#undead — Public Fediverse posts

When the Dead Don’t Stay Dead

There are few things that humanity has been quite so consistently afraid of as a dead person who refuses to behave like one.

Long before Dracula acquired his cape and Rick Grimes rode his horse into Atlanta, people across Europe were burying there dead with precautions. Stones were placed over bodies, heads were removed and limbs were restrained, Corpses were turned face down and objects were placed across throats and stomachs. Graves were reopened and their occupants subjected to considerably more indignity than most of us would consider reasonable after death. Because, apparently, sometimes being dead isn’t enough.

The modern vampire is a glamorous creature. Pale, beautiful, immortal and, generally speaking, blessed with excellent cheekbones, it bears little resemblance to it’s folkloric ancestors. The older revenant was something far less appealing. In fact, it was a corpse – and most of the time, not a particularly pleasant one.

Medieval accounts contain stories of dead people returning to their communities, wandering at night, attacking the living, spreading disease or simply making such a nuisance of themselves that somebody eventually dug them up and did something drastic about it.

Britain had it’s own troublesome dead. The twelfth century chronicler, William of Newburgh recorded several stories of corpses apparently leaving their graves. In one, a wicked man in Buckinghamshire was said to return after burial and terrorise his wife and neighbours.

Eventually, his grave was opened and the body, according to William’s account, had not decayed as expected. The solution for this weird turn of events was not subtle. His heart was removed and burned.

We have to remember that William was not writing a vampire novel. He was writing history. To him and his contemporeries, tales of the restless dead existed within a world in which supernatural explanations for misfortunes were entirely plausible.

Disease made the phenomenon considerably more frightening. When people began dying after the death of a particular individual, suspicion could often fall on the corpse itself. Without knowledge of bacteria, viruses or the mechanisms of infection, the sequence could appear horribly straightforward – someone dies, they are buried, then their family begins dying too. Something must be coming back from the grave. And if opening that grave revealed a corpse that didn’t look sufficiently decomposed, the evidence might have seen overwhelming.

Unfortunately, decomposition is complicated. Bodies do not decay to a convenient timetable. Temperature, moisture, soil chemistry, depth of burial, clothing, coffin construction, body composition and countless other factors affect what happens after death. A corpse exhumed weeks or months later might look very different from what frightened villagers expected. Natural post mortem changes could make matters worse. Skin can retract making hair and nails appear to have continued growing. Gases produced during decomposition can swell the abdomen. Fluids may emerge from the nose and mouth. Internal pressure can produce sounds. Then there was the blood. A body opened after burial might have contained dark fluids mistaken for fresh blood, then suddenly the community had proof. The dead man had been feeding. To someone already convinced the dead had been wandering around at night, none of this can have been particularly reassuring.

During outbreaks of disease in parts of Eastern and Central Europe, suspected vampires were exhumed and examined. Reports describing apparently undecayed bodies, blood around mouths and other supposedly unnatural signs circulated far beyond the villages where the events occurred, until by the eighteenth century, vampire panics had become sufficiently troublesome to attract the attention of physicians, officials and scholars.

Across Europe, people developed a variety of methods intended – or later interpreted – to prevent troublesome corpses from returning. Some were decapitated, some were buried face down, some had heavy stones placed on them. Yet others were pinned, restrained or otherwise treated in ways archaeologists now describe cautiously as unusual, atypical or deviant burials.

Finding a skeleton with a stone rammed into it’s moth does not necessarily indicate that somebody believed they had buried Count Dracula. Burial practices can have many explanations. Punishment, social exclusion, execution, religious belief, disease precautions, fear of grave disturbance and local funerary customs can all leave strange archaeological signatures. Those things don’t make good headlines though. ‘Vampire Burial Discovery’ though? That’ll get the views.

One particularly interesting discovery came from Drawsko in Poland, where several seventeenth and eighteenth century burials included iron sickles placed across the bodies among other unusual measures found in the cemetery. The discoveries obviously became known as ‘vampire burials’, but the reality is actually more interesting than the headline.

Researchers have explored whether these individuals were outsiders, victims of disease, people regarded as dangerous after death or simply participants in a funerary tradition whose precise meaning has been lost. Do the researcher consider the occupants of the sickle graves to have been believed to be vampires? I’d say they were uncertain of why they were interred in this manner.

The history of the restless dead isn’t really a history of monsters, it’s a history of frightened people trying to understand death. Imagine living in a village where disease has begun moving from house to house. There are no microscopes, no germ theory, no antibiotics, no understanding of contagion remotely resembling ours.

What you DO know is that old Thomas died first, then his wife became ill, then his children, then the neighbours…

And someone remembers seeing old Thomas near the road after dark. Perhaps it was another man. Perhaps it was a shadow. Perhaps nobody saw anything at all until the story started circulating.

