Zombies
Episode 169: How Centuries of Trauma Transformed Into the Walking Dead of Today
Engraving style illustration featuring a zombie hand popping up out of the grave
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Zombies today are a pretty specific thing. A staggering, oddly robotic, sometimes freakishly fast moving undead person, usually with gruesome injuries, rotting flesh, and tattered clothing in constant pursuit of living humans to infect and consume. Zombies eat brains. Zombies pass on zombieism to the living, infecting them like a virus, turning them into zombies. This modern image of zombies has been cemented by popular culture, starting really with George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” movie from 1968 and continuing with more recent films and shows, 28 Days Later and, of course, The Walking Dead. But, did you know that the concept of a zombie is not new and the original zombies were very very different than the zombies of today? Did you know that the original zombies came from a place of very real fear, a world of oppression and slavery, that the pop culture zombies of today are merely a whitewashed appropriation of another culture’s trauma? And did you know that zombies might actually be real? Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and this is History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. It is Spooktober, my favorite time of year on History Fix. For the month of October I focus on spooky stories from history, spooky, supernatural, mysterious, historical true crime, all that good stuff. In past Spooktobers I have covered topics like witches, one of my all time favorites still, body snatchers, giant skeletons, demonic possession, historical hauntings, historical serial killers like Vlad the Impaler and Gilles de Rais… all kinds of good stuff. And I have some great topics planned for you this Spooktober too. This week we’re talking about zombies which have absolutely taken over pop culture in recent decades. People love zombies. But zombies are not a new concept. Zombies specifically date back to enslaved populations in Haiti, or Saint Domingue (San Do-mang) as it was called at the time. But the concept of a living dead or the reanimation of the dead is really ancient. It’s something humans have always thought about and feared.
Many ancient cultures believed in this concept of the reanimated dead. We have found 9,000 year old graves, prehistoric graves, in Cyprus where heavy rocks were placed on the chests and heads of bodies to prevent the corpses from reanimating and climbing out of the grave. They are mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh which is the oldest surviving major work of literature from ancient Mesopotamia around 4,000 years ago. It was written as basically a collection of folk tales and poems that have since been woven into one long continuous story. But in part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the goddess Ishtar threatens to raise the dead to eat the living if she doesn’t get her way. So this was a concept that they understood in Mesopotamia around 2,000 BC. We know that the ancient Greeks and Romans also worried about the living dead. We’ve found ancient Greek burials where the skeletons are pinned down by rocks and other heavy objects to keep the bodies from rising up out of the graves just like in Cyprus thousands of years before. The Greeks believed that people who suffered a violent death, were murdered, or just not buried properly might return. So, humans have always been preoccupied with death and with the terrifying notion that a dead body might reanimate and pose a threat to living humans.
But zombies, the word zombie and really the modern concept of a zombie comes from a very specific time and place and really it comes from the blending of several cultures in essentially a petri dish of oppression and abuse and fear and that petri dish is 17th century Haiti, or Saint Domingue (San Do-mang) as it was called at the time. So let’s go there to find out what’s happening to bring about such terrifying fears. Originally the island where you will find Haiti, which is called Hispaniola, Haiti and Domincan Rebulic share the island of Hispaniola. Originally it was occupied by Indigenous people, the Taino people. In the 1490s, Christopher Columbus arrived, sailing for Spain and set up shop on Hispaniola. This island became the center of Spanish colonization in the Americas. And he pretty much immediately began abusing and enslaving the Indigenous people. I have a whole two parter on that, episodes 80 and 81 definitely check them out or revisit them.
So Hispaniola was a Spanish colony for the first hundred or so years. Then, in the early 1600s, French pirates started settling on the Island of Tortuga which is just off the coast of northwest Hispaniola. Soon, they made their way to the northwest coast of Hispaniola. Now, at one point, Spain had the whole thing on lock, but in the early 1600s, they had focused their attention on the city of Santo Domingo on the east side of the island. They actually forced settlers to move closer to Santo Domingo, farther east so they could better control smuggling and that sort of thing. And so they sort of started to abandon and neglect the western part of Hispaniola. French pirates and settlers start moving in and basically squatting in the western part of Hispaniola for half a century. It wasn’t until 1697 that that western portion was officially recognized as belonging to France now and it was named Saint Domingue (San Do-mang) which is literally just the French version of Santo Domingo, which was the name of the main Spanish city on the eastern part of the island. Not very creative, France, but whatever.
