At the far end of a night spent among the returning dead, a last visitor comes: "a man entered who was taller than all others, and looked terrible". He is old, with a white beard, and he speaks the words the whole tale has withheld — "Thou wretch", he cries, "thou shalt soon learn what it is to shudder, for thou shalt die". Here the revenant takes the shape not of a monster but of an ancient man, and he comes as death's herald. Our witness is the fourth of the Grimm's Household Tales (collected 1812–1857; this translation 1884), the story of the youth who could feel no fear, watching three nights in a haunted castle.

The boy meets the old man's threat with the same flat courage that carried him past the black cats and the half-corpse dropping down the chimney: "Not so fast", he answers, and offers to test their strength. He splits an anvil, catches the old man's long beard in the cleft, and beats him with an iron bar until the revenant begs for mercy and buys his freedom with gold — three chests, one part "for the poor, the other is for the king, the third is thine". At the stroke of twelve the spirit vanishes and the youth is left in darkness, having disenchanted the castle without once shuddering.

The motif is precise: the ghost that appears as an old man. In this witness he is the castle's presiding spirit, the terrible bearded elder whose defeat frees the treasure and wins the King's daughter. Only this German witness carries served text; the Swiss authority Thompson filed beside it (Jegerlehner's Oberwallis, its "Geister") waits unread. Why should the dead so often choose the mask of age — a white beard, a body "taller than all others" — when they come back to threaten the living?