Soon, somebody suggests opening Thomas’s grave, and when they do, his body isn’t as decayed as everyone expected. Now the village has an answer – it’s the wrong one, but it is an answer.

And that’s an important thing about supernatural belief – It gives shape to chaos. Disease becomes a vampire. Bad luck becomes a curse. A strange noise becomes a ghost. The terrifying randomness of death becomes something with a name, a cause and – most importantly – a possible solution. Dig up the corpse, remove the head, burn the heart, put something heavy over the grave.

Do ‘Something’.

The rituals surrounding dangerous dead people may look macabre to our modern eyes, but undeath them lies something very familiar – Fear, grief and the desperate human need to believe that catastrophe can be controlled.

Even Britain, supposedly safe from the great vampire panics of Eastern Europe, had it’s fair share of stories about people who refused to stay peacefully buried. Medieval chroniclers described walking corpses. Later centuries brought fears of grave robbery, disturbed remains and the ‘Resurrection Men’.

The Victorians developed an entirely different anxiety around the grave: what if the person inside it wasn’t actually dead? They dealt with the anxiety as they normally did – cleverly. Safety coffins, mortuaries where bodies could be observed for signs of life, bells and signalling devices were patented so that the unfortunate prematurely interred might theoretically announce that their funeral had been somewhat premature.

Meanwhile, mortsafes – heavy iron cages placed over graves, particularly in Scotland, from a much more real threat. The Resurrection Men.

These days, photographs of mortsafes appear regularly online labelled as ‘Vampire Cages’, installed to keep the dead from climbing out. They weren’t. They were intended to stop the living from getting in, which, frankly, is somehow even more grim.

And then there are the bodies that just seem to refuse to do what we expect. Saints whose remains are declared incorrupt. Bodies naturally preserved dry air, cold, peat bogs or unusual burial conditions. Corpses transformed into adipocere, a waxy substance produced under certain conditions. Mummies created deliberately. Mummies created by accident. Every generation encounters the same unsettling truth. Death does not always look the way we expect it to. The way we think it should look. And for most of human history, that uncertainty has left plenty of room for the supernatural.

This week, Mysterious Times is opening the grave.

(Not literally. We have standards. Mostly.)

We’ll be meeting Britain’s medieval revenants, examining so-called vampire graves, looking at the genuine terror of premature burial, investigating the iron cages sometimes incorrectly claimed to imprison vampires and exploring the extraordinary cases in which the dead appeared to resist death itself.

Some of the stories will be folklore, some will be archaeology, some will be misunderstandings. And occasionally the truth will turn out to be considerably stranger than the supernatural explanation. Because humanity has spent thousands of years worrying about what happens after we die, but every now and again, we’ve been even more worried about what happens if we come back.

Welcome to The Dead Don’t Rest Week.

Please keep your hands inside the graveyard at all times.

Tortuga Cleric

#sketch-a-day #art #graphite #tortuga #undead #cleric #DnD #Dungeons&Dragons #fantasy

Dracolich

#sketch-a-day #art #graphite #dragon #dracolich #undead #fantasy #desert #monolith

"I smiled and walked over, placed a consoling hand on Sonny’s back – and shoved hard. With surprised eyes, Sonny’s body rotated as he fell. He slung curse words back up at me that intensified and diminished like a magical lighthouse of profanity."

Last part of MN Wiggins's "The Gathering" in issue 20

#funny #fiction #humor #humour #serials #novellas #writingcommunity #readingcommunity #darkhumor #golf #undead #DeathByChocolate

https://onceuponacrocodile.wordpress.com/current-issue/the-gathering-part-v/

Koschei the Deathless is a prominent Slavic folklore villain depicted as a skeletal sorcerer who steals brides and hoards treasure, unable to die due to his concealed soul. #lich #undead #slavicfolklore https://connectparanormal.net/2026/08/05/exploring-koschei-the-deathless-in-slavic-folklore/

Virus_infect

(Note: this is old writing but still canon, and written in a mix of poetry and prose)

A few weeks before the war

Beneath the capitol city, dragons rested in silence

They were undisturbed

Bound by sleep

Everyone in New York knew dragons existed

American society had begun to open up to the creatures like Italian society had done so many years before

Dragons, both big and small, were a common sight

but steam began hissing up from manholes in New York

and there were missing persons reports that had been filed at the NYPD

Detective Rashner, a lone wolf on missions, was told to investigate the Underground New York Ontario Systems (UNYOS)

the tunnel network is indeed an unfinished underground city that the National Board of Welfare had initiated at the behest of dragons

construction was cancelled due to unknown reasons

Officer Riley guided Detective Rashner to the wide entrance

but that was as far as he could go

Rashner didn’t hesitate to go inside

the underground was dark, misty and humid

armed with only a flash light, a marble and a pistol, he braced the warm dangers of the underground

Rashner encountered the unbelievable. He shined his flash light on what he perceived was a wall. A shriveled white creature snarled at him, and in defense it pounced on Rashner, pinning him to the ground.