So by the late 1600s, France had taken over the western part of Hispaniola, Spain is still controlling the east. Spain will eventually lose the east to France and then get it back again later. And so, this is why they speak French in Haiti and Spanish in the Dominican Republic today. Those two countries have sort of shared and argued over that island since the 1600s. Nevermind that it didn’t actually belong to either of them, whatever. So who’s living in Saint Domingue (San Do-mang), Haiti, in the 1600s. French settlers, Indigenous people, and also enslaved Africans, mostly brought over from West Africa. So we have a really interesting melting pot of cultures and languages and religions happening and what comes out of this is Vodou.
What is Vodou? Vodou is a religion that started in Saint Domingue (San Do-mang) or Haiti, I’m just going to call it Haiti from now on, from a blend of West African religions, Indigenous Taino religion, and Catholicism. It was started by enslaved Africans in Haiti. The word Vodou, which is spelled V-O-D-O-U, not V-O-O-D-O-O, that spelling is actually considered offensive. Pronounced the same but Vodou means spirit in the Fon language from the West African kingdom of Dahomey which is now called Benin. People from this area, who spoke this language, were forced into slavery in Haiti and they brought the word Vodou, meaning spirit with them. Once there, their West African beliefs blended with the beliefs of Indigenous cultures and were also influenced by Catholicism which they were forced to convert to at least on the surface and Vodou was born. According to Encyclopedia Britannica quote “Vodou is a worldview encompassing philosophy, medicine, justice, and religion. Its fundamental principle is that everything is spirit. Humans are spirits who inhabit the visible world. The unseen world is populated by lwa (spirits), mystè (mysteries), anvizib (the invisibles), zanj (angels), and the spirits of ancestors and the recently deceased. All these spirits are believed to live in a mythic land called Ginen (Jee-nun), a cosmic “Africa.” The God of the Christian Bible is understood to be the creator of both the universe and the spirits; the spirits were made by God to help him govern humanity and the natural world. The primary goal and activity of Vodou is to sevi lwa (“serve the spirits”)—to offer prayers and perform various devotional rites directed at God and particular spirits in return for health, protection, and favour. Spirit possession plays an important role in Afro-Haitian religion, as it does in many other world religions. During religious rites, believers sometimes enter a trancelike state in which the devotee may eat and drink, perform stylized dances, give supernaturally inspired advice to people, or perform medical cures or special physical feats; these acts exhibit the incarnate presence of the lwa within the entranced devotee. Vodou ritual activity (e.g., prayer, song, dance, and gesture) is aimed at refining and restoring balance and energy in relationships between people and between people and the spirits of the unseen world,” end quote. So it’s an extremely spiritual religion and it’s really about maintaining balance and harmony. In the centuries since, Vodou has been horribly demonized and propagandized into something evil in order to benefit American imperialism and justify the oppression of folks who practice Vodou who are mostly Black people but, in reality it is not and never was an evil or dark religion or way of thinking. Certain people might use it to do bad. People use Christianity to do bad all the time and always have. I would even argue that far more Christians have used their religion to do bad than people who practice Vodou. The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the witch burnings… thou shalt not kill is an often overlooked commandment.
One Vodou belief that came about during the time of slavery was zombies, a belief in zombies. This was a belief that, after you die, and especially if you take your own life, your body could be revived by a Vodou practitioner called a Bokor. Bokors were known to create concoctions, like potions really, that could do all sorts of different things using herbs, shells, fish, animal parts, bones, and stuff like that. I’m getting healer vibes, like apothecaries but with more of a mystical, spiritual touch. I’m almost getting witch vibes. These were the sorts of people witches started as, healers, wise women. I get that vibe a bit. And it’s interesting because we see something similar with bokors. They aren’t very trustworthy. They are eyed with suspicion and distrust. And that’s because they operated outside of the official Vodou temple, which was led by priest and priestesses. They were like free agents and so they would act for good but they could also act for evil. They are described as serving the spirits, the Iwa, quote “with both hands.” Meaning they were willing to work with both constructive and destructive spiritual forces. So you couldn’t really trust a bokor. They might help you out, they might also put a hex or a curse on you or turn you into a zombie. Bokors are able to make zombie powders which contain tetrodotoxin which comes mostly from puffer fish. According to History.com quote “Used carefully at sub-lethal doses, the tetrodotoxin combination may cause zombie-like symptoms such as difficulty walking, mental confusion and respiratory problems. High doses of tetrodotoxin can lead to paralysis and coma. This could cause someone to appear dead and be buried alive–then later revived,” end quote.
