Revenant

folks, it's spooky season again and we take a look at the revenant, a lesser-known monster today but one that positively terrified Medieval people. we take a look at a number of stories spanning across all of Northern Europe about dead bodies rising from the grave and causing mischief and horror in the physical world. they were so worried about this that they even did so-called deviant burials, where bodies were covered in heavy stones or with bricks shoved in the mouth, to prevent them from coming back as revenant dead. we talk all about these guys, why the stories were so prevalent, how it connects to stories of vampires and zombies, archaeological evidence of deviant burials, and more.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
My friend, what's going on in the chat? I have
put for you the names of two places that I
went in Norfolk, and we're going to play. Can you
figure out how to say this? I've missed the h
off of one. I'm gonna have to retype it.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
What the h?

Speaker 1 (00:24):
Yeah? I know? Right? Okay, So two place names, both
in Norfolk. You're gonna have to spell them out for
our audience and then try to pronounce them.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
I see one.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Name, okay, hold on the other one is yes.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
All right? The first one h A p p I
s b U r g.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
H Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Let's go with Happisburg.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
That's what you would think. It's Hayesboro h A p
p I s c U r g h Haysburg col

(01:31):
hayesburh because you know you pronounced the pis as a
y I.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
You know, I didn't know that. I guess that's just
me being a being. And the next one, right now,
what do we got? We got.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
S t I f f K E y.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
Steph K.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
So you would think it would be stiff key because
that's how it's fucking spelled. And also that's like a thing, right,
like saying, oh, there's a stiff Key. It's like stucky Stucky,
like the Stucky Marches. I've also heard Stuckley and you

(02:19):
know you you what I will say about both of
these is you were like, I guess I'm just a hicic.
I think that this is like rural Norfolk, like this
is like deep peasants lore. This is like the real real.
It's like people will make fun of people from Norfolk

(02:42):
and say that they're all married to their cousins and things.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
This is great. It's like Alabama. It is it is Uh. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
I was in the fucking Stucky or stucky fucking Salt
marsh itsm yesterday, like being confused about how you pronounce it.
So but I saw a lot of cool birds.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
This is the thing. I don't know if I talked
about it. So after we did that segment, Darrin in
one of the mailback episodes, HM, a couple of people
in the chat in the discord were like, oh, okay,
let's do it with other languages and just started listing,
like cities in Germany in German. And I was like,

(03:31):
I mean, well they in German.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
Ordinarily you pronounce everything. You just say everything. Yeah, you
say everything.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
Sometimes you say it a little harder or gruffer or whatever.
But that's what you do.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
And like.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
Only English and especially only like like hard insistence on
insane local pronunciations that I guess we just seed to
the English, and some Americans do by proxy, Like what
the fuck are you talking about like that?

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Like you know, how the fuck do you get Hayesborough
from Happyesborough? I No, I don't.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
In South Georgia, there's a town that's spilled c a
I r oh, you know, like in Egypt Cairo, they
say k row oh ship.

Speaker 1 (04:25):
There's one in Illinois like that too. It is also Caro.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yeah, and everybody makes fun of that, and that's fine
because it is. It's weird, but whatever it is, it
makes so much more sense to say k row k
row Georgia like relative, I would say, than it does
to say stiff key as stuck late.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
Makes me very upset. I don't. I feel like we
don't bully the English enough.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
We don't. We don't, And that's that is a maybe,
that's you know, it's our fault again as as Americans,
we we we got to be spearheading that we do.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
It's the only people were kind of allowed to bully.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
Yeah, and then you know, whenever they're like, oh, you
guys suck too, and we're like, yeah, but we learned
it from watching you like you like you could you
could fall back on that in every instance, every single one,
So we did. Why do we do this because.

Speaker 1 (05:29):
English people?

Speaker 2 (05:30):
Bra because you guys taught What do you mean why
we're European? What do you fucking mean?

Speaker 1 (05:36):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (05:36):
Why do we do this? Are you kidding?

Speaker 1 (05:40):
What happens when Europeans get out of pocket?

Speaker 2 (05:42):
Did you miss from like the year eleven hundred to
like to like nineteen, like fifty, did you guys miss
that period of it?

Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (05:53):
Like because I didn't know the Yeah, you know anyway,
America America is super evil. We are bad as a country.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
I think a lot of the people here are good. Uh,
but you know, as a country, absolutely abysmal.

Speaker 1 (06:16):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
But the one thing I can say for certain, with
absolute certainty, is that we cannot be worse than the
English because the English have been around for far longer,
and you know, look what they made us, Like, I mean,
they like, you know, we're a monument to all their sins,
and I mean that literally, we are your fucking mon

(06:39):
Oh man uh anyway, that's great.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
They spent most of the morning I was running errands,
and I spent most of the morning thinking. I was like, hmmm,
you know, I'm gonna live to see I mean, as
long as I don't die in the next like I
don't know, few months or weeks or whatever, I'm going
to live to see the end of the hegemony of
the dollar and the collapse of the American Empire. I can't.

(07:10):
Like I remember talking to someone like four or five
years ago and they were astonished that I was like, look, yeah,
it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. And they were honest.
But like when I but I was like, I mean,
you know, like when I'm way older, like because you know,

(07:30):
these things just usually you know, it usually takes forever,
Like it usually takes forever. And then it's like COVID
just broke everyone's brains in various ways, and then you know,
the the genocide in Gaza, and like the last two

(07:57):
presidents both just being senile, like yeah, freaks, one of
whom is a convicting criminal.

Speaker 1 (08:04):
Like it's like, what is what is even the point
of getting rid of a monarchy If you're just gonna
have a bunch of senile old dudes running you anyway.

Speaker 2 (08:12):
Like America is the inheritor of Rome in one in
a way that I feel, I mean, you know, in
a few ways, a lot of them, because we chose
to do that. But in one way that we backed
into in that both America and Rome we're so terrified
of having a king, just so fucking scared of having

(08:36):
a king, that they fell asked backwards into into being empires,
uh that were ruled by emperors who ruled them like kings.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
Quite so.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
Quite so here we are, uh yeah, And that's what
I mean, that's what we are. You know, it's I
don't know what happens next. I don't know what happens
after that. I mean, I think it's like, I don't
think there's any way it could possibly be stopped. I
don't think there's a person or even coalition of people

(09:08):
on the planet who could stop like the economic collapse.
Because even if like I somehow gained like magic powers,
I was able to snap my fingers in important class
consciousness to like all of America simultaneously, and and you know,
we could kick off like the revolution tomorrow, the economy

(09:30):
would still collapse with a fucking way no no offense
to g U does not have the power to stop it. Yeah,
I mean, in fact, him being like all right, where
the big dogs now would actually hasten the collapse because
Western like money would break the fuck out. But like, yeah,

(09:51):
it's like Trump, I mean, Trump can't stop it. Like
he could do a lot of things to like slow
it down, but I mean it's still happy like the
a I think there's everybody see I don't know when
it happened. I don't know how it happened, but sometime
in the last six months, like a wide swath of

(10:11):
people started to be like oh yeah, uh fuck, uh yeah,
it's like no one's getting any return from this, and
uh we're just burning money, killing the environment for fantastic anyway, beautiful, beautiful.

(10:36):
I guess it just goes to show you that uh,
that quote about you know, well they didn't you know,
I can't imagine the end of capitalism. Well they couldn't
imagine the end of the uh you know, divine roddy
kings or whatever, and here we are. It's like, well, yeah,
I guess I guess that is true. It does kind
of sneak up on you.

Speaker 1 (10:55):
Yeah, I mean it's to be like that, you know,
all at once, quite suddenly, over a period of years.
I mean, I thought I would live to see it.
I just I didn't think it was going to happen
this quickly, to be.

Speaker 2 (11:08):
I thought I would. I thought it like if I
lived to eighty, I would see it.

Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah, like it just everything, you know, the century of
American humiliation. Yeah, that's fine.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
We deserve it. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Maybe we could
maybe we could head it off, we could stop it.
Maybe we could only have, you know, a few decades
of American humiliation if we uh uh get right. But
you know, we'll see, we'll see how it goes, all right. Uh,
Let's talk about something that is less depressing than this. Uh,

(11:46):
and by that I mean the Walking Dad. Yeah, no,
comic book or the terrible show that was based on it.
I love the comic kind of funny. I like the
comic book a good deal. Thought the show was fun
and funny, although I think unintentionally so, at least at

(12:06):
the beginning.

Speaker 1 (12:08):
The guy from This Life, isn't it? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (12:10):
Yeah? From love? Actually is it?

Speaker 1 (12:13):
Yeah? From yeah?

Speaker 2 (12:14):
Play playing a Kentucky cop.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
Yeah, it's that this is the same guy horrible. Okay.
So during during the pandemic, as part of my ongoing
Advanced Britishnist courses, Justin had me watch this show from
the nineties called This Life, where the guy who plays
Frank Grimes got his start and it's like a TV show.

(12:39):
It's very nineties and it's like about young lawyers trying
to make it in London. It's very it's very pleasant,
like one of them. It's like his big drama is
like that he's gay because it was the nineties, so
like being gay could still be a drama. You know,
it's amazing, amazing.

Speaker 2 (12:58):
That's the reason that we're in the problem now because
they had a gay person on TV in the nineties.
Yeah exactly, you know, but he fell in degenerous hadn't
come out on TV.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
Yeah. He plays a guy called whose nickname is Egg
and he's like the one who wants to do something
else other than be a lawyer. Yeah, so there you go,
there you go. And a weirdly Ricky Gervaise was like
dating the chick who wrote the show and so he's
like the music consultant and is like in the credits,

(13:30):
very nineties anyway, and then I lost my mind and
bought my fake lepperprint coat because one of the characters
is always wearing a Lepper cripp print coat and I
wanted one. You know, it was a deep lockdown there
you go?

Speaker 2 (13:43):
Yeah, that is that is certainly a lockdown purchase.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
Anyway, we should do the show.

Speaker 2 (13:52):
That's now cut the tape. Oh hello, and welcome back
to We're's So Different, a podcast about Eleanor's poor poor purchasing.

Speaker 1 (14:07):
Choices that cut whips, don't you dare?

Speaker 2 (14:10):
My name is and none like Eleanor, I made no
poor purchasing choices during the pandemic. I certainly didn't.

Speaker 1 (14:17):
About a mess stress about a Leppard pre know, we're
not going to talk about it. Yeah, that's going great.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
I can't my my headphones cut out for a second.
I couldn't hear what it's like. Oh cool, all right,
folks today, where do you spo key with it? Just
play the monster mash in your head the entire show.

Speaker 1 (15:16):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
But but we're not going to do that here because
we would have to pay them money. Yeah. But before
we get to that, we got a couple of questions.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
First from Allie can't. How did medieval people cope with
weather extremes? Did they construct buildings and knowing what the
weather was going to be like in the near future,
what was it like when a freak weather struck towns
and villages? Uh? Did they also cite extreme weather as
signs of the end times?

Speaker 1 (15:45):
Yeah? So we definitely see, you know, homes that are
constructed in order to you know, deal with weather, which
is why you see really varying forms of construction across
Europe obviously, So down in southern Europe, for example, you're
going to see really a lot of kind of courtyard houses,

(16:07):
you know, the kind of a courtyard in the middle
and then like a lot of rooms around the outside
of it, and that kind of allows you to you know,
bigger eves, shadier stuff things like that, you know, built
with small windows to keep the heat out and light out,
that kind of thing. Right northern Europe, you will see

(16:28):
varying things. So for example, like in alpine regions, you
tend to see more peaked roofs that go further down
so that snow will slide off them, for example. And
you know, you also see a lot of differentiation in
terms of what building materials are available, so you see

(16:50):
more stone in places with more stone, more wood in
places with more wood. But you do see a lot
more wood construction in general in the Middle Ages, which
is why we don't always have a whole lot of
medieval buildings left, because they burn down in the interim
hundreds and hundreds of years, right, So that is one reason.

(17:10):
Another reason is that, like especially the houses of poorer
people are oftentimes constructed of wood and wattle and daub,
and wattle and daub will fall apart without like constant
and ongoing care and attention. So that's why a lot
of the things that survive to us are usually like
churches or castles or monumental architecture, because that's more likely

(17:32):
to be built from stone, and that's more likely therefore
to survive as well. But I bring up wood construction
not just because it's something that people do a lot of,
but also because you know, it's a really great kind
of construction for certain extremes and like natural disasters. So

(17:53):
would construction typically you tend to find a lot of
it in places where there are earthquake zones. Yeah, so
you know, so that you have more flex to your
building and it won't topple over. But you know, one
of one thing that is true in terms of like
inclement weather and things like that is they don't have,

(18:16):
for example, the same problems that we have with flooding
because there aren't enough of them that they are building
on floodplains, right, you know, like you know, they they
do have problems with flooding and things, but the the
and there will be For example, you know, there is
a really great painting that I love in Amsterdam that

(18:39):
is from that is made after there was a giant
flood in the Lowlands in the fifteenth century where some
of their dykes were breached and like hundreds of people
die and like lots of animals and there's like this
big monumental painting.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
Made of it.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
But that is like, yes, you have inclement weather and
also it breaches the dye and that's the issue there.
But you don't you're not going to see kind of
like the same whole Citi's inundated kind of deal, because
it's just like, well, we don't live down there, like
even in Prague, you know, a city with the river
right through it, or London, a city with the river

(19:15):
right through it. It's like, well, you don't really build
right up to the edge of the river. It's like
there's a there's a floodplain on the Flatava that's like
right next to like the Jewish Quarter for example. That's
why the Jewish Quarter is over there, because they're like,
we don't want to live over there. It's dangerous, right,
And like in London, you do kind of have some

(19:37):
issues with the Thames, but they are managing the river
from a really really early time, so you know they
already have are building walls and things on it, you know,
but there's a reason why we have the Thames Barrier now,
et cetera, et cetera. So you know, you're tending to
build more for extremes like heat or cold, and that

(20:00):
is going to involve stuff like thatching. So yeah, I mean,
obviously people conform to their environments and they build varying
things in order to do so. Yeah, and that's why
we have a real varied housing stock across Europe. I guess, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
I mean I think like if they had like a
really unseasonably hot summer, especially during the a bit earlier
during the medieval warm period, I mean I believe that
they would probably struggle to deal with those temperatures because

(20:39):
they don't have air conditioning. I mean, you know, they
had They can you know, open windows, you can, you know,
you can try to move air through and stuff like that.
But if it's like, you know, eighty five or ninety
degrees whatever that is celsius, you know, and you're used
to it being seventy five, it's you can't really do

(21:04):
anything about that. Yeah, and we it's still hard to
do it about it today unless you like have like
an enclosed space with air conditioning.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
Yeah, And it is one of the reasons why we
tend to see things like, for example, really small streets
and laneways and stuff in the Middle Ages, because one
of the big things that you do is you build
houses kind of close together and then you kind of
like put a cloth over the alleyway to have shade,
which would be surprised. It really does a good job
of cooling things down, you know. And in the modern period,

(21:38):
we tend to want wider streets and things like that
because we've got stuff like cars, you know, for example,
and they don't need to worry about that shit, so
they just do other things.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
Yep. Yeah, they had a lot of things. I don't
know what they it's I think it's very hard to
do anything more to like cool yourself off really rapidly.
Then you know, maybe go for a swim, if you
could do that. I don't. It's pretty Uh, you know,
have your your servants wave palm frawnds on you, which

(22:13):
you know everybody had those back?

Speaker 1 (22:15):
Yeah, obviously obviously. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
Anyway, air conditioning, greatest blessing ever. Thank you? Whoever did,
I don't fucking know whatever. Probably bad overall, that's you
know whatever. Next, we got one question from Colin Keys,
who says when did medieval early modern people stop seeing

(22:39):
themselves as Romans or people in the sixteenth and seventeenth
century generally still seeing themselves as Romans or as something else,
albeit admirers of and heavily influenced by ancient Rome.

