A Spirit That Rides a Corpse

The vetala of Hindu folklore is not simply a reanimated body in its own right but a spirit that possesses and animates a corpse, most often one hanging in a tree or lying unclaimed in a cremation ground, in order to move and speak through it. This distinguishes the type from the jiangshi or draugr, whose animating force is bound to the body itself, and aligns the vetala more closely with a possessing intelligence that treats a dead body as a temporary vehicle.

Vetalas are described as having knowledge that spans past, present and future, and as being difficult but not impossible to bind to a sorcerer's service, since Tantric ritual literature includes procedures, vetala-siddhi, for controlling one and compelling it to answer questions or perform tasks in exchange for eventual release. The type sits at the boundary between menace and utility that runs through much of South Asian ghost lore: dangerous if encountered by accident in a cremation ground at night, but a source of genuine, even prophetic, knowledge if a practitioner has the ritual skill to approach it correctly.