Night after Night of the Living Dead

People have trouble accepting the finality of death.  Everything in our world is temporary.  There is just this one thing that doesn’t change, and nothing in our life prepares us for it.  So beliefs and traditions about the dead who come back, who aren’t really quite dead yet, are a common human experience.

Ghosts go back to the earliest Sumerian writing, but the dead don’t have to go to the trouble of becoming ghosts.  The newly dead can pop right out of their graves and ramble around.  This belief goes back at least as far as the Middle Ages and appears in many different cultures.   Some of the most interesting, and chilling, accounts are from England, and are documented by a respectable man of his time.

Around the year 1200 William of Newburgh wrote a history of England.  He included in it four accounts of corpses that left their graves and returned to their old stomping grounds.  Bishop Hugh of Lincoln convinced one to stay buried by writing it a pardon for its sins.  Two more had to be cut to pieces and burned, and one of them caused a plague with its breath.  The fourth roamed the streets for days and chased most of the people away, until two brave young men chopped it up and burned it.  It also caused a plague.

Some common threads in these stories are that each walking corpse was wicked in life and died without making a final confession.  Two of them caused plagues; it was a widely-held belief through the Middle Ages that walking corpses could cause the plague.  All but one had to be destroyed to keep it from wandering.  The danger exists while the corpse is still intact; once it’s in pieces the danger is past.

Another similarity is that when the corpses were cut up, they released huge amounts of blood, suggesting that they were vampires of the Eastern European kind.   Walking corpse and vampire beliefs are similar, and tend to mix and overlap each other.

What caused a corpse to walk?  William conjectured it might be the devil animating the corpse, but wasn’t sure.  Others thought that the soul was undergoing purgatory, wandering around to make up for its sins before being admitted to heaven.  Or it might be just the pure unnatural wickedness of the dead person.  Usually there was more concern with preventing the phenomenon than explaining it.

For this reason, if there was any doubt, it was a practice in England to bury a person face down, so if he tried to dig his way out he would be going the wrong way.  As late as 1916, during World War One, two British soldiers were observed burying a German soldier this way, and this is the explanation they gave.

For the same reason, bodies were sometimes staked down in the grave.  This is where we get the idea of driving a stake through Dracula’s heart.  The idea is not just to puncture Dracula, but to fix him to the earth so he can’t rise again.  This is part of the rich tradition of undead lore found in Romania.

Several things could predispose a person to vampirism in Romania, including being born too early, dying before baptism, dying an unnatural death, or being the child of a pregnant women who was looked at by a witch.  To this day in remote areas of Romania graves are opened periodically to see if the person is a vampire.  If there is no decomposition after several years, steps are taken.  The body is staked down and decapitated.  Garlic is placed in the mouth and also in the windows of homes in the area.

The undead were thought to cause plagues in Romania as well, and the heart of a vampire was removed and burned.  The ashes were mixed with water and drunk by the people suffering from the plague.  This was done in a ritual.  It was also effective to stand in the smoke coming from the burning heart.

Similar practices were common in other parts of Eastern Europe as well.  The ritual of burning the heart was done in Poland.   In European Russia the undead were stopped by staking down, decapitation, or burning.  The word for them is upir, and they were considered to be corpses possessed by the devil.   Russians also believed in a particular type of vampire called an eretich, which is also the word for heretic.  These people died outside the Russian Orthodox faith and were usually witches who had sold their souls to the devil.  They appeared as living beings, although they preferred sleeping in graveyards.

Sometimes the undead decided that they could take it with them.   The draugr was the walking corpse of a Viking.  It jealously guarded its burial mound containing the treasure it was interred with.  Sometimes it visited the living, and killed them, but usually it preferred to protect its hoard.  If it was necessary to get rid of a draugr, a very strong man was needed because the draugr had superhuman strength.  Another difficulty was that the draugr was impervious to weapons.

There is a story of a man, in later Christian times, who went to his boathouse to get a keg of beer for a Christmas celebration.  He saw a draugr sitting on his keg.  Being brave, and a little tipsy already, he kicked the draugr to the floor, grabbed the keg, and ran.  The draugr bolted after him, and as he ran through the churchyard he called on the good people buried there to help him.  The Christian dead rose up and chased the draugr away, and it was never seen again.

There is another story from medieval France that also shows the undead are not always horrible.  A woman died and was buried, but came out of her grave and returned to her home.  Her husband welcomed her back, and they lived together several more years.  They even had children, who were known as “les enfants de la femme morte” or “the dead woman’s children.”

Some of these beliefs may have arisen from people who were buried alive and managed to dig themselves out of shallow graves.  There is a story of James, a ne’er-do-well in 17th-century Scotland who was hanged for stealing sheep or some like offense.  The job was botched, though, and a day later he came lurching into town, terrifying everyone.  Considering the state of medical science in the past, similar things must have happened many times over the centuries.  James was not hanged again, since no one was willing to get near him.

The popularity of zombie movies shows we have vestiges of belief in the undead in our own culture.  For the time we’re watching the movie, zombies are real to us.  And, as strange as these beliefs seem, they helped people transition to an acceptance of death, because humans can at least understand transitions.  They provided a buffer zone between life and death.