The living and the dead

'One would not easily believe that corpses come out of their graves and wander around to terrorize the living, were there not so many cases supported by ample testimony.'

This BBC documentary from the series Inside the Medieval Mind spends some time on the relationship between the living and the dead in medieval Britain. Narrator Robert Bartlett of St Andrew's University recounts some of the 'ghost stories' told by William of Newburgh and others. Many of these stories are compiled by Andrew Joynes in Medieval Ghost Stories (The Boydell Press, 2001).

Bartlett is author of several books including The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

From the fifth book of William of Newburgh's Chronica rerum anglicarum as paraphrased by Robert Bartlett in the quote above.