Among the most matter-of-fact ghost stories of the Middle Ages is the Buckinghamshire revenant, set down by the chronicler William of Newburgh around 1196 as something that had genuinely happened. A man recently buried was said to leave his grave by night and return to the bed of his terrified widow; when she barred her door with the help of watchful neighbours, he turned instead to harassing his brothers, and then the wider village, even troubling the animals by day.
The story
The desperate villagers sought the counsel of the archdeacon, who wrote to Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln. Rather than the burning that other revenant tales prescribe, the bishop's remedy was a written one: a scroll of absolution was laid upon the corpse's breast in its reopened grave, and from that hour the dead man walked no more. William offers the case as one of several proofs that, in his own day, the recently dead could rise bodily from their tombs — a striking glimpse of medieval English belief in the corporeal walking dead.