Often when a particularly evil criminal is executed, suspicious folk fear that the criminal's remains might rise from death to continue to plague the living. To combat this possibility, many mobs or rural justices take to the practice of burning the bodies, grinding the bones, and scattering the remains in the wild. Yet in the case of particularly evil criminals, even these steps are in vain, for their will is enough to reassemble a body from earth, stone, roots, and plants drawn from the region into which the remains were scattered. Such an undead horror rises as a guecubu, a harbinger of misfortune and vengeance from beyond the grave.