Repentant soul or walking corpse? Debatable apparitions in Medieval England [1]

Folklore, Dec, 2003 by Jacqueline Simpson

   Old people tell how a certain James Tankerlay, formerly Rector of
   Kirkby, was buried in the Chapter House at Byland, but used to walk
   forth as far as Kirkby by night, and one night he struck out one eye
   of his former mistress. And it is said that the abbot and monks had
   his body dug up from the grave, together with the coffin, and forced
   Roger Wayneman to cart it as far as Gormire, and how when they were
   throwing this coffin in the water the oxen almost sank in too in
   their terror. May I not be in any peril myself for writing such
   things, for I have written just what I heard from my seniors! And
   may God Omnipotent have mercy on him, if indeed he might be among
   the number of those to be saved!

It is significant that in this instance the writer is not describing a contemporary event, but one which occurred a good many years previously, perhaps as much as two generations, as it is not clear whether the old people who told him about it had witnessed the disinterment themselves, or were merely passing on information at second hand. It may be a belated memory of the physical destruction of corpses so common in William of Newburgh's time, though here by water, not fire--as in much lore about ghost-laying in later periods (Motif E437.2; cf. Brown 1979, 27-34; Simpson 1976, 93-6).

Walking Corpses

Apart from James Tankerlay, the Byland Abbey ghosts are laid by spiritual means. Nevertheless, most of them manifest themselves in physical forms, so it is still justifiable to call them walking corpses. The one in Story III "used to come out of his grave at night and disturb and terrify the townsfolk, and all the town dogs used to follow him about, barking loudly." A group of youths went to the graveyard to catch him, but only two were brave enough to stand their ground when he appeared. One pinned him against the churchyard stile, shouting to the other, "Quick! Go and get the priest to conjure him down, and what I've got I'll hold on to, with God's help, till the priest comes." The priest does come, and absolves the ghost's sins, after which it can rest. Similarly, in Story VI a man defends himself from a ghost by wrestling. Story XII speaks of a ghost being "captured," again implying physicality.

Story V, however, is different. It is the briefest of the tales, and says simply:

   There is something else, quite amazing, which I write of. It is said
   that a certain woman caught a ghost and carried it on her back into
   a certain house, into the presence of some men, one of whom reported
   that he saw the woman's hands plunging deeply into the ghost's
   flesh, as if its flesh were rotten, and not solid but illusory
   [fantastica].

"This is most curious," says M. R. James in a footnote. "Why did the woman catch the ghost and bring it indoors?" I think the answer may be that she did it for a bet or a dare, and got more than she bargained for. This guess rests on a migratory legend common in Scandinavia (ML 4020, "The Unforgiven Skeleton"), telling how a servant-girl who prides herself on her courage accepts a challenge to go into a church at midnight and fetch a sack of unburied bones, or a skeleton, left lying around there. But the skeleton takes offence and leaps onto her back, forcing her to carry it to a priest, or to someone it had wronged, to obtain forgiveness. If this is indeed what the Byland monk had in mind, it fits in well with his concern that the dead should be loosed from their sins. And the reason it is brief to the point of obscurity may be that he jotted it down as an afterthought in a small blank space; it comes at the foot of fol. 142b, and the next page begins a new story. He noted only the one point which had so astonished him: the permeability of the ghost's flesh. Evidently he expected revenants to be solid and graspable, as in Stories III, VI, and probably XII.