The creature tried to douse Rashner in the acid from it’s mouth, but he managed to keep the creature’s mouth closed. His fingers nearly slipped between the dragon’s teeth. He slipped under the dragon and he grabbed his flashlight.

He ran fast, stumbling and looking back. As he progressed down the hall he could hear them hissing. He clicked his flashlight off and stepped lightly. The ground was mushy from mucus, saliva and crap. There was a small light shining from the power box in the corner.

He inched closer and saw the open door. With a peek through it, he saw the main center of the station. Desolate trains had been crashed atop eachother and unconscious bodies were scattered around. Little dragons were cocooning unconscious victims. That’s when he saw their King, not Queen, at the far left at the end of the station.

For Rashner, it was a terror to behold.

Docile red and green eyes staring into nothingness, the King was the one creating the eggs.

Through this shocking revelation, Detective Rashner could finally conclude that the Vessel is on Earth. He could successfully speculate they were creating the virus. As a major in dragon biology and history, Rashner knew there had to be a human female nearby.

“Send everything you got, including Alpha Team. I’ve just discovered the Vessel…in the living flesh,” he whispered into his walkie talkie, “send in the Fire and Water squad, pronto.”

hhhhhhhhhhhhhiiiiiissssssss

“HOLY F—”

Rashner’s shouts echoed through the station as one of the Dragons nearly stung him. This dragon was a giant arachnid-type with a feminine body structure and a curly mane down her head to her neck. She struck at him with her sharp talon, but he dodged and heard a low rumbling in the Vessel’s chest.

“Treat our visitor to the Dragon’s welcome.”

The second he spoke, the little dragons that were cocooning had followed Rashner out the room.

Rashner ran out the service tunnels as fast as he could. He stumbled upon the train tracks and dropped his flashlight. He didn’t care to pick it up; he wanted to make it out alive, but in the mix up he wandered into a Wyverns’ room.

The goo and mucus on their bodies were helping them stick to the ceiling so they could rest comfortably.

The exit was a few steps away.

He ran towards it, the light coming closer, and when his feet touched the urban pavement he felt instant freedom.

The little dragons stopped in their tracks and watched as Rashner ran away. He could’ve sworn they were chirping in glee.

Within a few weeks time, a virus had broken out into the city. The virus segregated itself to specific people that lived in certain parts of New York, and Rashner was no exception.

He later found himself quarantined and examined by scientists. Riley had to fill in during his absence. Was it irony that he became this way?

Virus pendemics were becoming a hot topic in video games around 2010-2014. I wanted to do my own virus story, and this (and the revamped Dino Macro) was a result of my efforts. In the stories, the virus was made to wipe out New York before the war. The virus, UNYOS, was developed by Ashuton, Rico, Thomas and Charlie. The dragons living in the train station are different than the ones above ground.

UNYOS itself changes human physiology. It imbues them with draconic DNA while also decaying their body and keeping them alive.

If you are wondering who the guy on the cover is, he is one of the dragons who works on Rashner after he is captured. That story comes later.

2019 notes: I believe this and the UNYOS storyline were inspired by PROTOTYPE, another game I loved. Alex and Elizabeth Greene were fascinating to me. I liked Elizabeth’s design and the fact that she was old. ‘Young but old creator of a deadly virus causes destruction of a city, know she’s a badass, and looks like a post apocalyptic kinda cutie metal-head’ is a vibe I like. I like destructive old-young people.

Want an ebook readable version of this story? Download it here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1163877

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cover by Jack Gaughn

putting this up because I'm reading "A Question of Re-entry" by J. G. Ballard right now in my Ballard short story collection. It caught my eye flipping through my folder.

I think the cover looks more like a Philip K. Dick story. I've read a few of his that are heavy on androids and what it means to be human. The eyeless face seems like it was part of the human skin worn by the robot, and it looks like it's screaming, maybe something cool about how our humanity is terrified of the androids we've become, something like that. Or the reverse, the androids are terrified of humans, it's taking off the suit because it doesn't want to be mistaken for one of us. haha

#art #pulp #scifiArt #reality #androids #robots #human #heart #love #alive #undead #ghost #cyborg

https://www.wacoca.com/media/720154/ RESIDENT EVIL Official Trailer (2026) New Zombie Action Movie | 4K UHD #2026 #4K #Action #ActionHorror #ApocalypseMovie #clip #film #infected #movie #Movies #new #NewHorrorMovies #NewMovieTrailers #official #RaccoonCity #ResidentEvil #ResidentEvilOfficialTrailer #ResidentEvilTeaserTrailer #scene #ScienceFiction #trailer #trailers #undead #UpcomingHorrorMovies #UpcomingMovies #ZombieApocalypse #ZombieMovie #zombies #映画 #映画予告

As Pennsic 53 opens in just a few hours, we sincerely thank all the volunteers working Troll (registration check-in) in the newly built hall... and we wish them good luck for... the hordes are coming.... the hordes are coming....