Speaker 1 (22:51):
So by the time you get into especially like the
seventeenth century, they're on some new shit, like largely because
they're inventing new empires, right, And you know, if you
are like Portugal and Spain and engaging in like a
kind of colonial arms race, you don't want to be
hearkening back to Rome because you're both trying to beat

(23:12):
the other one, right, the there is Like so for example,
one of the reasons why you tend to see this
idea that there was a break with Rome also kind
of like comes from the fact that like Italians realize
they've lost the sauce and like, I mean, that's part
of the Renaissance that like people don't talk about, right,

(23:35):
is that they're like, oh, look and we've rediscovered being Roman.
You should like let us be in charge. And it's
like you guys the money lenders, that's wild, right, like
because you know, the Italians.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
The U City States, Like what what the fuck do
you mean? You know, you don't you're not even united?
That's cute, sweet. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:58):
So I mean but by the time we're getting in
boats and trying to take over other places, we're definitely
not calling ourselves Roman, right, And so you know, like
there and there tends to be kind of like more
pushback against the Holy Roman Empire being considered Roman at
this juncture as well, Like this is where you tend.

Speaker 2 (24:18):
To see it.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
Like and obviously that reaches its peak in like the
eighteenth century with Wultais bullshit. But basically, by the time
we start inventing more empires and there is more kind
of a fracturing because like you know, everyone in the
Middle Ages kind of agrees that they are Rome's successors
because like that's what it means to be Christian, right,

(24:40):
So it's like, uh, it's a direct line from Rome
to Christianity. But when you get confessionalization and do you
have more type than one type of Christian then that
no longer works. And simultaneously, obviously, if you are one
of the Protestant countries, you definitely don't want the Catholic
countries to say that they are in a direct live

(25:00):
with Rome, right, And you also don't want things to
be Rome either because you don't like how the church
still is in Rome. You don't and you don't like
the church. Yeah yeah, I like the slave part, Okay.

Speaker 2 (25:17):
The rest of it, though I don't care for I
would say I would. I would note two things here. First,
the Holy Roman Empire did not cease it being until
eighteen oh six, and they were calling themselves the inheritors
of Rome the entire time. You you know, can we

(25:39):
can quibble about how much power they had at the
end or whatever, but it is what it is. And
the Ottomans until nineteen twenty one or twenty two, whichever
it was, when they formally broke up, and you know,
it started to become Turkey and all that. They said

(26:01):
they were the inheritors of Rome because they they held Constantinople,
they held uh you know, and at that point it's
still had been changed. The name hadn't been changed, because
that wasn't officially done until the nineteen thirties. Again, I've
said that before, but it's very funny. Uh yeah. So,
I mean, they didn't stop calling themselves Romans. I think

(26:25):
the last time you could say, like, if you want
to say, like an actual physical part of the Roman
Empire and you want to hand to someone, it's whenever
the Ottoman's folded, like yeah, yeah, because they still held Constantinople.
They considered themselves the inheritors of Rome at the time,
the Sultanate of Rome, all that sort of stuff, and yeah,
and they stopped in the twenties. But I mean, again

(26:47):
I did say earlier. I do think like America and
the West has done, has done the modern and postmodern
version of this, which is recreate all the shitty aspects
running through Againda Mills and you know, say it makes
you a big tough man because you believe it essentially. Yeah, so,

(27:11):
Colin Keys, thank you very much for the question. If
you want to ask us questions like these, please subscribe
on Patreon, Patreon dot com, slash w NSD pod five
bucks a month. You can ask us questions get access
to bonus episodes like our review of Kingdom of Heaven
Hey Extended Edition, and our upcoming ninth episode in our

(27:34):
book club series on the de Cameron by Boccaccio. But anyway,
let's get onto the show. So folks, it's spooky season again.
The days are growing mercifully shorter and Halloween draws near
as long as you're in the Northern Hemisphere. If you're
in the Southern Hemisphere, it's not any of that for

(27:56):
you right now. But I hope you still celebrate Halloween
because it's fun. All of which puts us in the
mood to talk about scary stories from the Middle Ages.
We've done this in the past, talking about the Bilin
Abbey ghost stories, and that was so much fun that
we decided to go back and tell some more scary
stories from the era. However, instead of limiting ourselves to

(28:16):
one location, we're going to look all over Europe. We
focus on a single type of supernatural entity, a singular
kind of monster that was widely feared at the time,
from the shores of Island to the Germanic lands and
up into the frozen north of Scandinavia. No, I'm not
talking about sasquatch, godzilla, goblin schools, or zombies with no conscience.

(28:41):
I'm instead talking about the revenant dead, a lesser known
monster to us today. These were buried bodies which were
reanimated through the work of Satan or black magic or something,
and rose from their graves to terrorize the living. Unlike
the ghost, which is a temporal spirit that haunts the

(29:01):
mortal realm for various reasons, the revenant is a real,
flesh and blood body risen from the grave. The tails vary,
but they all agree that these monsters were able to
lay hands upon the living, both humans and animals, and
abuse or even kill them. Burial shrouds were found half
chewed and covered in red blood from their mouths that

(29:25):
the revenant would use to bite, scream, or, in rare instances,
even talk. Though one could become a revenant by leading
an iniquitous life or dying without having been baptized. Other
factors seemed more important, such as a burial position and location,
or ill timed deaths during the spread of disease. And

(29:46):
while this might seem like just another fanciful bit of
pre modern imagination and belief in magic and the supernaturally
rearing its head, and it certainly is, that medieval people
manifested it into reality, and the historical and archaeological records
reflect that. William of Newburgh, the twelfth century English historian

(30:06):
and monk, wrote that quote, it would it would not
be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead
should sally, I know not by what agency, from their graves,
and should wander about to tear or destruction of the living,
and again return to the tomb, which, of its own
accords spontaneously opened to receive them. Did not frequent examples

(30:30):
occurring in our own times suffice to establish this fact
to the truth of which there is abundant testimony end quote. Indeed,
this belief was so prevalent all across in Northern Europe
that old graves are littered with so called deviant burials,
where bodies are found resting under heavy stones or with bricks,

(30:52):
and their jaws to prevent them from rising and terrorizing
the living as revenant dead. Honor of Halloween and the
Middle Ages, we're going to take a look at the
lesser known revenant. It's close parallels to other monsters like
vampires and zombies. Why Europeans feared it so much that
they often ignored canon law to bury people in chains,

(31:16):
and some very very some various revenant ghost stories from
the Middle Ages. So yeah, in our modern minds, the
concept of a physical body ri rising from the grave
is usually either a vampire or a zombie. Eleanor How
does a revenant differ from these creatures just in terms

(31:40):
of like the like the monster, how it's portrayed.

Speaker 1 (31:43):
Yeah, I think that in a lot of ways, the
revenant debt are kind of like precursors, you know what
I mean, Like it's a precursor to both zombies and vampires,
because there are similar factors in both cases. But as
a general rule of thumb, the revenant dead show back

(32:07):
up after they've been buried. They have this ability to
like get out of their grave, I go around, starting
trouble like bodily they do. Sometimes they suck blood mm hmmmm,
or and like I mean that that or they like
bite people, they do things like that, but they're not
they're not a vampire in the modern sense, you know,

(32:28):
like have vampires. It's like they also have like mind
control powers and can maybe like change forms and you
can become a vampire blah blah blah. Right. Similarly, like
with zombies, so like zombies are usually seen as being
like brainless, right, it's like a reanimated corpse that is

(32:48):
just kind of like shambling, right, Yeah, And similarly, zombies
also have you know, because it's a modern constant of
a monster, there is this idea of contingen So both
vampires and zombies now we tend to think of them

(33:09):
as contaminating, so that like you can become one year
if you're bitten by one, and there's that is not
true of the revenant dead. Like the revenant dead have
got out of their grave and they're moving around. But
also a lot of the time, the revenant dead have
full power over their faculties, right, right, like they behave

(33:31):
in the way that they did before they were dead,
but kind of like more so to an extent, and
so if they were a bad person, and most of
the revenant dead, though not all are often kind of
seen as bad people during their lifetime and so then
they're like doing it some more in their death, right, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:54):
Yeah, I would say when you know, when we were
I was reading up on this, I will I will
say that there was I think one instance of the
seeming like the Revenant did could because it was sometimes
associated with disease. It was sometimes believed that there they

(34:17):
had a disease that they could that they would that
they would like spew it on you somehow and you
would either you would either die from it directly. And
I think in one case, I think it was the
Icelandic tale that we were fuck I forget what it's called,
Oh the air beardra sorry a beard brus saga where

(34:42):
they they did seem to bring but they bring more
homies back. Yeah, they bring more people back, which but
that's very that's uh like the exception that first of all,
it's Icelandic, which you know, it's still Europe.

