Zombies

In Haitian voudou superstition, a zombie is a dead body revived by magic to act as a soulless robot. In recent years stories of zombies have spread throughout Western countries in Hollywood horror films about the walking dead. According to the folk tradition, the houngans, or voudou priests, are said to dig up corpses and reanimate them by magic rituals. Another way of creating a zombie is to feed the victim a preparation that stupefies the soul, leaving the body a living corpse.

To cure a zombie, it is said one should give it saltwater to drink. Special burial techniques are sometimes used to prevent corpses from being used as zombies. The corpse may be buried face down and its mouth filled with earth; sometimes the lips are sewn together, presumably to prevent the soul from leaving by the mouth. A somewhat naive custom is to strew handfuls of sesame seed on the grave (a common practice in eastern Europe to entertain vampires), so that the spirit of the deceased will always be occupied in counting the seeds.

Firsthand accounts of zombies have continued into the late twentieth century. Author Alfred Métraux stated that six months after the death of a friend he saw that friend as a zombie at the house of a houngan. Harvard ethnobiologist Wade Davis, who visited Haiti in 1982, succeeded in penetrating the secret societies and understanding and documenting the voudoo culture. He has suggested that certain powerful drugs might be capable of influencing centers in the brain concerned with conscious control. A person given such drugs would appear dead, would be buried alive, and revived several days later. They would then be given hallucinogens and forced into a new life as an unpaid laborer.

Davis' theories were recently validated by an expedition to Haiti that was the subject of a remarkable BBC television program presented by John Tusa in 1984. In interviews with houngans, the secret of creating zombies was disclosed. A poisonous substance from the puffer fish (Diodon hystrix) is carefully prepared by the houngan and administered to the victim, who thereafter appears dead and is buried. He is exhumed by the houngan and used as a zombie. The poison stupefies certain brain centers.

The poison was analyzed by Leon Roizy, professor of neuro-biology at Columbia University, and identified as tetrodotoxin, found in the puffer fish, the exquisitely dangerous gourmet dish of Japanese Fugu, requiring skillful preparation by experienced chefs in order to avoid poisoning the diner.

When eaten sliced raw (sashimi), the flesh is relatively safe, but among eaters of the partly cooked dish known as chiri, which includes toxic cooked livers, there are over a hundred deaths annually.