Without the volunteers to give us site medallions and welcome us in, and everyone else who gives some of their vacation time, Pennsic could not happen. For all the volunteers... Huzzah!

#CommediaDellArte #Commedia #Improv #Improvisation #Theater #Comedy #Mask #Pennsic #PennsicWar #SCA #SocietyForCreativeAnachronism #MySCA #Horror #Zombie #Zombies #Undead

Human Burial And Dealing With The Undead And Ghosts

https://johnbronze.wordpress.com/2026/07/18/human-burial-and-dealing-with-the-undead-and-ghosts/

Go Tell Aunt Rhody 😱 #Mastodon #YouTube #TBGN #TwoBrosGameNight #YoungerBro #OlderBro #ResidentEvilVIIBiohazard #RE7 #ResidentEvil #PS4 #PlaySation #replayseries #announcement #playthrough #videogames #gaming #ToddSoley #KatieOHagan #PaulaRhodes #UmbrellaCorporation #FPS #horror #biologicalwarfare #scary #undead #BOW #BioOrganicWeapon #GoTellAuntRhody #onemanarmy #survival #EthanWinters #MiaWinters #Eveline #July #Friday #post #link #playlist @capcom @TBGN_Older_Bro

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrVoPQdxs8RIAJLHDVrMKCBFJ6id6xPEr

"Garen did not recognize the person to which the head had once belonged. It was little comfort. He chose not to linger and pushed further into the tunnel, putting as much distance between himself and the earthen chute as he could."

New chapter: https://hpkomics.com/2026/07/fang-bone-27-digging-deeper/

#amWriting #fiction #fantasy #horror #adventure #ebook #writing #werewolf #undead

I got in a total of 103 movies watched for the when #NatureAttacks #CreatureFeatures ending that marathon for #MyHorrorfest2026 Now July is dedicated to the #Infected the ones that get bitey or mad like with #Rabies or become #Zombies or the #Undead excluding the vampires they get their own month! I don't have as many as I wish I had in the collection but Tubi is a great place to find some of them. I'm sneaking 1 movie in today cuz I see its last day on Tubi & it's a fav that I haven't been able to collect, the Return of the Living dead 1985! #ZombieMovies #UndeadFilms #DanOBannon #JohnRusso #LivingDeadFilms

Something else lovely.

Our whole house is full of art – old and new, created by us or by others – music or pictures.
Among other things, this beautiful etching, which depicts the entrance to Augustusburg Palace in the Ore Mountains. A lovely place and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A friend pointed out to me that the artist is still alive and lives in a care home in Ölsnitz. Her name is Mechthild Pöhler and her birthday is in August.

#oremountains #erzgebirge #art #MechthildPöhler #etching #undead #undeadchemnitz #art

Noch was Schönes.

Unser ganzes Haus ist voll mit Kunst, alt und neu, von uns selbst oder von anderen, Musik oder Bilder.

Unter anderem diese schöne Radierung, die den Eingang des Schlosses Augustusburg im Erzgebirge zeigt. Ein schöner Ort und UNESCO Weltkulturerbe. Ein Freund hat mich darauf hingewiesen, dass die Künstlerin noch lebt, und in Ölsnitz im Seniorenheim ist. Sie heißt Mechthild Pöhler und hat im August Geburtstag.

https://word.undead-network.de/2026/06/30/noch-was-schoenes/
#erzgebirge #kunst #MechthildPöhler #radierung #undead #undeadchemnitz

Did somebody say Just Eat... People? The RPG Professor's players handbook for the 5e undead - feeding, degradation and decomposition. 8 playable ancestries, all with the same problem - so many delicious people to choose from. On Kickstarter now!
#crowdfundQuest #crowdfunding #kickstarter #5e #undead #theRpgProfessor #DND
https://www.tabletopsentinel.com/news/fantasy/crowdfund-quest-so-you-died--a-5e-undead-players-handbook?utm_source=mastodon

Scratch board style half body of an undead sorcerer for a client's DnD campaign.

vgen.co/DoomweaselArt

#art #darkart #horrorart #horror #creepy #spooky #sorcerer #undead #TTRPG #DnD