by Bob Curran
The most famous of all such “mummies” was perhaps that of the monk Tetsumonkai, which is still held by the Churenji Temple at Mount Yudono. It was believed that through the skull-like polished head, the spirit of the holy man could speak, utter curses, and give advice to those who came to worship there. In this aspect, the monk was still “alive” and was still interacting with the world. Until very recently, according to Sato Eimei, who was head monk at Churenji, the “mummy” of Tetsumonkai drew all sorts of ghosts and phantoms to the monastery, making is a holy and highly unusual place.
It has been estimated that in northern Japan there are between 16 and 24 of these “living mummies” still intact, and they are held in a number of remote, rural monasteries. In the late 19th century, the process of self-mummification was outlawed by the Japanese government as an illegal form of suicide. Yet, for many ascetics it was still a way of withdrawing from the material world that was in keeping with Buddhist tradition. And it was also considered to be a way of gaining further enlightenment and self-knowledge free from physical encumbrances. It is also noteworthy that many of those who began the process were old and possibly near the end of their days in any case—few young monks sought after enlightenment in this way.
The idea of the “living mummies” added a new uncertainty to death. Death was not a single event in the life of the ascetic; rather it was a gradual process of crossing over from one type of existence into the other. And because it was done throughout a long period, the process was not formally viewed as “dying,” but rather as a progression toward enlightenment. The monk thus actually came to be seen as one of the “walking dead” as he progressed through the various stages of self-mummification. Although the process is supposedly outlawed, there have been stories of such practices continuing among individual monks at isolated Japanese monasteries to this day. Perhaps the Japanese “walking dead” are still around!
Eastern Europe
For many people in the West, however, it is not the Far East that is most strongly associated with the walking dead, but rather Eastern Europe. The reason for this may be the numbers of vampire films and books, which depict the Balkan dead, rising from their graves in order to torment the living. But is such a picture actually true? Does it have an accurate origin in East European folklore?
As in Japanese folklore, the answer is a complex one. Although it has become fashionable to equate the walking dead with places such as Romania and Albania with vampirism, this is not strictly true. Not all East European walking dead are vampires, and there is a tradition of returning revenants outside of vampiric lore.
To differentiate between the two ideas, the Romanians use two separate words: moroi and strigoi. Although many equate the former with vampirism, this is not the case. The moroi (the plural is moroii) are simply those dead who have returned from the tomb for a specific purpose—in order to see family or to complete an unfinished task, for example. Some, it is believed, may even return in order to correct the faults of their descendants or to discipline naughty children. They are usually harmless and are often welcomed by the families whom they visit. Similar to the Western Roman Church, the Eastern Orthodox believed that there were days set aside for the returning dead who came back under a special dispensation from God or the saints.
The Strigoi
In the Orthodox Calendar there were a number of nights when the dead supposedly walked the earth. As in Lithuania, St. Martin’s Eve (November 10th) was one such time, but notable too was the night of St. Sylvester’s Day (Christmas Eve). Sometimes the period that lay between these two dates was a time when the dead might randomly return. But the most significant night of the year for the returning cadavers was St. George’s Eve. This might fall on a number of nights—the most frequent being April 23rd (the date when most Churches—both Roman and Orthodox—agreed that the saint had died in AD 303). However, if the feast day fell within Lent, as it did in 2008, then the festival moved to Easter Monday. St. George’s Eve was a designated time for the dead to return, and this was primarily the feast of the “Blessed Dead,” those who had died within the proper rituals of the Church. However, one had to be wary, for the Devil, jealous of the status that God had accorded his dead servants, chose the date to release some of the more evil corpses from their tombs and allowed them to wander the countryside, creating mayhem and havoc. Romanians had to be truly careful about whom they admitted to their houses, for even their returning relatives might bring some evil intent with them.
Strigoi
The second type that characterized the walking dead was the strigoi. Strigoi had not died or been buried, but they had some personal characteristics that made them anti-social—anything from a physical disfigurement to unusual sexual practices to a scolding tongue. The name is thought to have originated from the Roman word striges, which was used to describe demons of the night and latterly witches. It may also have its roots in the word strix, which in Latin folklore was used to denote a shrieking vampiric bird that only appeared at night. These corpses returned to the world of the living for maligned purposes, and were to be avoided at all costs. It was the strigoi rather than the moroi who would eventually turn into vampires once they got the taste for human blood. Usually, they attacked livestock in an attempt to drink animal blood in order to gain nourishment and warmth, but from time to time they would attack members of their own family in a similar way.
