The Byland Abbey ghost stories
- Date of account
- late fourteenth century CE
- Location
- Byland Abbey, Yorkshire
- Source
- model_recalled_reference
- Record updated
- 2026-10-10
Record summary
A collection of ghost stories copied by a monk at Byland Abbey records encounters with revenants, corpse disturbances, apparitions, and other marvels. The manuscript is a particularly identifiable source for studying medieval haunting narratives because it preserves multiple short accounts in a monastic setting rather than a single famous legend. It can support comparison of burial anxiety, confession, clerical authority, and local geography. The stories’ dates of composition, oral origins, and relationship to exemplum literature are uncertain, and the manuscript’s rhetoric should not be confused with forensic documentation.
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