Valpurgeist

When an innocent person dies on the gallows, darkness sometimes answers their unheard pleas with a valpurgeist, or hanged man. It is plainly human but could never pass for living: the snapped neck lets its head loll and bob as it walks, its skin is corpse-gray, and the stench of rot hangs around it. It does not speak and will not listen. Only magic such as speak with dead gets through, revealing a mind consumed by revenge.

It pummels with two fists, each dealing 1d6 thanks to unnatural strength. If both land in one round, its hands are locked on the target's throat. From the next round it deals 1d8 automatically each round, and the victim must save vs. paralysis or pass out from lack of air. A victim still held one round after passing out dies, windpipe crushed and neck snapped.

Rescue takes either a successful bend bars roll to pry the hands loose (the victim may also try) or a distraction, which rarely works: each point of damage it takes gives only a 1% chance it lets go, and then always attacks the distracter. Cutting off its arms is useless, since the severed hands keep squeezing.

It is turned as a ghast, and each vial of holy water sears it for 1d4. It shrugs off sleep, charm, hold and their like, but magic meant for undead works normally.

Betrayed by a world deaf to its pleas, the hanged man feels no kinship with anything living. It is exactly as smart as it was in life, and it plans patiently and shrewdly to destroy its enemies. Killing everyone tied to its trial and execution only makes it widen its circle of hatred.

Destruction is a delay. Even a body dissolved in acid reassembles and resumes the hunt, after 2d4 days if the body was intact or twice that if it was destroyed. The only lasting cure is to find evidence proving its innocence of the crime it hanged for, which drains the anger from its spirit and lets it rest.

Like other undead, it has no role in nature and is purely a product of evil and darkness.