Medieval Ghosts: Revenants, Purgatory and the Undead in the Middle Ages

A belief fuelled by purgatory

Medieval ghost stories drew on a widely shared religious conviction: purgatory, the place where souls were purified of their sins before entering paradise. According to the article, this belief fed the idea that the dead could return among the living.

These spirits came to ask for prayers and reparations intended to shorten their stay in the afterlife. The stories therefore often took an edifying form, urging listeners to pray for others and to examine their own conduct before their own death. The boundary between legend and religious teaching was thus very porous.

The twelve Byland accounts

The twelve stories recorded at Byland Abbey form a particularly rich corpus for historians. They contain a surprisingly varied bestiary: spirits that change shape, accounts of miracles, and dead figures who emerge to startle the living, with no single logic running through the collection.

The texts clearly aim to frighten. They evoke the "terrors of the night" and spirits rising from their graves to trouble and terrify villagers. One account even describes a woman plunging her hand into a spectre's flesh, as though into rotten, insubstantial matter. Some witnesses were wounded or fell ill for many days after their encounter.

Ghosts who seek the help of the living

Yet most revenants do not seek to harm anyone physically. In one story, a spirit throws a man over a hedge, then catches him on the other side so that he will not be hurt. The ghost above all seeks the assistance of men.

The most frequently cited case involves two men walking in a field: one flees while the other struggles with a spirit that tears at his clothes. He manages to "conjure" it, a decisive step that allows the living man and the dead to communicate. The spectre then confesses that he had been excommunicated for stealing silver spoons, and begs that the objects be returned and that absolution be obtained in his name.

Morality, inheritance and exhortation

Several accounts convey an explicit moral message. In one, linked to a genuine inheritance dispute at Ampleforth, the sister of Adam of London, a small landowner, is condemned to wander the village after her death. She threatens her brother: if he does not return the disputed property to her husband and sons, he will suffer the same fate when he dies.

Others reflect the practical concerns of landowners, such as a spirit punished for not having ploughed his master's lands well enough. Faith remains the best weapon against these visitors: a man named William de Bradeforth orders a spectre to depart in the name of the Lord and by the power of the blood of Jesus Christ, and the creature withdraws, unfurling like a cloth tearing apart.

The undead and the mutilation of bodies

Not all the accounts deliver a clear lesson. The revenant of James Tankerlay, a former rector, rises from his grave and blinds his former concubine. No one attempts to communicate with him or to soothe his soul: the community chooses to destroy him by exhuming his body and throwing it into a bog.

This tradition of revenants belongs to a long literary history: beheading, burning or mutilating the bodies of the dead was believed to prevent their return. Archaeology suggests that such practices were not merely imaginary. Skeletons dated between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, excavated from the deserted village of Wharram Percy in North Yorkshire, show a series of post-mortem mutilations that may reflect these anxieties. The interpretation, however, remains uncertain.