Stories of wandering spirits and the restless dead were common in the Middle Ages. These ghostly encounters were recorded in a wide variety of medieval literature.

Medieval ghost stories combined folklore traditions with religious doctrine. The widespread belief in purgatory – a place where souls were cleansed of sin before entering heaven – helped fuel the belief in ghosts.

Spirits of the departed were thought able to return, exhorting the living to pray for them and make amends on their behalf to aid their passage through purgatory. As a result, medieval ghost stories often contained a strong moral and religious message.

Historians have long been fascinated by a series of 12 ghost stories written down in the early years of the 15th century at Byland Abbey, a Cistercian monastery in north Yorkshire. They recorded a bizarre and eclectic array of ghosts, featuring shape-shifting spirits, miracle stories and the walking dead, who crept up on the living.

These tales were clearly intended to scare people. They referred to the “terrors of the night” and to spirits rising from their graves to “disturb and terrify villagers”. One........

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