpse will wander villages, knocking on doors and calling out the names of residents. If nobody answers, the vrykolakas will move on... but if someone answers, they will become its next victim (and a vrykolakas in turn.) As a result, some Greek villages practiced a habit of only answering after a second knock!
Thanks for reading - for more morbid curiosities, try...