Enslaved Africans in Haiti are especially fearful of this, and here’s why. Slavery in Haiti is horrible. It’s a horrible way to live. They work nonstop on sugar plantations, extremely difficult, back breaking labor. They are tortured and abused constantly. Okay so if you think about slavery in the United States, there were places you could run to to get away from it. Early on you could escape into the wilderness, you could go live with Indigenous people. Later you could escape to the northern states or to Canada where slavery was illegal. There were places to go. It was very difficult to escape but at least it was possible. The hope was alive. There was an underground railroad. In Haiti, you’re on a small island surrounded by water. Where are you going to go? There is nowhere to escape to. In Haiti, the only escape from slavery was death. That was their only hope, that they would one day die and be free and go on to this Ginen (Jee-nun), cosmic eternal Africa paradise, unless they got turned into a zombie. Then, they would continue to be enslaved even after death. Because that was the whole point of making a zombie, it was a form of free labor. Zombies were created as slaves, it was a way to continue enslaving someone, even after death. University of California, Irvine, professor Amy Wilentz wrote in an essay for the New York Times quote “Suicide was the slave's only way to take control over his or her own body ... And yet, the fear of becoming a zombie might stop them from doing so ... This final rest — in green, leafy, heavenly Africa, with no sugarcane to cut and no master to appease or serve — is unavailable to the zombie. To become a zombie was the slave's worst nightmare: to be dead and still a slave, an eternal field hand,” end quote. And so really the idea of a zombie was born out of slavery. It was born out of this fear that there was really no escape from the torments of slavery. That even in death, their only hope of one day finally being free, they could still be enslaved. It was the ultimate fear of enslaved Africans in Haiti and it really speaks to the absolute depravity of the institution of slavery and the extreme trauma suffered by those who were enslaved.
But was it completely made up, a wild idea born out of fear and paranoia? Or was there any truth to it? Was the fear warranted? Could someone actually be turned into a zombie and forced to continue working, even after death? Sort of, it seems. There are a few documented cases of this actually being done in Haiti, sort of. The catch is, they’re not actually dead. They weren’t actually dead, they were just thought to be dead because of these neurotoxins from the puffer fish. They’ve been drugged to appear dead and then brought back later but kept in a semi drugged, zombie-like state, and forced to work. Take the case of Clairvius Narcisse from the 1960s in Haiti. This case was studied extensively by ethnobotanist Wade Davis for his 1985 book The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombies, and Magic. Davis reports that Clairvius Narcisse went to the local hospital, in Haiti, in 1962 with respiratory problems. He was also spitting up blood and feverish. He got so bad that he eventually slipped into a coma and died 3 days later. An American doctor even signed his death certificate. His body was put in cold storage for 20 hours and then buried. Then 18 years later, Clairvius showed up in the village marketplace and approached Angelina Narcisse claiming that she was his sister. He used a childhood nickname and told her things only their family would know. He was positively identified as Clairvius Narcisse by townspeople, his family, and even doctors. They were like “yep that’s Clairvius, that’s definitely him. But hold up we buried him 18 years ago.” Well Clairvius had an explanation for that, he said that he had been buried alive and then immediately dug up and put to work on a distant sugar plantation where he had been enslaved for the last 18 years. Clairvius told his sister Angelina that he remembered being declared dead while she wept by his bedside. He remembered being buried alive. He said he was fully conscious when he was lowered into his grave, he just couldn’t speak or move. He pointed to a scar on his right cheek, an old wound he said he got when a nail was driven through the casket.
Davis suggests in his book that Clairvius had been drugged probably with a combination of puffer fish and toad venom, which caused the initial problems, the respiratory problems, coughing up blood, that sort of thing, that sent him to the hospital and the coma and the death like state, although he wasn’t actually dead. So the theory is that, in this heavily drugged state, they mistook him for dead and buried him, then, whoever did this to him, Clairvius said it was a Vodou priest but it seems more like a bokor thing to do and those are totally different guys, this guy digs him back up, keeps him in a semi drugged state using tetrodotoxin and forces him to work on a sugar plantation for 18 years. Clairvius said there were others like him there too, other zombies working on this plantation. He said that only with the death of the zombie master were they able to escape, presumably because no one was giving them the toxin that was keeping them in that state anymore.
