Medicine: Zombies: Do They Exist?

Yes, says a Harvard scientist, who offers an explanation

On a brilliant day in the spring of 1980, a stranger arrived at L'Estère marketplace in Haiti's fertile Artibonite Valley. The man's gait was heavy, his eyes vacant. The peasants watched fearfully as he approached a local woman named Angelina Narcisse. She listened as he introduced himself, then screamed in horror—and recognition. The man had given the boyhood nickname of her deceased brother Clairvius Narcisse, a name that was known only to family members and had not been used since his funeral in 1962.

This incident and four others in recent years have sparked the most systematic inquiry ever made into the legendary voodoo phenomenon of zombiism. According to Haitian belief, a zombie is an individual who has been "killed" and then raised from the dead by malevolent voodoo priests known as "bocors." Though most educated Haitians deny the existence of zombies, Dr. Lamarque Douyon, Canadian-trained head of the Psychiatric Center in Port-au-Prince, has been trying for 25 years to establish the truth about the phenomenon, no easy matter in a land where the line between myth and reality is faintly drawn. More recently, Douyon has been joined in his search by Harvard Botanist E. Wade Davis. Next month Davis is publishing a paper on his findings in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology. His startling conclusion: "Zombiism exists and is a societal phenomenon that can be explained logically."

Douyon set the stage for Davis' study by foraying into rural Haiti, where he met with purported zombies and fearsome bocors. At least 15 individuals who had been branded zombies by terrified peasants turned out to be victims of epilepsy, mental retardation, insanity or alcoholism. The case of Clairvius Narcisse, however, gave Douyon good evidence. Medical records showed he was declared dead in 1962 at Albert Schweitzer Hospital, an American-run institution in Deschapelles. Yet more than 200 people recognized him after his reappearance.

The best explanation, Douyon believed, was that Narcisse had been poisoned in such a way that his vital signs could not be detected. The psychiatrist obtained a sample of a coma-inducing toxin from a bocor. The poison is apparently used to punish individuals who have transgressed the will of their community or family. Narcisse, for example, said that he had been "killed" by his brothers for refusing to go along with their plan to sell the family land. Ti-Femme, a female zombie also under study by Douyon, had been poisoned for refusing to marry the man her family had chosen for her and for bearing another man's child.