revenant

In folklore, a revenant is an animated corpse that is believed to have been revived from death to haunt the living. The word revenant is derived from the Old French word, revenant, the "returning" (see also the related French verb revenir, meaning "to come back"). Revenants are part of the legend of various cultures, including Old Irish Celtic and Norse mythology, and stories of supposed revenant visitations were documented by English historians in the Middle Ages. Comparison to other folkloristic and mythological undead The term "revenant" has been used interchangeably with "ghost" by folklorists. While some maintain that vampires derive from Eastern European folklore and revenants derive from Western European folklore, many assert that revenant is a generic term for the undead. Augustin Calmet conducted extensive research on the topic in his work titled Traité sur les apparitions des esprits et sur les vampires ou les revenans de Hongrie, de Moravie, &c. (1751) in which he relates the rumors of men at the time: Calmet compares the ideas of the Greek and Egyptian ancients and notes an old belief that magic could not only cause death but also evoke the souls of the deceased as well. Calmet ascribed revenants to sorcerers who sucked the blood of victims and compares instances of revenants mentioned in the twelfth century in England and Denmark as similar to those of Hungary, but "in no history do we read anything so usual or so pronounced, as what is related to us of the vampires of Poland, Hungary, and Moravia."