It was on St. George’s Eve that both the Blessed Dead and the strigoi emerged from their graves and took to the roads, the latter often in torn, winding sheets that they had gnawed for sustenance in the darkness of their tombs. This gave them another common nickname, particularly in German-speaking areas: shroudeaters. It was easy to see where their graves lay. On St. George’s Eve, a faint blue flame burned above the graves of the evil and unquiet dead—those who had committed a crime or a terrible sin in life. In fact, the grave of a robber or a murderer was usually marked in this way on this night of the year. Somewhere between 11 p.m. and midnight, it was believed, such graves burst open and the evil cadavers burst forth to torment the living. However, it was possible—so Slavic folklore said—to restrain them in their tombs if they could be pinned there and not permitted to rise. Once pinioned in the earth, the walking dead could no longer rise and cause mischief in their communities. The pinions might be a number of wooden nails driven into the hands and feet of the cadaver in an imitation of Christ on the Cross or, perhaps more effectively, a wooden stake was driven through the body of the cadaver, thus preventing the strigoi from rising. Indeed, this might be the origins of the commonly held idea of destroying a vampire with a stake. As with the vampire kind, the only proper way to dispose of the strigoi was to burn the body completely. But of course, the grave of the walking dead had first to be identified. The faint blue flame that appeared on St. George’s Eve was a good indication, but it was not always reliable.
According to Professor Harry Senn in his Vampire and Werewolf in Romania, certain methods were often employed by local communities in order to detect the grave of a strigoi or vampire. One of these methods involved placing a very young male child on a white horse (if the horse had any impurities in its coloring, the detection would not work) and leading him to a graveyard. In some instances the horse had to be a stallion, because in many cultures stallions were considered to be magical animals. (For example, in Ireland and Scotland, witches had no power over an individual while he or she sat on the back of such a beast.) On the way through the cemetery, the horse would stop at a particular grave (or maybe even several) that would then be thoroughly inspected by community officials and the clergy. If small holes were discovered in the soil, then it was almost certainly the grave of a strigoi and the body therein would have to be exhumed and staked.
Romanian Folklore
In some parts of Romania and in Istria, the line between the living and the dead with regard to the strigoi was extremely blurred. It was often not clear as to whether exceptionally evil people had managed to somehow
cheat death and extend their ghastly lives, perhaps through the dark arts, and had achieved a kind of unwholesome immortality. To reflect this confusion, two classifications had been developed within certain regions: the strigoi (denoting a living witch) and the strigoi mort (denoting a returning cadaver, risen from the tomb). Both of these were best avoided, but it was the latter who returned at specified times of the year such as St. George’s Eve, Halloween, or St. Sylvester’s Day, and tried to deliberately annoy the living.
According to some variants of Romanian folklore, the walking dead are invariably ginger-haired and blue-eyed. (No matter what their natural color was when alive, the hair coloring is transmuted to ginger.) They also have two hearts, which makes the staking process slightly more difficult in the case of a vampire—one may have to use two stakes and not one in order to destroy it. In places such as Albania, the strigoi are invariably of Turkish origin and resemble Turkish people. This, of course, stems from a racial antipathy between the Albanians and the Turks. In all cases, there seems to be a firm connection between the walking dead and the Romanian pricolici, or werewolves, and it is alleged that some of the dead have a taste for the flesh of the living, although such a belief is not universal in Romanian communities.
In some versions of old Magyar tales, there are sometimes references to certain stones, which are specialist sites at which black magicians can sometimes raise the dead. In some cases these rocks are described as “black stones,” the color symbolizing the evil intent of the magicians who use them. It is this belief that supposedly influenced the famous 1931 short story by the American fantasy writer Robert E. Howard entitled “The Black Stone” and published in the magazine Weird Tales in November of that year. In this, Howard describes a strange monolith upon which old gods sometimes appear. They were places where the world of the living and the dead met, and some supernatural entities might cross over from one world into the other.
The black stone in Magyar stories, however, state that these may be sites where the walking dead gather in order to plot mischief against the living. However, the myth may be based on a real black stone—the al-Hajar-ul-Aswad—which is a facet of Islamic religion. This stone, according to Muslim tradition, has existed since before the time of Adam and Eve, and fell from Heaven into the world. It is still to be found in the center of the Masjid al-Haran in Mecca in Saudi Arabia, and is often a focus for many pilgrims to the city. Initially, the stone was said to have been white, but has turned black because it has absorbed so much sin and evil from the world around it. Although this particular stone has nothing to do with the walking dead it may have inspired tales of other stones that reputedly were among the Magyars, who learned of the black stone through their contact with Islamic traders. Such stones, said the East Europeans, drew the walking dead to them and could be used by people of evil intent, who knew the proper rituals to bend such cadavers to their will.
The Black Stone
Polish Mythology
Some notion of the dead gathering at special sites at certain times of the year also appears in Polish mythology. Here, the sites are not designated by black stones, but by shrines to Zwyie, the goddess of death and rebirth. Zwyie, whose emblem is the cuckoo, is probably the representation of an old fertility god; there are legends concerning her that are similar to both Greek and Roman mythologies concerning goddesses who descended into the Underworld for a time. She conquers death and returns to the world of the living just in time for spring, and brings her retinue of the recently dead with her. They gather around her shrines, accosting those who pass by for food and drink before they return to the grave. From these points they wander abroad, sometimes visiting their former homes and sometimes creating mischief in the countryside. Zwyie is certainly the embodiment of an old pre-Christian Polish spirit, and may well have one time been one of the chief goddesses of the Elbe Slavs. She also sometimes contains certain elements of another pre-Christian deity: Zwelzda Polnoca, one of the three Zoryas of ancient Polish lore. The Zoryas were three crones who guarded the Universe and were in charge of the cycles of death and rebirth, which kept it stable. Zwelzda Polnoca was the goddess who was charged with death and rebirth—it was to her arms that the sun came to die at the end of each day, and from which it rose the following morning. Thus, similar to Zwyie, she had the power of life and death, and was able to call the dead from their graves in order to do her bidding. Throughout the years, the notion of the crone and Zwyie have become entangled and more firmly linked to the recall of the dead.
