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Comment by lithos | Hacker News Reader

Probably not zombies, just miss identification of a deep coma. Especially during plague times, people knew to not linger near the dead and quickly get rid of them (a logical reason for the miss ID, rather than the normal stupidity people seem to think the ancestors had).

Someone only needs to wake up once to start the story.

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Reminds me of a Gaelic word I found in a dictionary - somehow this is the second time I've got the chance to roll this out on HN:

Teurmnasg (lit. thumb binding). a bandage on the toes and thumbs of a dead person, to prevent his ghost from hurting foes.

I couldn't find anything to indicate the origin of this practice but it seems like what you've said here would pretty much make sense. Cool!

During the Victorian (and maybe earlier) era the British Army and Navy would sow the dead into a shroud with the past stitch being tied through the nose on the basis that if a man weren't really dead they'd probably wake up when you rammed a large needle through them.

There are records of similar practices (binding toes or piercing the soles of the feet to stop the dead from escaping) in Scandinavia, so it may have been something that came over with the Norse influence in Scotland.

See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draugr#Means_of_prevention

>so it may have been something that came over with the Norse influence in Scotland.

Not only via Scotland. Vikings regularly raided and colonized Ireland directly, too.

I know -- I just apparently parsed Gaelic as Scottish and forgot that the spelling is same for Irish Gaelic...

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