When Skeletons Danced in the Graveyard
In European folklore, the dead were alive … sort of.
In the Late Medieval Age of Europe, folklore belief was that the dead
sometimes got out of their graves to dance the night away.
A few accounts of these macabre dances have been passed down to us today, like the following ones.
“One time, the tower ward in Mals [a village in South Tyrol] looked down at the graveyard around midnight. He saw that the dead had crawled out of their tombs and were doing all kinds of dances …”
A tower ward (German: Türmer) was a person that watched over the village from a vantage point. As church towers could be that vantage point, they were especially close to anything happening in the churchyard. In those times in Europe, graves were located in the churchyard, an enclosure surrounding the church.
Here is another account from the region of Posen (around today’s Poznan in Poland):
“… there was a dirty and muddy path going past the church in Neustadt and nobody would take it at night if they didn’t have to. The reason is that the lights of the church were often seen lit around midnight and many that went past it around that time saw that the dead had come out of their graves and were dancing round the church.”