Speaker 1 (34:56):
But it's oh yeah, but it's it's just particular.

Speaker 2 (34:59):
Yeah yeah, but it's also the except the exception that
proves the rule, because that's really the only one that
that we could find that's like that. And I would
also say, just here as a point of clarity, when
we say zombies, we were talking about the European slash
Western Anglo conception of zombies obviously, Uh, the concept of zombies,

(35:23):
uh where where we stole that from? Originated in Caribbean cultures,
you know, voodoo and and creole uh stories and stuff
like that. But yeah, they the revenant is they they
kind of the stories kind of seemed to me like

(35:45):
it's usually someone who probably hasn't been dead that long
and they come back and their body, Yeah, their body
looks worse for the wear, Like they look like they've
been in the grave for like a few days or whatever,
maybe their skin sloughing off a little bit. But like

(36:05):
there's a big focus on blood like they they had
like medieval people were so freaked out that dead bodies
still had blood in them for a little while. Like
it's really they're like fear of the blood in this context,
because all of these things are about how uh like

(36:29):
sometimes when bodies Sometimes when people die and their bodies
are like covered, you know, and they have like a
veil or cloth put over their head. Sometimes if they're
exhumed for later reasons, it is found that the cloth
looks like it has been eaten by the corpse, like
the corpse has been chewing on it. And this is

(36:50):
because you know, as I think we all know now,
when you die, your body is going into rigor mortis
and everything, but it's not like it's still shrinking and closing.
You're losing liquids and stuff like that. And so this
thing that's over your mouth, which is an open hole,

(37:11):
you know, kind of falls in there and it looks
like it's been eating it and there's blood in there.
And so when the Europeans would exum bodies for whatever
reason they had to, they'd be like, oh shit, They're like,
why is there still blood in the mouth of this thing?
Why has it been eating the garment? And this is
part of how they explain that, and I think it's

(37:31):
really cool. I also think it's funny that they were like,
these things just have so much fucking blood. You have
no idea like that, that's.

Speaker 1 (37:37):
Too much blood.

Speaker 2 (37:39):
That's too much blood. Oh it's gross.

Speaker 1 (37:42):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
But also eleanor A, you did kind of touch on this.
I think like the medieval and early modern vampire is
much closer to the revenant. Will be discussing than it
is to like what we think of with the vampire,
you know, like the swab Dracula style or like, you know.

Speaker 1 (38:03):
Yeah, that's a very modern invention and basically bramstoke Er.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
Did that and it's a really cool invention too.

Speaker 1 (38:08):
We love it.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
We love it.

Speaker 1 (38:10):
Yeah. Oh, I mean, like, let us be abundantly clear.
I love sexy gentleman vampire. You know.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
I love sexy vampires, scary vampires, like like I love
a weird freak vampire, you know, like yeah, it suddenly
becomes like ten feet tall kind of like hell yeah,
hell yeah, break stuff. Great commentary on the noble classes.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
I gotta say one of my favorite movies. Have you
ever seen Shadow of the Vampire. It's really fucking good.
It was kind of like it came out in the
odds and it's like about the making of the movie
No Speratu and it's very good and you should have
seen that and you should watch it. Yeah, I'd like

(38:51):
it very much. So like that's my vampire movie recommendation
for everyone. So yeah, like and whereas you know, like
the suave gentleman, the Eastern European vampire thing that kind
of like lives in our head is like, you know, again,
it's very modern because it's like, oh, no, what if
an Eastern European had money and was fucking bitches.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
And was sexy. Can you imagine if an Eastern European
man was attractive? Like no, horror, Like it's like if
the yeah, oh and he has to be transported in
a box. Oh, I love, I love the Insane Magic System.

(39:36):
They're a lot.

Speaker 1 (39:37):
It's so good. It's so good. Yeah, I feel like
it is really interesting, uh, to look at the way
obviously that that we we use horror stories to kind
of work out our own modern tensions, and obviously medieval
people are doing that with with the Revenue Dead. But

(40:00):
you know, very particularly and you've touched on this, when
we see the Revenant Dead, they tend to be in
Northern Europe. It's like a Northern European thing.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
This is not a Southern European thing. If you are
touching the Mediterranean coast, you do not have to worry.
Don't bear, don't bury your you're dead with stones, don't
put them in chains. They're fine.

Speaker 1 (40:22):
Like basically they're just decomposing so much fasters like.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
Absolutely what it is.

Speaker 1 (40:29):
Yeah, they're just like what like what the you mean
like homeboys not getting back out of the ground.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
Like some some some trader from Messina who has to
go up into like the haunts of territories for some reason,
and they're like what yeh, why would they come back?
It's how could it come back? Have you seen how
acidic our soil is?

Speaker 1 (40:51):
Just like absolutely not.

Speaker 2 (40:53):
No, that's why we can grow that in the climate,
or why we can grow these amazing fruits and vegetables.

Speaker 1 (40:59):
Yeah, exactly right, like you tend so you tend to
see it in like culture is that at some point
in time had kind of like some connection to like,
you know, the more kind of like Nordic or Germanic beliefs,
like this is really in there for like the Norse cultures. Yeah,

(41:20):
this is this is old, very very very very old.

Speaker 2 (41:26):
Recently, a so called revenant burial was discovered in I
believe it was right along the coast of Belgium modern
day Belgium, and it's forty two hundred years old. It
had a stone, a heavy stone placed over its legs,

(41:51):
clearly to stop it from getting out. And yeah, it's
I don't know why, I don't know where it started,
but yeah, they were like, fuck, these bodies are gonna Yeah.

Speaker 1 (42:12):
So yeah, like we were, we aren't exactly sure where
it started, but we know it continues throughout the medieval period.

Speaker 2 (42:19):
Yeah, it does seem to be a like a European thing.
This is not uh not common that we know if
I there, there could be plenty of cultures that that
I don't know about, but this doesn't really seem to
be the same kind of thing uh elsewhere. And yeah,

(42:39):
uh that brings us to the real revenants and that
we got, folks. We got historical records attesting to these
guys everywhere England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, what is now Denmark, Scandinavia,
the Czech Lands, Iceland. Yeah, just anywhere in Europe where

(43:04):
it's cold as fuck. And I guess isn't Russia maybe
uh Russian, but yeah, have them there. But yeah, eleanor
let's talk about these stories and tales which they which
they told us as truths, as iron glad history truth Yeah.

Speaker 1 (43:26):
Yeah, and it's so a bunch of the ways that
we hear about this are oftentimes they will be recorded
in mirabilia, and mirabilia are basically records of wondrous things
miraculous things, and like, that's a really good place to
go looking for ghosts and the revenant dead, because those

(43:47):
will be the miraculous things that happen. But the interesting
thing about mirabilia and stuff like that is they tend
to be like, dude, it's true, no homie, believe me, homie,
I'm so serious. Everybody saw it right, and they will
talk about these particular ways that they've gone out after

(44:12):
I would like that.

