The Barrow-Wights were of a substance of darkness that could enter the eye, heart and mind and crush the will. They were shape-shifters and this power gave them the ability to reanimate whatever life-form they wished. The ones which attacked the Company of the Ring reanimated the corpses of the Kings of the Barrows. Most often the Barrow-wight came on the unwary traveller in the guise of a dark phantom whose eyes were luminous and cold. The voice of the figure was at once horrible and hypnotic; its skeletal hand had a touch like ice and a grip like the iron jaws of a trap. Once under the spell of the Undead, the victim had no will of his own. In this way the Barrow-wights drew the living into the treasure tombs of the downs. A dismal choir of tortured souls could be heard inside the Barrow as, in the green half-light, the Barrow-wight laid his victim on a stone altar and bound him in chains of gold. He draped him in pale cloth and precious jewellery of the ancient dead, and with a sacrificial sword ended them. "Cold be hand and heart and bone and cold be sleep under stone never more to wake on stony bed never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead In the black wind the stars shall die and still be gold here let them lie till the Dark Lord lifts his hand over dead sea and withered land." —The dismal, tortured chant of a Barrow-wight.