Gjenganger  

"The Danish word for ghost is Gjenganger, or Gjenfserd, answering exactly to the French revenant. The belief in ghosts was deeply impressed on the minds of the heathen Northmen ; a belief closely connected with their ideas of the state after death. The soul, they believed, returned to the place whence it sprang, while the body and the grosser life bound to it passed to the abode of Hel or Death. Herewith was naturally combined the belief that the soul of the departed might, from its heavenly home, revisit the earth, there at night-time to unite itself in the grave-mound with the corporeal shadow released from Hel. Thus the dead could show themselves in the opened grave-mounds in the same form which they had in life. See Volsungakv. I. Str. 37, 38, in Edda Saem."--Northern mythology : comprising the principal popular traditions and superstitions of Scandinavia, North Germany, and The Netherlands, volume 2