Berwick Revenant

William of Newburgh records that in the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed a man of wealth but evil life, lately dead, would not stay in his grave. By night his corpse wandered the streets, and packs of dogs followed it with terrible howling, so that the townspeople shut themselves indoors for fear of meeting it in the dark. As the haunting went on, dread grew that the very air would be corrupted and pestilence follow — a common medieval link between the restless dead and disease.

Ten bold young men were chosen to deal with it. They dug up the body, hacked it apart and burned it utterly — the standard remedy in these northern revenant tales — and the walking ceased. Yet, William notes pointedly, a plague broke out in Berwick afterwards regardless, though it spared the men who had destroyed the corpse. The Berwick case, like its fellows, shows how seriously the twelfth-century border country took the threat of the bodily undead.