After the shepherd’s death
Under the year 1336, Abbot Neplach’s chronicle includes a short Bohemian narrative. Near Kadan, in a settlement called Blow, a shepherd named Myslata dies. After burial he supposedly rises at night and visits surrounding settlements. His power depends particularly on his voice: anyone he calls by name dies within eight days. This figure has no need to drink blood secretly. Danger arrives as an address from a familiar dead person who still knows his neighbours’ names. Night and former neighbourliness become extensions of relationships that an ordinary burial has failed to end.
A staff presented to an enemy
The inhabitants respond by acting against the body: they pierce the shepherd with a stake. The narrative refuses to stop there. The dead man remarks mockingly that they have supplied a staff to defend him against dogs. An object intended to restrain him becomes his own possession and the subject of his speech. The reversal is striking: the living can open the grave, but the dead man retains the ability to interpret their action for himself. A later version transmitted by Dudley Wright through a work on posthumous magic adds further nocturnal victims after the failed staking. Those additions belong to a subsequent retelling.
A body on a cart
The next attempt aims to destroy the remains. In the chronicle the body swells, bellows and draws up its legs as though alive when removed. Blood flows when it is put into the fire and pierced. Wright expands the scene into the work of an executioner and assistants: the corpse must be carried beyond the village while disturbing sounds and movements accompany the operation. An ordinary transport of remains becomes an enemy’s final resistance. Neither the medieval phrases nor the later literary detail supplies measurements, a modern medical examination or an independent account of the body’s condition.
Fire ends the nightly rounds
Both narrative lines conclude with burning. Afterwards the evil ceases, supplying the story’s own test: one remedy failed and the final remedy succeeded. The ending links destruction of the body with restored security. It also enables later authors to place the shepherd beside vampires, although the earlier text describes a dangerous returning dead man. Blood appears during treatment of the remains, rather than as an established result of feeding on living people. Preserving the distinction keeps the tale’s particular features visible beneath a familiar general label.
What the chronicle’s date means
A modern study by Tomas Maly and Monika Enenklova likewise places the entry in 1336 and connects it with later beliefs in harmful posthumous activity. The electronic transcription allows its Latin heading to be checked. This is the year under which the chronicler placed the story, rather than a demonstrated date for opening a particular grave. Neplach is not treated here as our direct eyewitness. Repetition in subsequent books establishes a long textual life without multiplying independent witnesses. The record consequently documents a chronicle tradition while leaving the shepherd’s bodily return unestablished.