Tales of the Dead
But it was not only on Halloween (October 31st) that the marbh bheo might return. Indeed on May Eve (April 30th) and Martinmas (October 10th) they might also come back. And when they did, they behaved very much in the style of living—they ate, drank, smoked a pipe, played cards or other games of chance, and even enjoyed conjugal rights with their former partners. And in some of the more remote areas—particularly in Ireland—there were tales of marriages between the living and the dead. The idea (which was relatively common in Ireland around the 18th and 19th centuries) forms the basis of the ghostly short story “Schalken the Painter” (or more properly “A Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter”) by Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73).
Although the story is set in Holland and involves truly Dutch historical figures, the basis for the tale is unquestionably Irish, a fact that Le Fanu himself hints at as he states that it comes from the private papers of the Reverend Francis Purcell P.P. of Drumcoolagh in Ireland. The two protagonists in the tale, the master painter Gerrit Dou and his pupil Gottfrid Schalken (Schaleken) are both actual figures. Dou (1613–1675) was a master of one of the Flemish schools of painting based at Leyden in Holland, whereas Schalken (born 1643) was his pupil for a time. According to the story, Dou was also the guardian of his niece Rosa, with whom Schalken was secretly in love. However, being penniless at the time, he could not afford to ask Dou for her hand in marriage, and the painter, anxious to find a good marriage for his ward, married her off to the mysterious Wilken Vanderhousen of Rotterdam. Vanderhousen passed himself off as an old man, but in the end was revealed to be an animated corpse who took Rosa back with him to his tomb and beyond Schalken’s reach. In despair, the pupil painted one of his finest pictures—Girl with a Candle—and this too is an actual portrait, painted by Gottfried Schalken, which can be seen today, hanging in the Galaria Pitti in Florence. It has been suggested that seeing this portrait inspired Le Fanu to write the tale. The actuality of the characters and of the painting brings a mysterious and rather sinister element to the tale. Did the events recounted in the tale really happen in early modern Holland? Obviously Le Fanu wanted us to think so.
The story, however, is probably based on an old country folktale from the south Armagh/County Monaghan border country. The story itself is said to be of great antiquity, and Le Fanu may have heard it or one similar to it. The story is known as “Grainne Daly’s Wedding” and it tells of how the rather unprepossessing Grainne, who lives in abject poverty with her widowed mother, tries to find a good match for herself and finally married Thady Walsh of Killycard in County Monaghan who, it transpires, has been dead for some time, but returned to the world of the living. He takes her back with her to his tomb in a ruined church at Muckno where they are attended by other long-dead cadavers from his dark family. Variants of this tale are to be found in the more remote parts of Ireland and also in some parts of Scotland; the idea of the living marrying the dead is therefore not unusual in Celtic lore.
There are also stories of brides or bridegrooms who were somehow killed on the way to the wedding, but nevertheless continued on their journey and made their way to the ceremony and took their wedding vows before either collapsing as a rotting corpse or else vanishing away altogether. In this case, it was the will and desire to be married, which, many argued, had transformed them into the walking dead. Often they were accompanied by spectral phenomena such as ghostly carriages, which often conveyed them to the c
eremony and later spirited them and their partners away into the Afterlife.
But it was not only those who wished to marry who returned to the world of the living in corporeal form. There was an old Irish saying: “A man who dies owing money or a woman who leaves a newborn child will never rest quiet in the grave.” Nursing mothers in particular (those who had died when giving birth) were often permitted to return from beyond death in order to suckle their offspring in the crib. Sometimes, the fact that a corpse had returned from the grave could confer great gifts on the child that the cadaver attended. Again, on a personal note, around the age of 12, I was taken by my grandmother to see a local wise woman who reputedly had a cure for the ringworm from which I was suffering at the time. The “cure,” which this woman possessed, had been acquired in a special way. Her mother had died in giving birth to her and her father had raised her. However, each night the mother had returned from the grave in order to suckle her, and in doing so had conferred the “cure” on her. There was a downside to this gift, though: For the greater part of her life she was known as “The Corpse’s Daughter,” and no man would even consider marrying her, as they were just too frightened of her imagined powers.
Again, the cadaver of a debtor might also return in order to complete some task that could absolve him or her of the debt, or else return in order to complete work that they had solemnly promised to do. Thus, workmen might return from the tomb (with God’s permission, of course) in order to cut corn or to repair walls, while maids might return to milk cows, churn butter, or bake bread or cakes. As soon as the task was complete or the debt paid, they would return to their graves permanently and for eternity. Apart from Ireland, such traditions were held in parts of England, Wales, Scotland, and the Isle of Man and in Brittany as well—indeed all across the Celtic world.
