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Haiti News Media > Haiti News > Zombie - Haitian Voodoo Zombie, Haitian Voodoo 1937. Felicia Felix-Mentor, of Haiti, who died and was buried in 1907, found wandering the countryside in 1937. Is this the only known photograph of a zombie?
(Zora Hurston, from her book Voodoo Gods).
A zombie is a kind of undead, or figuratively, a very apathetic person. is a kind of undead, or figuratively, a very apathetic person.
According to the tenets of Voodoo, a dead person can be revived by a houngan or mambo. After resurrection, it has no will of its own, but remains under the control of the person who performed the ritual. Such resurrected dead are "zombies".
In 1937, while researching folklore in Haiti, Zora Neale Hurston encountered the case of Felicia Felix-Mentor, who had died and been buried in 1907 at the age of 29. Villagers believed they saw her wandering the streets in a daze thirty years later, but this was subsequently found to be false.
Hurston pursued rumors that persons were given powerful drugs, but was unable to locate anyone willing to offer much information. She wrote "What is more, if science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than gestures of ceremony."
Several decades later, Wade Davis, a Canadian ethnobotanist, was the main person to present a pharmacological case for zombies in two books - The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) and Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (1988). Davis travelled to Haiti in 1982 and as a result of his investigations claimed that zombies could be made by the ingestion of two special powders. The first, coupe poudre, induced a 'death-like' state, the key ingredient of which was the pufferfish (Tetraodontiformes) toxin tetrodotoxin (TTX). The second powder of dissociative hallucinogens held the person in a will-less zombie state. Clairvius Narcisse was alleged to have succumbed to this practice. There was considerable skepticism to Davis's claims; he was widely accused of fraud and opinions remain divided as to the veracity of his work.
Others claim zombies are sufferers of various psychiatric disorders such as catatonic schizophrenia whose symptoms are misinterpreted as a return from the dead.
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