So this is a way to scientifically explain how a real life zombie might be possible. But Davis’ book was super controversial and highly contested. Other researchers claimed that his methods were unscientific and that they couldn’t find evidence of hallucinogens when they tested his samples. It was theoretical but not scientifically proven I think was their complaint. I think we need to get on this. Can we definitely test this puffer fish venom stuff or whatever to see if this is possible. Can we get the myth busters on this one? I feel like this is testable.
Clairvius isn’t the only one to report this happening to him. Several others have as well including two women in 1980 who both turned up in their villages claiming to have been zombiefied. That same year, in northern Haiti, local peasants claimed to have found a whole group of zombies wandering around in the fields. So, there’s something to this and, though contested, Davis’ research seems to suggest an answer as to how it’s possible.
So that’s a zombie. A zombie is a person who is made to look dead, then is abducted, kept in a semi drugged state and forced into slavery. That’s an actual zombie. How did we get from there to the zombie apocalypses of pop culture? Well the concept of zombies would have traveled from Haiti to the United States after the Haitian Revolution in the late 1700s, early 1800s. This was when enslaved Black people in Haiti successfully revolted and overthrew their French oppressors and took over, establishing the first independent, Black led Republic. Crazy. Mini fix? Maybe. That might need a whole episode, I don’t know. It was the largest and most successful slave rebellion in human history and it sent out all sorts of shockwaves, disrupting the global economy, and ultimately leading France’s Napoleon to sell French held lands to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. So if you live in the US west of the Mississippi River you can thank the enslaved people in Haiti for that. It also caused a diaspora of people fleeing the chaos and violence of the revolution. Many came to the United States, mostly to Louisiana, to New Orleans which is why there is such a Vodou presence there. And they would have brought with them this belief in zombies.
By 1838 we have the first documented mention of zombies in the US printed in a part true part fictional short story called “The Unknown Painter.” The story is about an African man named Sebastian Gomez who was enslaved by a Spanish painter named Bartolome Esteban Murillo in the 1600s. Both of these guys were real people but the actual story itself is made up, I think. I don’t know it’s very confusing. According to the story, Murillo would enter his art studio in the morning to find beautiful works of art that he had not painted. The enslaved man, Sebastian, claimed that a zombie appeared in the art studio at night and worked on the paintings. Now in reality, in the story, it was actually Sebastian himself who had taught himself how to paint and had incredible talent for it. In real life, Sebastian was eventually freed by Murillo and went on to become an art student of his. But we don’t have any confirmed surviving paintings that he painted. We don’t know how talented he was. The story itself about the self taught master painter Sebastian likely came from 19th century abolitionist writers championing Black intelligence to counter racist stereotypes about Black people at the time. But, all that aside, it’s the first mention of zombies we have in the United States. In an essay about zombies in pop culture, cultural historian Anne Kordas writes that by the mid 1800s, zombies had quote “come to be associated with a creature of African origin that willingly performed services for whites,” end quote. In 1872, linguistic scholar Maximilian Schele de Vere defined a zombie as quote "a phantom or a ghost, not infrequently heard in the Southern States in nurseries and among the servants," end quote. Creepy and weird.
So there is mention of zombies in the US by the 1800s but we white Americans at least seem to be quite confused about what a zombie actually is. In 1929 travel writer William Seabrook published a book about Haiti called “The Magic Island” and he talked about Vodou and zombies. This book might have inspired the 1932 horror film White Zombie, which features Bela Lugosi as a Vodou bokor who is asked zombiefy someone. You know Bela Lugosi best as Dracula but he also dabbled in zombie films. But in White Zombie, as the title suggests, the zombies are white people. So the plot is basically that this white couple goes to Haiti to get married at a plantation but the owner of the plantation is secretly in love with the bride. So he gets Bela Lugosi’s character to give him a zombie potion to use on her. I know, I know, how is that helpful, it’s not a love potion. So the plan is, he’s going to drug her, make it look like she’s dead. They bury her, he goes and gets her from the grave and she’s all his, right. This is how he’s going to steal her from her fiance. Of course it all goes horribly awry. But here, in the first ever zombie movie, we at least see close ties to what a zombie actually is, someone who has been drugged. The bokor, Bela Lugosi’s character runs a sugarmill where he commands a group of enslaved, drugged zombie workers. This is actually pretty close to the origins of zombies, minus it being all white actors.
