Zombies: Can They Be Real?

Charles King has provided an interesting tale of the development of anthropology as a scientific field in his book Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century.  His story focuses on the career of Franz Boas as he formulated his personal beliefs and propagated them through his and his students’ activities.  King focuses on four of the most famous and most interesting: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella Cara Deloria.  It was unusual at that time to encounter one woman performing cutting edge research, let alone accumulating four.  And Hurston was an African-American woman, while Deloria was of Native-American descent.  

Zora Hurston never became a full-time student, but she did participate in research suggested by Boas and also pursued her own initiatives.  Given her heritage, she was mostly involved in work among the blacks of the American South, and Caribbean peoples.  Her most interesting accomplishment was to be the first person to photograph what she believed to be a real, live, undead zombie.  Her efforts would produce the book “Mules and Men,” but she would ultimately become best known as a writer with her most famous work being the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” 

Hurston would reach Haiti in the 1930s already familiar with the traditions of voodoo from a book by William Seabrook, The Magic Island (1928).  Seabrook had described the prevalent belief that zombies existed: “a soulless human corpse, still dead but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life.”  Hurston would discover that belief in  zombies was a significant part of Haitian life.

“Everyone Hurston knew had met one, or new someone who had met one.  But all that was talk.  Nothing could quite prepare her for coming face-to-face with such a creature herself.”

Hurston would encounter a woman being kept in a hospital who was known as Felicia Felix-Mentor.  She had been found a year earlier walking on a country road naked.  She told someone she had once owned a property there that she inherited from her father.  The owner of the property showed up and identified the woman as his sister.  Her former husband would also recognize her as being his former wife.  The medical records indicated that she had died and was buried in 1907, twenty-nine years ago. 

“Doctors told Hurston that Felix-Mentor was likely the victim of poisoning.  A practitioner of dark magic, a bocor, might have given her a drug that simulated death, concocted from a secret formula passed down from priest to priest.  The bocor could then summon her back to life, brain-damaged and only a shell of the person she had been before…” 

This case could be representative of a common theme about zombie creation.  A person is rendered a zombie in order to eliminate someone troublesome or convert that person into a docile servant. 

“In her absence, everyone, including Felix-Mentor herself, had become someone else.  The brother was a prosperous farmer, with control over the old family property that might otherwise have been shared with her.  The husband was a minor official in the postoccupation government, with a new family of his own.  There was little to be done except to seal her up again, this time behind the walls of the hospital where Hurston found her.”

Hurston spent some time searching for this secret potion, now believing it to exist, but eventually decided that that could prove to be rather risky.

So, did Hurston encounter an actual zombie, someone returned from the grave or not?  Wikipedia is usually a good source to turn to.  The author of the zombie article found there dismisses zombies as being a myth.

“…a fictional undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse.”

As to Felix-Mentor, she is claimed to be bogus because she was reputed to have had a broken leg at some point and x-rays could not detect such a break having occurred.  Someone more expert would have to rule on whether or not that is a definitive finding.  But others would look and discover other instances of the undead. 

The journalist, David Leafe, tells the tale of Clairvius Narcisse. 

“Doctors in Haiti had been baffled anew by the case of Clairvius Narcisse, a man in his 40s who in 1962 suffered a mysterious fever and within a fortnight was pronounced dead by two doctors, and buried.” 

“Eighteen years later, his sister was traumatised when a heavy-footed and vacant-eyed man approached her at the market, claimed to be her brother and told her he had been zombified by a witch doctor and put to work on a sugar plantation in the intervening years.”

“At the time of his ‘death’ he had been conscious but rendered immobile, he said, listening to his sister weeping as he was pronounced dead, powerless to protest as his coffin was lowered into the ground.”

“When two Haitian psychiatrists quizzed him on aspects of the family’s past that only a relative would know, he correctly answered all their questions — and many villagers insisted he was the Clairvius Narcisse they had known.”

The Narcisse case generated scientific investigations.  As is normal in much of science, those who wanted to believe could find explanations, those who wanted to not believe could find objections to any explanation.  It seems there is at least one chemical that can produce the near-death state that can lead to burial, and candidates are available to explain the automaton-like behavior after being disinterred.

“…puffer fish whose reproductive organs contain a nerve poison called tetrodotoxin, which lowers a victim’s metabolic rate almost, but not quite, to the point of death.”

“In Japan, where such fish are a delicacy, there had been several famous cases of poisoning, including that of one man who apparently ‘died’ after eating puffer fish, but regained consciousness seven days later in a morgue.”

“Another victim had an even narrower escape, coming round soon after he was nailed into a coffin.” 

Dismissing a phenomenon just because you cannot understand it comes disturbingly close to barbarism, so let the studies and debates go on.  Some useful scientific enlightenment might be revealed.  Perhaps more sophisticated movie and television fare will emerge.  New types of lifeforms, witches, werewolves, vampires, zombies, allow endless variations on human themes, many of them quite entertaining.  

Zora Hurston was an educated and intelligent woman.  What she observed led her to believe in the existence of zombies and that the Haitian culture, a mixture of indigenous influences and African influences, was capable of developing the means of producing zombie-like behavior in humans.  A people “primitive” by our standards should not be assumed to be stupid.  What Boas and his students sought to teach humanity was that all humans are essentially the same even if they did not look alike and they did not follow the same customs.  They fought long and hard against the notion that the more technologically advanced nations were biologically superior to other peoples just because they could physically dominate them. 

If Boas and his team were successful, it would be temporary.  We seem to need to be taught the same lessons over and over.  Those in power are so much happier when they can ignore what science tells us.

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.