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In the case of the shadows. I think they probably also have limits like liking certain areas, disliking sunrise (yes I know there's no mechanic), etc. Also undead don't behave like people.
Also, everyone keeps acting like shadows are brilliant tacticians. They're intelligence 6, Wisdom 12 (even the greater ones). They're malicious little s#!ts, not brilliant strategists.
On the question of the original topic though, this sort of thing has actually been brought up. There was a RTS game, Myth the Fallen Lords, which stated that the baddies usually would go around raising dead out of cemetaries, masoleums and the like to fill their ranks. When questions were raised of why they don't just burn the bodies, there was a mention of 'something more horrible that can be made from...' and that was the answer.
Fiends generally don't come back as the person, they are typically formed of a sod or various sod's rotting souls congealed together in the Abyss like mold congeals on a rotting rat behind a radiator. The rat doesn't really benefit, even when the occupants of the house start getting asthma.
Being undead sucks. Vampires might disagree but thats because their curse makes them rapacious little jerks. I always liked the idea that the vampire is continually hungry and angry, and tries to play it off as 'powerful' instead of ravenously miserable and angry all the time.
Liches and Mummies seem the happiest and most well adjusted undead ironically. Liches are basically mages who got tired of having to do things like eat, sleep and evacuate instead of their magical aspirations and the mummies generally just want to be left alone.
As for folk methods, a lot of them would probably work for the average undead creature. Staking vampires. Burying them upside down, and so on.
Even normal burial would stymie a vampire (or damn near any corporeal undead). The average vampire probably doesn't have the strength necessary to dig out from under 6 feet of earth (and lacks a burrow speed).
Lets use the average vampire (our pal from the bestiary) who has a strength of 16.
First problem. The coffin. Wood has a harness of 5, and 10hp per inch. The average coffin is probably at least 2-3 inches. Lets be nice and assume two inches, so thats hardness 5, 20 hp, trying to break free with one slam attack (coffins are tight and constraining, so lets also assume the squeezing rule since we're being nice. If we're being jerks, we could demand escape artist checks).
Our friendly vampire begins pounding on the coffin lid. +8 attack bonus, -4 for squeezing, -4 for prone meaning she needs to roll a natural 10 on a d20. Not impossible, but its going to take a lot of work. And her slam attack? 1d4+4 damage. Meaning on average, she's barely doing any damage to that coffin lid as she beats away at it, missing 50 percent of the time.
After a few moments of hard labor though, she's succeeded in breaking the lid, and in so doing has earned a megaton of dirt in her face. She's buried in it.
You need a DC 25 bare strength check to break out from a buried condition (lets assume buried undead is similar to being stuck in a cave-in). This means that she needs an 18 or higher just to be able to dig each round or else she ends up buried again, and she has to clear 16,000lbs of dirt (two five foot squares in length by two five feet square down since the customary depth is about six to seven feet; if you assume the grave is only five feet long then its 'only' 8,000lbs of dirt) with no tool.
Now you can clear your max carrying capacity per minute. So she can clear 230lbs of dirt, a minute. BUT, as cave-in rules represent a somewhat different situation (that dirt keeps pouring in here, not so with a cave in where its cleared into open space..there is no open space) so I'd adjudicate that she has to make the DC 25 strength check every single round to avoid getting buried again, while digging her ass out. So thats 10 rounds (1 minute) of needing to roll an 18 ten times, or else getting buried again and losing all progress for that minute.
Now a cave-in does let a strength 16 vampire clean out 230lbs per minute with her bare hands.
Still, she's undead with nothing better to do. And she keeps at it, now..she might poke her head up and discover the sun's up, or find out she's got a huge impressive strongly presented holy symbol sitting over her grave. You're still looking at hours, if she even succeeds, and if she doesn't get out, she has to do the whole damn thing over again the next night (well except for beating her way out of the coffin).
Now keep in mind, the vampire doesn't intrinsically know which way is 'up' in her crowded, dirt infested grave. So if she's say...buried upside down, the little bastard is going to try to be digging out through the center of the earth for eternity. Problem for villagers, averted. Just by turning the coffin upside down.
Now lets add on stuff like the fact that villagers would tie ropes around the things, fill the coffin full of weird bric-a-brac (even if you don't buy into OCD, that crap's gonna get in the way) an the like. You begin to see why vampires prefer masoleums. Its easy to push a stone slab, its not easy to dig out. Being buried alive sucks no matter who or what you are.
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In the real world, various populations don't get out of hand because they compete with each other for food and resources. If the wolf population gets too high, the rabbits get hunted to extinction, and then the wolves starve.
Vampires at least are smart enough to recognize that every spawn is potential competition and fewer villagers to go around. Thus they probably avoid siring more spawn unless they need the additional numbers (assuming a vampire can choose between creating a spawn and simply drinking a corpse dry).
Shadows and other less intelligent undead presumably have other forces at work. True, they can't starve to death, but they must have some sort of "resource" that they compete over. Perhaps there's a limited amount of negative energy on this plane, and thus a hard limit on the total amount of undead there can be at any one time? Perhaps evil clerics casting Inflict spells are actually increasing the frequency of undead rising?
Maybe there is some kind of invisible predator that eats shadows, keeping their populations down to acceptable levels.
Often enough that the peasants ought to be burning the bodies!
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Honestly, I actually like the idea of recalling, with knowledge (local), how two farmers and a cleric put down the last uprising of Vlad's undead horde five hundred years ago.
And while that puts it closer to the reach of the masses, it's still less sure fire than just assuming that any folklore works, the way some seem to in this thread. After all, five hundred years is plenty of time to forget whether it's "Klaatu verata nicto" or "Klaatu verata *cough,...
Well, it's Klaatu, Barada, Nikto!, so you've cocked it up, whichever way.
In a word Competition and Selfishness
When you create another shadow , you create somemone who is going to steal YOUR kills .
As I shadow I want to slowly drain the life of MY victims , not see someone else do it .
Maybe we are missing something in the ecology of shadows.
Maybe when they feed a certain number of times they decide they are full and go off somewhere to rest.
Maybe when they feed enough and reach a certain number of shadows they do something magicky and transform into something else/ go to the plane of shadows/ explode themselves creating a desecrate or unhallow effect/etc
Maybe they have a limited lifespan outside of places that are full of negative energy.