In 1968 another zombie film comes out called Night of the Living Dead and this is a turning point for our understanding of zombies. These are the zombies of current pop culture, the zombies of The Walking Dead. This movie is about a group of people forced to spend the night in a farmhouse in Pennsylvania surrounded by hordes of flesh eating zombies and it really created the modern stereotype of zombies that we know today. It has nothing to do with Haiti. It has nothing to do with puffer fish venom or forced enslavement. These zombies are after flesh and when they bite you, they infect you and you become a zombie too. The state of being a zombie becomes more like a virus, something that can spread. This is the first time we see that. It’s also the first time we see zombies as free agents. The whole thing with zombies before this is that they were controlled by someone else, enslaved. Now zombies roam around freely, they can’t be controlled at all, in fact.
This was a landmark horror film in a lot of ways so it really left an impression on people. There was also a lot of veiled social commentary in this movie too. It came out 6 months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. , right in the middle of the Civil Rights movement and the director, George Romero was clearly influenced by that. The main character in the movie is a Black man, played by actor Duane Jones. This was a major statement by Romero, casting a Black man as the protagonist of the film in 1968. Duane’s character, Ben, leads a group of white people in defense against the zombies and he’s clearly the most capable and clear headed one. In fact, spoiler alert, skip forward 30 seconds if you don’t want me to ruin the ending, but Duane’s character is the only one to survive the night. And then, and this speaks volumes, the next morning, rescuers, the white Sheriff and his all white posse, approach the house looking for survivors. Duane pokes his head out the door and they immediately shoot him, thinking he’s a zombie when he’s really a survivor. That’s how the movie ends. And that was clearly a statement being made by Romero that, you know, the traditional power structures of America were just as deadly to a Black man as a zombie apocalypse, more so in fact. So that movie was very much a product of its time, of the Civil Rights Movement, and zombies are twisted into something quite different than how they started but they’re also used as a sort of social commentary and I find it interesting that that social commentary still centers around the oppression of Black people, which is how zombies started in Haiti, with slavery. It’s almost like an homage to the origins of zombies, adapted for the modern day. And Romero was very sensitive to the fact that he was borrowing from Haitian Vodou culture and that he was twisting what a zombie was. He actually called them ghouls, not zombies, to try to set them apart as a separate thing, but everyone saw them as zombies anyway.
Because Night of the Living Dead was such an important, landmark, horror film, it really sparked a whole new genre of zombie content. Now there are all sorts of zombie shows and movies and video games. People love zombie content but it’s all very much based on Romero’s viral flesh eating zombies in rural Pennsylvania and not so much the enslaved puffer fish venom zombies from Haiti, and that rubs some people the wrong way. Mike Mariani wrote an article for the Atlantic called “The Tragic Forgotten History of Zombies” in which he argues that the zombies of our pop culture today are a form of cultural appropriation. That we’ve taken zombies, stolen them really, from Haitian Vodou culture, a concept borne out of the trauma that they suffered, enslaved for centuries, and we’ve twisted them into entertainment for white people. And he’s kind of right. Very few people today, consumers of zombie content, Walking Dead fans or whatever, very few of them know the first thing about the origins of the zombie, that it came from enslaved people in Haiti whose greatest fear above all else is that they would never be free, not even after death. We’ve really trivialized something very serious with zombies, something very tragic, and I don’t think many people realize that. I’m not arguing that we put a stop to zombie content and no one’s allowed to talk about zombies anymore, no z words. I’m not saying we cancel zombies. But I do think it’s important to know the history, to be culturally aware, and culturally sensitive to the roots of the zombie which was born, not out of a need for gory entertainment and jump scares, but out of a genuine fear of eternal enslavement, a fear suffered by many who deserve our respect.
It’s finally Spooktober! All October long I’ll be telling spooky, mysterious true stories from history, starting with zombies. Zombies are a big deal. They are all over pop culture in movies and TV shows, even video games. People love a good zombie apocalypse story. But the pop culture zombies of today are quite different than how zombies started out. They’re almost a different beast entirely. So where did the idea of a zombie come from? How did they get so twisted? And could zombies possibly be real? Let’s fix all that.
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