Anantis Castle Revenant

The most elaborate of William of Newburgh's revenant tales concerns a thoroughly wicked man who had settled near the 'castle of Anantis' — a place long debated by scholars, but often identified with Alnwick in Northumberland. Spying jealously on his unfaithful wife, he fell from a beam, died unconfessed, and was buried; thereafter his corpse roamed abroad by night, and wherever it passed the air grew foul and a wasting sickness spread, until whole families were dying and the town was emptying.

On Palm Sunday two brothers whose own father had died of the plague resolved to end it. They dug up the body and found it gorged and swollen with the blood it had drained from the living; striking it open, they tore out the heart and burned the whole corpse to ashes, after which the pestilence ceased. The Anantis revenant — a blood-bloated, plague-bringing corpse destroyed by burning — is the closest the medieval English record comes to the later folklore of the vampire, and among the earliest such accounts in Europe.