Supernatural the book of monsters, demons, spirits and ghouls

Ghouls, revenants, et cetera, part 1

The dead like to hang around graveyards, but hey, everybody's gotta get out sometimes, which means sometimes you get various revenants and ghouls and vampires screwing things up for us in the world of the living. The difference between a spirit and a revenant is that a revenant walks around in the same body it inhabited while it was alive. A spirit, if it's a real badass, might be able to ectoplasmically reconstitute its body, but only a revenant can motivate the genuine article. This is a distinction that's probably only important to us.
Folklore abounds with tales of the walking dead, and so do the accounts of historians, back when you could talk about stuff like this without having everyone in sight call for the guys in the white coats. We've seen just about every revenant story ever written down, and here's a little primer in the history of the dead who just won't stay dead. It begins with William of Newburgh, writing in England in the twelfth century:
It would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead should sally (I know not by what agency) from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living, and again return to the tomb, which of its own accord spontaneously opened to receive them, did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony. It would be strange if such things should have happened formerly, since we can find no evidence of them in the works of ancient authors, whose vast labor it was to commit to writing every occurrence worthy of memory; for if they never neglected to register even events of moderate interest, how could they have suppressed a fact at once so amazing and horrible, supposing it to have happened in their day? Moreover, were I to write down all the instances of this kind which I have ascertained to have befallen in our times, the undertaking would be beyond measure laborious and troublesome.

William does write down a few, though. Dad transcribed some of them into his journal, and this one is interesting for the bit about the axe.
As soon as this man was left alone in this place, the devil, imagining that he had found the right moment for breaking his courage, incontinently roused up his own chosen vessel, who appeared to have respond longer than usual. Having beheld this from afar, he grew stiff with terror by reason of his being alone; but soon recovering his courage, and no place of refuge being at hand, he valiantly withstood the onset of the fiend, who came rushing upon him with a terrible noise, and he struck the axe which he wielded in his hand deep into his body. On receiving this wound, the monster groaned aloud, and turning his back, fled with a rapidity not at all inferior to that with which he had advanced, while the admirable man urged his flying foe from behind, and compelled him to seek his own tomb again; which opening of its own accord, and receiving its guest from the advance of the pursuer, immediately appeared to close again with the same facility. In the meantime, they who, impatient of the coldness of the night, had retreated to the fire ran up, though somewhat too late, and, having heard what had happened, rendered needful assistance in digging up and removing from the midst of the tomb the accursed corpse at the earliest dawn. When they had divested it of the clay cast forth with it, they found the huge wound it had received, and a great quantity of gore which had flowed from it in the sepulchre; and so having carried it away beyond the walls of the monastery and burnt it, they scattered the ashes to the winds.