Well, I was browsing The Straight Dope’s many columns, when I came across the Q and A about Zombies. I read it in its entirety, and suddenly a book I read popped up in my head. It was called “Weird But True: A Cartoon encyclopedia of Incredibly Strange Things”, by Janet Goldenberg. Yes, this book is a rather childish book, but I came across it a few years ago and bought it out of pocket for very little. I read it all in less than an hour. Anyway, one section was on Zombies. Let me quote it for you:
“For years, tales have been told of Haiti’s Zombies- the “Living Dead,” who walk in a trance and do simple manual labor.
There really have been Zombies. Their enemies would give them a secret voodoo potion that temporrarily paralyzed them, making them seem dead.
The potion Probably contained internal organs from a poisinous puffer fish.
After the funeral, the “enemies” would open their victims’ graves and give them othor drugs to keep them in a stupor.
They’d lead the Zombies’ away and put them to work as slaves-sometimes for years. The Zombies’ families never missed them, because they were supposedly dead.
Are there and Zombies’ in Haiti now? You never know.”
So there you have it. It sounds somewhat similar to what the research showed, anyone have anything else to say?
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How do I go about creating a zombie? (21-May-1999)
I wish I could remember the name of the book (“Armchair Companion” comes to mind) which had various short stories of interesting sorts, one, entitled “Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields” posits that the whole zombie thing boils down to the need for cheap labor. Guy is secretly drugged, appears dead, is duly buried. Grieving family goes home.
Next, the zombie masters dig the poor guy up, gives a type of antidote, and puts the now brain addled feller to work, usually in a new location. If true, this would certainly explain horrified relatives who stumble on to their “dead” brother, father, etc.
The Serpent and the Rainbow is an excellent Zombie book, but it’s a dry read - quite a bit of chemistry to chew through in some of the chapters. But the dry is well balanced with a generous sprinkling of his accounts of HAitian Voodoo culture and ritual.
http://www.erowid.org/library/books/serpent_and.shtml
The cheezeball (yet entertaining) movie was actually based on this non-fiction account of a pharmaceutical company paid researcher who went into Haiti to investigate whether “zombie powder” could be used as a viable anesthetic.