In the summer of 1592, high in the Moravian hills, the little town of Bennisch was gripped by fear. Back in February, the story goes, the mayor, Johann Kunze, had died after being kicked in the testicles by a horse. No sooner had he been buried, however, than the inhabitants began to experience strange and terrible things. Animals went mad, walls shook and gates flew open on their own. A little later, people reported being strangled in their sleep; Kunze’s widow was raped in her bed; the local church was defiled with blood. After five months, the townspeople could stand it no longer. Over the protests of the Lutheran pastor, they had Kunze’s corpse exhumed. To their horror they found that the body was not only incorrupt, but even responsive – clear proof that Kunze was one of the undead. There was only one thing to do. They hacked his body apart, threw the pieces onto a bonfire and tossed his still-smouldering ashes into the river. 

All this should be taken with a pinch of salt, of course. The only source we have – written years later by a rather eccentric philosopher – is less a piece of serious reportage than a work of schlock horror, riddled with motifs from local ghost stories. But the attack on Kunze’s corpse was no fantasy. Nor was it an isolated incident. A wave of corpse killing was then sweeping Moravia. Over the next 150 years there were hundreds of similar reports across the region, each more violent and gory than the last. Things got so bad, in fact, that in one year alone (1727–8), almost eighty bodies – including those of sixty children – were ‘executed’ in a single village.  

As the historian John Blair points out, corpse killing has been a feature of human society for millennia, and with good reason. We’re all frightened of dead bodies. We can’t help it. Until decay sets in, a dead person looks pretty much like they did in life. It is all