At the end of the fourteenth century, a monk at the Cistercian abbey of Byland in Yorkshire wrote down a series of stories concerning ghosts and spirits which he had been told by local people, and set them in the villages and dales of the countryside around his monastery. The stories were written on a few blank pages in a collection of manuscripts dating from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and the anonymous monk must have intended them to be used as exempla in the tradition of Caesarius of Heisterbach. A number of modern scholars, including the antiquary M.R. James, who transcribed the Latin text of these stories in the early 1920s and who was himself a well-known teller of ghost stories, have detected overtones of Scandinavian folklore about revenants in some of the stories. For instance, in the story which I have called ‘The Frightened Oxen’, the wagon-team drawing the corpse of James Tankerlay almost drowns in panic, like the oxen which hauled Thorolf Halt-Foot's remains in Eyrbyggja Saga. There are also resemblances, in the story which I have called ‘The Child of Richard Rowntree’ to Guibert of Nogent's account of the ghostly crying child which appeared to his mother, and to the procession of the dead which Orderic Vitalis called Hellequin's Hunt. Above all, it is worth noting that the monk of Byland seems to have been more concerned to record the eerie, grotesque, and fantastic details of ghostly occurrences than to draw moral conclusions from his stories. In that sense, these fragments of popular legend, written down by the person to whom they were recounted in the neigh-bourhood where the various spirits supposedly appeared, bear a basic resemblance to the modern notion of a ghost story as an entertaining narrative which can be both frightening and enjoyable. Indeed, M.R. James himself used a motif common to a number of these tales – whereby the unquiet spirit takes on a number of guises, writhing into different physical manifestations as though trying to thrust its way through the barrier between the worlds of the dead and the living – in some of his best-known ‘Ghost Stories of an Antiquary’.