Revenant

A revenant is the returned dead in their most physical form — not a translucent apparition but a body come back, known from medieval European chronicles where monks record troublesome corpses with bureaucratic weariness. The vampire panics of later centuries belong to the same family. Modern accounts are, thankfully, rarer and softer: the figure at the wake that mourners each assumed was a distant cousin, the muddy footprints from the direction nobody arrives from. The medieval chroniclers would have known exactly what to write.

Related on this site: /ghost-stories/ /tag/cemetery/ /tag/old-house/