IN A WAY, IT WAS NO surprise that Isabel Heriot should return from the dead. As was often the case with such marvels, Isabel had lived a bad life. She was proud and wilful and a poor student of Scripture. After some time, her employer, the local minister, dismissed her from his service.

In the winter of 1680, Isabel took sick and died. If the minister was not immediately sorry at her passing, he soon would be, for several nights afterwards, a local woman saw Isabel, wearing her white burial robes, walking to town from the chapel in which she had been interred. She entered at the minister's back gate and went into the stable. A few nights later, stones were thrown at the minister's house, and a few nights after that, at the minister himself, and at a visitor. A servant man had his heel grabbed and another time had a horse-comb hurled at him. The assaults continued for some two months, until one night a certain Isabel Murray saw the dead woman with a pile of stones gathered about her, ready to throw. Murray conjured Heriot to say why she had come, to which Heriot replied that she returned because she had wronged the minister in life, had stolen money from him and done other things. Chiefly, she had consorted with the Devil.

Isabel is the kind of revenant we get by the seventeenth century. No longer in that grey area in which the walking dead might actually be the person returning to the body they inhabited in life, the Reformed revenant is nothing more than a corpse inhabited by the Devil – at least in Protestant Europe. Elsewhere things take a turn, at once back towards the medieval conception of the revenant and in a new direction altogether, but we will come to that later.