The name "Wiedergänger" refers to different zombie or ghost phenomena from different cultural areas. The word means "one who walks again" in German, the etymology relates to Germanic wieder "with, more apart, against, contrary to, re-" (* ̯ui-t[e]ro-, meaning more apart, farther away. diverged, gone apart. nowadays weiter does not only denote a greater distance but also the continuation of an action. ) and gänger, "foot, walker", and the core of the wiedergänger myth is the concept of the deceased, who—often in the form of a physical phenomenon—return (as "undead") to the world of the living (cf. French revenant, "one who is returning"). They usually cause problems and frighten living people. They exist either to avenge some injustice they experienced while alive, or because their soul is not ready to be released, as a consequence of their former way of life.
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German beliefs
In different parts of Germany, until the early 20th century, the belief was common that dead ones lived on, after their death, and exerted a disastrous influence from the grave. This influence was believed to be partly done via a telepathic effect (sympathy charm), so that the nachzehrer, as the villain was called, did not need to rise from the grave and still could suck the vitality from living persons with his open mouth, his open eye and by gnawing on the burial shroud. Other undead, in the belief of the people, rose from the graves and jumped on the back of night ramblers. This Aufhocker could assume different shapes, for example in the Rhineland, the form of the werewolf. The humans had to carry him, frequently as far as to the wall of the churchyard or to the place where the body was buried. The aufhocker (also called "huckop" or "huckupp") became ever more heavy, and the victim would finally break down exhausted or dead. In some legends, the troubled humans succeeded in banishing or redeeming the villain by a spell or a prayer. Especially in the areas marked by Catholicism the belief of the up-squatting wiedergänger merged with the belief of the soul, so that folklorists around 1920 had considerable difficulties to separate a belief in ghosts from the old nuclear belief of the undead wiedergänger. The Aufhocker after all could, according to the tradition, not be a ghost, because he had a tangible body, which also increased in weight from step to step, which would not have been possible for an immaterial spirit. Another form of the physical wiedergänger is the headless rider that, frequently mentioned in West German legends, entered into world literature and even into the history of film through the American poet Washington Irving and his novel The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Nordic mythology
In the sagas, wiedergänger in the form of draugar are a frequent motif. This occurs, for example, in the Hrómundar saga Gripssonar or in the Laxdœla saga. Whoever met a wiedergänger is often threatened by imminent death. Remarkable here is the stress on the physicality of the wiedergänger, which on the one hand shows in its superhuman power, but on the other hand, in its vulnerability: draugar can be killed by cutting the head off of them.
Slavic folk beliefs
In the beliefs of the Slavic people, the wiedergänger is undead, a deceased person, who gets out of his coffin and goes again among living people. His appearance is almost always connected with mischief and death, and therefore it causes fear and fright. Often the wiedergänger has to settle some affair from his lifetime or wants revenge on his murderer or something similar. Also, if the dead one is mourned too much, this keeps him from the final transition to the other world. In old graves that have been recently excavated, there are corpses that were bound, had their sinews split, had their limbs destroyed or cut off and put crosswise on their chests, and were impaled through their hearts. Crosses or lumps of earth overgrown with grass were put into the mouth or on the forehead. All these funeral rites were intended to prevent a return of the dead person. Belief in the wiedergänger mixed with belief in the vampire, but the food source of the wiedergänger was not frequently discussed. One tale delivered by William of Newburgh from the 13th century, of a wiedergänger from North England (The Revenant of Annant Castle), describes a case which in many details is reminiscent of the more recent vampire tales of southeastern Europe. In the opinion of the French expert on legend and myth Claude Lecouteux, this clearly belongs to the range of the belief in vampires. It is to be assumed therefore that concepts, which were believed, previously, to be limited only to the area inhabited by Slavs, actually were common across much larger parts of Europe.
A belief in wiedergänger is commonly explained by the alleged fact that some time after death, corpses' hair and nails would continue to grow. Today this is disproved: it is because of dehydration of the skin that nails and hair of unchanged length appear to be freshly grown, because the skin contracts over time) and because of the fact that corpses become swollen after some time by bacterial rot. This could have contributed to the belief in vampires, since the swollen corpses looked "healthier" than the emaciated fresh corpse of someone who had died of disease. Thus humans believed that corpses would suck the vitality from living persons.