Speaker 2 (44:13):
I would like to point out that I quoted William
of Newburgh earlier. William of and this is from his
fuck basically history of England from the conquest until his
near his death in eleven ninety eight, and this is
the historical document that is used for citations to the anarchy.

(44:38):
It is the best sighted one, it is the best
research one, and at the same time it includes a
passage of him going revenants are absolutely real. They're so
real that if I wrote every instance, I would get tired.
It would become a rote exercise. And it's plentiful evidence.
So like, I absolutely believe this ship was real as

(45:02):
much as like Matilda and and step.

Speaker 1 (45:07):
Yeah, absolutely, and so we we see these things come
up and now so that I find really interesting because,
for example, we will have like references to hauntings that
come up in like other mirabilia and other chronicles. Right,
But like so for example, when we think about there's

(45:29):
a particularly famous haunt that is recorded as happening, and
it shows up, Oh god, what is the name? I
was literally at the cathedral yesterday. Uh hold on where
Catherine of Aragon was buried. Oh my god, I'm so
brain dead.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
Hold On was it Bingham?

Speaker 1 (45:51):
Uh no, I went to being a priory as well,
But it is the Peterborough that's it. Okay, try this again. So,
for example, there's a really famous like the dark Hunt
of Peterborough where monks in two different sources, one the
Peterborough Chronicle and like another like regular ass chronicle that

(46:12):
one of the monks writes, they are like, oh, yeah,
we got given a really bad like abbot and he
isn't very holy actually, and he's just friends with the
king and he sucks so as punishment God, like all
winter long sends like these hell hounds and hell hunters
around the town to bark. And it's like, okay, yeah,
there's two attestations of that, but they're all by monks

(46:34):
who just hate this new guy. So it's like not
very like, you know, it's very obvious what they're doing, right,
It's really super obvious that they're just like, yeah, me
and all my homies hate new Abbot, right, Whereas with
the Revenant stories, it's not exactly sure what the point is.

(46:55):
I mean, obviously there is the standard like be a
good person, right, and and indeed, like sometimes we see
so like the Revenant Dead, for example, come up in
the Biland Abbey ghost Stories and they are doing the
like a standard you've got to say, masses for my soul, dog, dog,
my soul please, right, and and I guess that that

(47:15):
California baby exactly. So it is physical bodies there, so
it's a revenant. Yeah. Yeah. So like we get, for example,
in the Biland Abbey ghost Stories, you get like the

(47:35):
the Robert, the son of Robert de Boltby of Kilburn,
who comes back as the Revenant Dead, and like he's
been going around town getting barked at by dogs. It's
really funny, and he's been like hanging out outside of
people's windows and stuff, and eventually he gets like physically
like a bunch of the brave young men of the
village go and like tackle him and they get a

(47:56):
priest to come confession and then like he then rests
after that, and basically they're thing is like, oh yeah,
he was hanging out because he was looking for help,
like looking for help having confession said. And that's really
different to a lot of the Revenant stories where they're like, yeah,
so we went and fucking dug him up, cut his

(48:16):
head off, burnt him, and then buried the ashes in
a swamp, right, like yeah, it's like Jesus, okay, Like.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
I mean, yeah, they folks. Some of this We'll talk
about the archaeological evidence in a minute, but some of
this stuff is is a little grim because uh yeah,
the the histories here are just like they they spanned.

(48:50):
They they all, like all the Revenant have this like
thing in common where it's like the physical body came
back and there's almost always something about blood, something about
the mouth in some way, and like typically the body
either has to be like the typically the body has

(49:13):
to be disposed of in a certain way. If it
has already come back as a revenant, you can do
stuff beforehand, like preventative etroprophetic exercises like bearing them with
stones over them, but when this happens, they seemed to
be pretty clear that, like you can do stuff, you

(49:34):
can maybe keep them down for like a few days
with the normal stuff, but at some point you got
to burn that fucker. You got to burn it up.
That's the only way. And sometimes sometimes that involved just
burning the heart, exhuming the body and burning the heart,
and other times it was the whole thing. But yeah,

(49:55):
it's these stories are pervasive. They cut across all I mean,
they cut across all of northern Europe, like they seem
to have had started in the Pagan era, pagan times

(50:15):
and went right on through and I mean, in the
case of Poland up until the late seventeenth century. So
like this is something that was hard, too hard to
die out. And it was also something where like they
seem if a body was buried in a way, either

(50:41):
inadvertently or just like somebody left it in like a shallow,
unmarked grave or something like that and they discovered it,
they were fearful of that because bodies that had not
been properly like sanctified and buried in the proper way
and with the proper as you know aspect, were We're bad.

(51:03):
You know that that was bad and if they weren't buried,
you know, what is it east to west? Yeah, Uh,
with their basically lying flat on the back with the
hands over their you know, hands over your chest in
in sanctified ground of some kind. Uh, you know, they

(51:26):
were liable to come back. There's an example in one
of these stories about like a body that had washed
up from like a shipwreck, and it washed up with
no head and no feet, and the people, like, you know,
they they like made a special burial place near where

(51:47):
it was and like kind of cordoned it off because like,
you know this even even though they didn't do it
and nothing, you know, it was probably just a freak accident.
Somebody died in you know, a shipwreck. It Uh, you know,
they still had they still had to deal with that

(52:07):
body in the appropriate way or it wasn't going to
uh it was going to be bad news for all involved.
It was coming back mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (52:16):
Yeah. Like we do see a lot of these, like
very specifically, if heads have been removed, we tend to
be like aha, yeah, probably bad times. And oftentimes one
of the big revenant dead things that we find is
heads removed and heads between the legs. Then very specifically,

(52:39):
and then again like burial in places that is not
the ordinary place. And now, so sometimes that can be
that that people thought this person was the revenant dead,
and sometimes it can be they're stopping them, yeah, from
becoming the revenant dead. And those are two different things.
And we definitely see like prophylactic measures against people becoming

(53:05):
revenant dead, which we'll get written about. And you know,
it's very difficult for us to tell if we're just
digging it up, whether or not they're worried they will
come back, or if they they did it because they
thought the person had come back. Yeah, Like obviously that's
what that's part of the difficulty of archaeology is that
we don't necessarily know. So unless somebody specifically writes it

(53:25):
down and says they did come back and then we
did this, we don't know.

Speaker 2 (53:29):
Right, Yeah, there there is a there is a note
in an article that that Eleanor passed to me, and
it's about how like it seems that the decapitation and
skull between the legs is usually more of a reactive

(53:53):
instead of a prophylactic one, because that is like seen
in some cultures in some ways as as a way
to stop someone from coming back as the revenant dead.
You didn't have to go as far as burning in
some cases, but in a lot of it seems that
that that was more of a reactive measure. But the

(54:14):
other things, the prophylactic stuff. And this is where we
get into what we call the archaeological evidence for the
revenant dead. And these are deviant burials now before we're
gonna talk about them in just a second, and they
are very cool and grizzly and everything. But eleanor Now,

(54:36):
the church clearly, you know, they weren't. The church clearly
believed that there were spirits and there were things like
that and it could be bad. But they also really
didn't like you bearing bodies in weird or different ways
or doing or putting like chains or something over them,

(54:58):
because you know, your body's supposed to come back, and
if you have changed, your body can't come back. Yeah,
but it's so, and it's what were they what were
they thinking about the church? What was the church thinking
about this?

Speaker 1 (55:11):
Well, it's interesting because like it tends to be a
lot of this is like localized, and we will see
records like from priests talking about their involvement in these
things from monks talking about their involvement in these things,
but it's happening at like a really local level, like
they are like one hundred percent. This is not getting
reported down to Rome, not right, because in Rome they

(55:34):
would be like, what are you talking about?

Speaker 2 (55:36):
You you've chopped off its head.

Speaker 1 (55:39):
Like you have weird o' hillbilly freaks, right.

Speaker 2 (55:43):
That's what you do for suicides, and only if you're
a dickhead.

