In most cases these things are nothing more than slight of hand; a parlor trick. After ~80 hours, a body will become somewhat flexible again (rigor mortis will only remain where the blood has pooled) and you could probably make a corpse walk again with typical magician tricks (thin twine, pulleys and the like.) I'd be surprised if a corpse ever walked under low trees for this reason.
To stormlord: As far as a hand "frozen in a death grip", that's actually cataleptic rigidity. Human corpses moving is somewhat common, but it's usually caused by the gases the build up during the stages of decomposition. Electrical impulses from the nervous system is much more rare but it can happen.
In the case of this picture, I'm going to go ahead and make a guess that it's a live person with leprosy and chronic uremia.
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