Hereford Revenant

Walter Map, the worldly courtier-cleric of the Welsh border, set down in his 'De nugis curialium' (c.1190) a revenant tale from his own country. A wicked Welshman, recently dead, returned from the grave night after night to wander his village near the Hereford march, calling aloud the names of his former neighbours — and each man so named would sicken and be dead within three days.

The bishop, consulted, advised that the grave be reopened, the corpse's head struck off with a spade, the body sprinkled with holy water and reburied. When that was done, the hauntings ceased. Map, writing at almost the same moment as William of Newburgh, presents the affair as recent and credible — valuable evidence that belief in the malignant, name-calling walking dead was alive along the English–Welsh border in the twelfth century, and not only in the cold north.