Speaker 1 (55:46):
What's is wrong? It's like you don't need to be
doing all that right, like, and don't get me wrong,
like the church is fine with deviant burials, like if
you've got a criminal or something like that, they're they're like,
oh yeah, they don't need to be in hollow ground,
like you know, if you've got a suicide, they don't
need to be hollow ground. They're fine with deviant burrels
like that. They don't like a whole lot of corpse
mesene because yeah, as you say, your body's supposed to

(56:09):
be coming back. And also they don't love, you know,
the idea that the revenant dead are coming back because
like within Christian cosmology, this isn't supposed to even be happening,
Like you're not even supposed to be having a fucking ghost,
let alone like the Revenant Dead.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
Yeah, so if that's happening, that means Satan is doing
Satan and Evil are doing way too much work on Earth.

Speaker 1 (56:32):
Yeah, there's this great dramatic English way of relating to
the Revenant Dead where they're called the satellites of Satan,
which I love. Isn't that really good? So it's like
they like they're kind of able to be animated as
a result of like yeah, like basically, like obviously anytime

(56:54):
something bad like this happens is because God lets Satan
do it.

Speaker 2 (56:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:57):
Yeah, it is sort of the idea. But like basically,
on a high up church level, like cardinals would tell
you that this stuff can't happen. But on the ground,
if you're living in a bog in Denmark, what are
they going to do? Like, I mean, the church has
so little slant way in like Iceland. Really yeah, you know,

(57:19):
it's like, let's be so real about that.

Speaker 2 (57:21):
I mean in some places, in some places, it's kind
of a folk belief, like I mean, you know, there
are groups of Gnostics and you know, people who are
still clinging to pagan beliefs for a very very long time,
Like yeah, and the church did a lot to try
and stamp that out, but.

Speaker 1 (57:41):
Like a lot of the records that we have come
from people who are in the church, so like clearly,
clearly it's still going on, right.

Speaker 2 (57:48):
Yeah, well yeah, one of uh, one of William of
Newburgh's stories is about a deviant bishop who was who
was buried, who was given a proper christ burial despite
being an asshole who like is para or not if
paramore his uh uh mistress like shit and and beat

(58:09):
her ye, So like yeah, it's.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
And that's a really big trope with deviant burials because
we also see that in one of the Violot Abbey
ghost stories, where it's like member of the church has
a mistress treats are like shit in life comes back
from the dead and like rips arrive all out right exactly.

Speaker 2 (58:30):
Yeah, And that's a that's a different a slightly different
version than the one that William tells. So like these
are yeah, they're stories, Yeah, yeah, they're probably drawing from
similar things, but like two different stories have spun out
of this one thing. And I think like a big
thing is that like if somebody has a bad death

(58:52):
or like a weird death, they are more likely to
be able to come back. As this there seems to
be connection to like when there is widespread uh disease
in the area, not just the Black Death, but like anything.
And I mean the Black Death was clearly there was

(59:14):
clearly a lot of belief or at least fear of
this during the Black Death because of the you know
the Three, the Three the Living Yeah, that one. Yeah,
but like it's just if you were a bad person
and you were given a good burial, uh, there was

(59:34):
a chance you were coming back. If you were a
criminal or a dev or, a suicide or whatever, there
was a good chance you could come back. And that
meant they had to take steps, and steps were taken,
and uh yeah, look, this is what we're all here for.
Deviant burials. There are so many types of these. Just

(01:00:01):
to start with the eleanor didn't you say you recently
saw or were at the location where somebody was buried
with like a stone and chains around them.

Speaker 1 (01:00:11):
Yeah, okay, so we know about the burial of this
particular month, and his name is Alexander de Langley and
he was buried at Bingham Priory up in Norfolk, which
is why I was, you know, I was out making
a new ghost show that should be out this winter
or that you know when it's out. And so we

(01:00:33):
know about this guy because it's written about. We haven't
dug him up and found his chains.

Speaker 2 (01:00:38):
But please don't, please don't.

Speaker 1 (01:00:41):
We don't, we don't, we do not want to do that, right,
Like we're just there's a whole monk's graveyard there. We
know he's probably we know probably the general area that
he's in. We're letting him like Homie Requiet in Patcham,
you know, And uh, basically we know about this because
what is that to Langley is an interesting case that

(01:01:02):
kind of tells you a lot about who the average
person that they think will be a revenant is. Where
he was fairly high up as a monk, like it
makes his way up to Abbot and he goes, in
their words, mad, and they say that he goes mad
from over work and like not like the cute, a

(01:01:25):
beautiful mind mad or whatever like he he seems to be.
He has like a fairly serious, like psychotic break and
it is incredibly disruptive to the monks. And it's basically
the way that madness is related to in the Middle Ages.

(01:01:45):
It could be all sorts of things. Sometimes they think
it's demonic possession. Sometimes they think it's just like you
aren't like, uh buckling down hard enough and like mastering yourself.
In this case, they say that he goes mad from overwork.
And basically what you're supposed understan is that this makes
him like a bad member of the monastic community, because like, yeah,
you are supposed to be doing like your book learning,

(01:02:07):
but you're also supposed to like be doing your singing
and your praying, right, so you're you're meant to kind
of understand him as somehow lacking in discipline, right, And
that's how they relate to him. He gets better, then
he goes mad again, so you know, in that way
that that people do. And anyway, eventually he finally dies,

(01:02:28):
and when he dies, the monks are so convinced that
he may become a member of the Revenant Dead that
they bury him covered in heavy chains and they write
about it. They want you to know this, and they
tell his whole story and they go, yeah, so like,
don't worry about it. We wrapped him up in really

(01:02:50):
fucking heavy chains and that'll keep him where he is now.
To their credit. They tell us this story, and they
don't say his ass back. So it's like it's like
it's like the bear patrol, right, it's like, uh, you know,

(01:03:10):
the rock that repels tigers, et cetera. Right, Like, so
we don't see any record of him come back. So like,
clearly they dealt with this, but we do. This is
kind of part of a pattern. Like the people that
are presumed to be a revenant dead or members of
the Revenant Dead are often people who are disrupted to

(01:03:30):
the community. Yeah, you know, like whether or not. Like
I mean sometimes a lot of the time it's like
people who are murderers or suspected of being murderers. People
who were just like kind of annoying, you know, people
who like they're oh shit, Like there's a lot of
like wife beaters. That's that's like a big one. You know,

(01:03:50):
things like that where where it's like, oh, yeah, well
they trouble the community in life, so they're going to
trouble the community and death. Why would you know, someone
who's like raving, why would death stop them from doing that?

Speaker 2 (01:04:03):
Yeah? Right, Like imagine yeah, imagine being like the guy
in the town and you're just like you're not me.
You're not bad, You're just kind of annoying, like you know,
like you just you know, you have like you know,
like you have kind of a grading personality or whatever.
And then when you die, they lay you next to
like three rapists, a guy who fucked a horse and

(01:04:26):
I'm a double murder, Like what the come on, man, man,
Like I didn't I didn't do anything. I'm just like,
I'm sorry, I pointed out the flaw and your argumently
I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 (01:04:39):
Just yeah, like just like he's just a well actually
guy getting buried out with the murderers.

Speaker 2 (01:04:48):
Yeah. So chains, Uh, we we have evidence of large
stones placed on it. And this is everything from like
a stone slab to like uh you know, just like
heavy rocks, stone in the mouth stone. Yeah, the stone
in the mouth because they were so afraid of the

(01:05:10):
revenant either biting them or spewing blood or whatever on them. Uh,
you you would, you would put the Sometimes it was
a brick, Sometimes it was like a you know, like
maybe like a round stone or whatever. And then sometimes
which I found odd but but also kind of cute. Uh,

(01:05:31):
sometimes it was just a bunch of pebbles like that
was going to be enough. To weigh you down and
stop you from doing this was like having like a.

Speaker 1 (01:05:39):
Mouse kind of annoying, you know, don't want the pebbles
all over it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:44):
Just spit those out like I get the brick thing,
like if you're gonna do it, like I get that,
but like like stuck some like uh like pebbles and
they're just like okay man, And then I did read
of course, because it's medieval Europe. On one of them,
a Jewish person was buried with money in their mouth.

