30. His contemporary William of Newburgh had similar tales to tell
A few years before Map, the English historian William of Newburgh recorded his own vampiric tales in Historia regum Anglicarum. Around 1196, a man from Buckinghamshire died, and several nights in a row returned and tried to smother his sleeping widow. When she took measures to scare the ghoul away, he simply repeated the trick on his brothers. After scaring men and livestock every night, the corpse soon started to appear in daylight, too. Eventually, the local archdeacon opened the man’s tomb, and gave him absolution for his sins over his perfectly-preserved body. The vampiric man never walked again.
