The Yorkshire canon William of Newburgh (1136–98) included in his Historia Rerum Anglicarum a collection of gruesome ghost stories – Prodigiosa, or ‘unnatural marvels’, is the way he describes them – which strongly resemble the accounts of monstrous revenants in the Scandinavian sagas. This can perhaps be explained by the fact that many parts of Britain (particularly the Scottish borders and the north of England, where William places the accounts contained in the second and third extracts from his history) were subject to Danish and Viking cultural influences. Similarly, as we have seen from Grendel's appearance in the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, there is likely to have been a general belief in monstrous nightstalkers in Anglo-Saxon England which persisted into the later medieval period. William seems to have no doubt about the veracity of these stories, as his self-justificatory preface to the story of ‘The Hounds’ Priest’ makes clear. His accounts are noteworthy for the active part played by ordinary people in ridding their afflicted communities of the ghostly nuisances: quite as much as the clergy with their scrolls of absolution, it is the sturdy commoners with their mattocks and bonfires who are the ‘heroes’ of these stories. In this respect, as in the monstrous and corporeal nature of the ghosts which William describes, these stories have much in common with saga accounts of the dead returning to threaten the communities where they formerly dwelt.

The Buckinghamshire Ghost

Book V, Chap. XXII

At this time in the county of Buckinghamshire, a most iextraordinary thing happened. I was first told about it by the people of the neighbourhood, and afterwards more fully by Stephen, a venerable archdeacon of that district. A certain man died, and his wife, an honourable woman, and his family took care to bury him with full customary rites on the feast of the Lord's Ascension. But the very next night he entered the bedchamber of his sleeping wife. She woke, greatly afraid, as he attempted to lie upon her in the marital bed. The same thing happened the next night, and on the third night the terrified woman struggled with her dead husband yet again before arranging for some of her family and neighbours to stay awake on watch with her throughout the night.