(01:06:07):
Surprise surprise. Uh yeah, it's wet. We at that people
are staked to the ground. Uh grizzly, very grizzly thing.
I'm about to say alert. But early in the uh
Christianization of the Germanic lands, there were horrified monks and

(01:06:31):
bishops and letters going around about the fact that the
Germans took the unburied. Uh it took the unbaptized things
so seriously that they staked unbaptized children who died like
like that so they would like and there are talks

(01:06:52):
of like, uh like just thirty or four finding thirty
or forty bodies buried like this, just monks being like
what the fuck is this? This is not what we
were talking about. What is this shit?

Speaker 1 (01:07:08):
Like absolutely not absolutely not right.

Speaker 2 (01:07:11):
Like oh yeah, yeah, you get the the decapitations as
we talked about, uh sometimes prophylactic uh also mostly likely
reactive in some way. The different positions of the burial
I find interesting, Like they would instead of lying on

(01:07:33):
the back, they would put it in like a face
down prone position, which I don't understand how that's supposed
to stop anything. I guess, like the it wakes up
and it's confused.

Speaker 1 (01:07:45):
And it's like, oh damn, they got my ass. It
can't roll over.

Speaker 2 (01:07:51):
Yeah listen, yeah, oh my god.

Speaker 1 (01:07:55):
Never mind, not going to go back to sleep. This
is too much effort.

Speaker 2 (01:07:58):
Like I look, I do. I love the idea that
like you can like the the devil has gone to
the trouble of finding like the bodies that were buried
improperly and or not and and are not shielded from him,
and he's and he and he sends he throws a
demon up into like this guy who died, but they

(01:08:21):
buried him face down, so the demons.

Speaker 1 (01:08:23):
Like, oh, they can't turn around.

Speaker 2 (01:08:27):
And then yeah, well I guess they It worked. And
we got a couple of more of these uh bog burials,
and folks, if you lived in a boggy area, I'm
going to tell you the the the dead swamps from
the Lord of the Rings. There's a reason that that's

(01:08:49):
the thing, and it's because they like to throw bodies,
either either for these purposes or just because it needed
to be uh stashed out of the way, and they
would throw them in the bogs.

Speaker 1 (01:09:04):
Put that motherfucker in the bog. They can't come back
if they're in the bog, I'll tell you that much.

Speaker 2 (01:09:09):
Some of them have been found with like steaks through
their like bodies to keep them like down in the bog.
I mean, clearly, you can't say everybody that's in there
is is you know, a deviate burial to try and
keep them.

Speaker 1 (01:09:26):
But the ones stay.

Speaker 2 (01:09:29):
Yeah, some with stones around their feet like they got
the they got the the concrete shoes. The early Irish
mafia in like five hundreds, like.

Speaker 1 (01:09:40):
Oh yeah, they're like, put that motherfucker in the bog,
in the bog when they got the stone tied to
his feet, get him out of here. And that's definitely
something we see written about as well. When people say
Batman came back, Badman revenant dead. One of the big
things that they will do is dig him up, get

(01:10:00):
him out of the churchyard, and bury him in the bog.
And they write that down and tell us that as well.

Speaker 2 (01:10:06):
Oh yeah, they're like, oh no, he was in the
churchyard and we apparently forgot to sanctify that one corner
of it. And uh he came back, so we exhumed him,
threw him in the fucking bog, and stuck a steak
through that guy coming back.

Speaker 1 (01:10:22):
Now, bitch, he does not deserve the churchyard, basically, and.

Speaker 2 (01:10:26):
Uh yeah, it's and then the last of these, which
is also the one that you is insanely hard to tell,
is burnings because a lot of these stories involve burnings. Now,
as I said, some of them only involve burning the heart,
but they do involve burnings. And the thing there are

(01:10:48):
reports of them written down that they burn things like this,
so it definitely had to happen. But the thing about
burnings is that in order to get a pyre hot
enough to fully consume a human body like down to ash,
you gotta get it to like twelve hundred fare andhegh,
that's really fucking hot, and it takes like ten to
twelve hours to get there. So and also, burnings don't

(01:11:12):
really leave remains unless we find them in an urn
or something like that.

Speaker 1 (01:11:18):
They just.

Speaker 2 (01:11:20):
It's really hard to find ash when you're digging in
something that resembles ash all the time. So it's yeah,
but we have all the stories about burnings that seem
to be the like the cure all way to end
them regardless, and I mean, yeah, they this is a

(01:11:44):
good like I think this is a good example of
like how people like, yes, they took the church seriously. Yes,
as the Middle Ages went on, the church had incredible
amounts of power, and while some of these deviate burials
were happening, like the church were becoming the cops like
they would full scale in the early modern period. But

(01:12:08):
the thing about it was that people still did this regardless,
like from the very beginning of the Middle Ages, when
the Church was tiny and not terribly powerful to I mean,
as we said, like seventeenth century Poland, they Poland is
a deeply Catholic country, still is in many ways, and

(01:12:29):
they the people were still doing that despite the fact
that the church was really like, seriously, stop, what are
you doing your fucking heal abilities?

Speaker 1 (01:12:42):
Yeah, I mean, and it is interesting because when this
shit comes back like in you know, Poland certainly we
see it in Romania, certainly, we see it in Slovakia
places like that, it does time kind of tend to
come back as like the vampires thing, and those burials
are quite interesting. They'll be like we're putting a blade

(01:13:04):
over the throat.

Speaker 2 (01:13:06):
Yeah, the vampire burials are really cool.

Speaker 1 (01:13:08):
It's a very metal. But I think I also just
want to do like one shout out to uh the
I realized I'm going to make us go long as
a result of this, but just one shot out to
our friends from the sagas who are the revenant dead,
because we get a lot of revenant dead that come
back in Icelandic sagas. I'll tell you what the Icelandic

(01:13:32):
guys are. They love it. They fucking love the revenant dead,
and the revenant dead come back for all sorts of reasons.
Like a big one is like if you gave someone
like improper hospitality and they die, they are going to
fucking haunt you and tear you limb from limb. They're
going to do all kinds of like useless stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:13:50):
That's right, guess right, baby, It was a real fucking thing. Seriously, Scotland.

Speaker 1 (01:13:59):
But I love this particular story about the haunting that
happens at fruit As Water because basically so it's like
a furtus water. They're like bedded in for the winter,
but like something goes wrong with their haul of fish
and all the fish rots off, so like some of
the lads are like, okay, well we're gonna go out.
We're gonna get more fish, but obviously this is really

(01:14:19):
dangerous in the winter. So they all drown and then
everyone is like sad about their dead homies. So they're like,
you know, we're gonna get the Christmas beer out the
Christmas Ale and we're gonna drink to their health. And
all the homeboys come back and they're like yo.

Speaker 2 (01:14:35):
Yeah, yeah, who not that kind of health you get back.

Speaker 1 (01:14:40):
And at first everyone is all like scared and they're
like shit, this is not good, and they're like dripping
water everywhere. But then they're like, well, homies probably just
wanted their share of the ale, so like let's just
all get drunk together and then surely this will go away.
But they come back the next night and they bring
more dead people, and they come back the next night,

(01:15:00):
they're like and then everyone's like, guys, ah, and they
like run out of the ale and they're like fuck,
like what are we gonna do? And like more dead
people are coming and more dead people are coming. It's
like they keep inviting more people to the party and
eventually they have to, like the host.

Speaker 2 (01:15:15):
Of dead grows larger each night, and you're like, what
the fuck are you people doing?

Speaker 1 (01:15:20):
And they're like it's interesting. I find these guys really
interesting revenant dead because unlike the other revenant dead, like
the Icelandic Revenant Dead, are tend to be really violent.
Usually the revenant Dead are like doing bad shit. These
guys are just kind of annoying.

Speaker 2 (01:15:35):
They throw shit on them. One of the things they
do is they walk in and instead of observing like
proper guest behavior, they throw shit everybody. They throw like
mud and shit off of their bodies.

Speaker 1 (01:15:47):
And everyone's like, ah, I fucking hate this, Like this sucks,
you know, and like and and it's like they're not
hurting anyone, but again, they're just disruptive.

Speaker 2 (01:16:00):
It's like this is it. They're annoying.

Speaker 1 (01:16:02):
They don't know when to leave the party, right, like
so there they are like bad guests, so it's like
the opposite, and then they eventually get them to go
away by having a priest come out and.

Speaker 2 (01:16:13):
Be like, okay, listen the power like Christ compels you.

Speaker 1 (01:16:18):
Yeah, Like basically the priest like does a judgment on
all of them, like one by one, is like, look,
go fucking back to the grave, like I'm done with
your ship, like we're we're and they're all like.

Speaker 2 (01:16:27):
Okay, Like he's like I'm tired of this pagan shit.
Go back to the grave.

Speaker 1 (01:16:34):
But it's like I find that one really interesting because
it's like it's not as scary, it's like it's kind
of like positive as annoying, and I find that really
fucking funny. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:16:47):
Yeah, the ones, the ones where it's annoying, like the
one where the guy came back but it doesn't say
he did anything, just that dogs kept barking at him
and it was really annoying to everyone as well. Yeah,
like because it like because they clearly believed it too.
But it's just so funny that it could like it

(01:17:07):
could contain multitudes to be everywhere from like it terrorized everyone.
It's breath raised other dead, it's blood seeped everywhere, and
then it's like these guys came in and they didn't
wipe their feet on the mat and and they ruined
our nice winter fish fry, and I'm I just really

(01:17:30):
wish they'd stop. And the priest comes, he's like, come on, guys, like,
what are we doing?

Speaker 1 (01:17:34):
Just kind of honestly like a like yeah, just like
a teacher that's like God like you little fuckers. You Like,
I'm just I'm just disappointed with you, Like, hey, hey, hey,
do I need to call the priest? I need to
tell God.

Speaker 2 (01:17:52):
When you've had a substitute the day before. And the
teacher comes back and she just does that thing when
she's just like rubbing the temples. She's like, in all
my thirty years of teaching, I never said note from
a substitute this bad. And you're like, there's we were fine,
we didn't do anything.

Speaker 1 (01:18:08):
Yeah, exactly, exactly exactly. I think it's just a nice
one to end on because it's a little bit jollier,
like all the other ones are all like we don't
like people who suffer from mental illness, so well, I.

Speaker 2 (01:18:23):
Did you know, I just I wanted to tell I
did want to do the one from Prague from the
uh neplock of Opato Vice's cry. I have no idea
about that, but yeah, anyway, because first of all, it's
a woman, and second of all the resolution is very funny.

(01:18:44):
Eighty thirteen forty four, a certain woman died in Leven
and was buried. After her burial, she rose and killed
Minnie and ran after whomever she pleased. And when she
was transfixed, which means impaled, blood flowed as if from
a living animal. She had devoured more than half of

(01:19:04):
her shroud, and when it was extracted it was completely
covered in blood. When she was to be cremated, the
wood would not set a light unless, according to the
instruction of some old women, it was made from the
roof of a church. After she had been impaled, she
always kept rising, but when she was cremated, all evil subsided. Folks,

(01:19:27):
if you're gonna do this, you go find some old
women and you take some wood from a church. That's
the only way it's gonna worry.

Speaker 1 (01:19:35):
Listen, this is so my grandma coated.

Speaker 2 (01:19:38):
Yes, I love it.

Speaker 1 (01:19:39):
I love it. I'm all like babitchka.

Speaker 2 (01:19:46):
This is an old NaN's story from from a Game
of Throne. She's like Bran and then she tells the
story and Brand's like, all.

Speaker 1 (01:19:54):
Right, can we get that sounds metal? Can we get one.

Speaker 2 (01:19:58):
About the giants? I guess yeah, yeah, that was a
good one.

Speaker 1 (01:20:03):
Because it's like it's illegal for women to have hobbies
even after death. Oh yeah, oh oh it's she Oh
I'm sorry. Oh was she running out? She wanted?

Speaker 2 (01:20:13):
And I like the charges against her or that she
killed many and ran after people, not injured, people not
killed and maimed, just killed some and the rest. She
was like, ah, like.

Speaker 1 (01:20:31):
Very very funny, like just I love this particularized rampage,
you know, And I'm just gonna say it. Whoever she
killed how to come in?

Speaker 2 (01:20:41):
They did?

Speaker 1 (01:20:42):
They did?

Speaker 2 (01:20:42):
They probably? They were probably rude to her in life.

Speaker 1 (01:20:45):
Nobody asks if the victims of the Revenant Dead had
bad vibes all right.

Speaker 2 (01:20:50):
Or were unpleasant to live around. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Anyway, Uh, folks,
you know, we got a lot of scary things going
on nowadays, but one thing you don't have to worry
about is the Revenant Dead. We have thankfully put a
stop to that.

Speaker 1 (01:21:09):
Yeah, there's no more magic in the world.

Speaker 2 (01:21:11):
That's why there isn't it bothers me. We lost it
in like I love I love science, I love rationality
and all that I really do, but like we did
lose something. There was something gone from the world. There's
something beautiful about that, and and it's lost. It's not
fully lost. We still have it in stories. We can
still appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:21:32):
But like, yeah, there's a lot less.

Speaker 2 (01:21:34):
I mean, you know, yeah, like I don't even know
how you to even go about getting that back.

Speaker 1 (01:21:42):
You.

Speaker 2 (01:21:44):
I don't know that it's possible these days. What the fuckes? Yeah, well,
my my screen just decided to blip out on me.
All right, folks. Uh, the tech is giving up.

Speaker 1 (01:21:59):
It's kicking us off. It's like, that's enough, thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:22:02):
It's it's like these these stories are too scary, you guys,
stop it. I'm scared wook anyway, Yeah, folks, thank you
very much for listening. We I think this is actually
going to come out on Halloween yet, Well yeah, we
got I hope you have a good Halloween. Hope you
dress uh that's funny, Hope.

Speaker 1 (01:22:24):
You dress fluody. I hope from Leviza like christ bloody
sloody Leviza.

Speaker 2 (01:22:35):
Please thank you. Yeah, that's the slutty Hilde Guard of Bingen.
So I don't even know why anyway, Yeah, thank you
all for listening, patrons. The bonus episode on the Name
of the Rose will be out on Friday afternoon. Uh,
whenever you are.

Speaker 1 (01:22:56):
Sorry, not Name of the Rose. Oh our cameras Cameron
yet Yeah too for Look, i've been I had the
flu and I've been filming too much, so we're doing
everything at the last minute. Sorry about it.

Speaker 2 (01:23:11):
It's all good. Uh yeah, but we'll be doing that.
But anyway, eleanor what you got going on?

Speaker 1 (01:23:17):
A great question. I don't know if you're in the
UK and you haven't watched The Witches of Essex yet,
If you could do that and like respond on social
media and tell Sky History how much you liked me
and how much they should give me money, that'd be great.
Do that. Yeah, I've done a bunch of stuff that

(01:23:38):
hasn't come out yet. I'll flag it up as and
when it does, obviously, but otherwise, yeah, you can find
your girl on the socials at Going Medieval. Uh. Yeah,
that's like, that's what's up. I'm very busy doing things
that are not out yet. You know. Oh, I guess
if you read the Times Literaries supplement. Oh sorry, the

(01:24:01):
London Review of Books. It's London Review of books. I
have a review of a very good book called Father
Trusser and the Apologists. So if you read book reviews,
I got that out. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:24:12):
There you go, yeah, there you go. Yeah. You can
find me on socials. Luke is amazing and you can
find mild show of people's history of the Old Republic
if you want to hear me. Yep about Star Wars.
But anyway, thank you all very much for listening and
we'll see you next time.

Speaker 1 (01:24:31):
Bye, go be spooky.