by Aaron Mahnke
Some of the children told him that two local boys had been killed, and they had come to the graveyard for revenge. The constable didn’t know of any murders in the area, but then again, there was a lot that went on in Gorbals that went unreported. But he was concerned about the gatherings, so he spoke with some of the parents. Some were worried about the safety of their children; others were troubled by the stories and what it said about their children’s fascination with violence and danger.
Yet hundreds more children arrived at the cemetery the very next night. Constable Deeprose dispersed them once more, but he also wanted to know what it was they were hunting. Who were these two mysterious boys who were said to have been killed, what had killed them, and why did the children think they could find the suspect here, in this particular graveyard?
The killer, he was told, was a vampire. A vampire that stood over seven feet tall, with sharp teeth and glowing eyes.
NO ONE WANTS to die. If the human design was scheduled for a revision, that’s one of the features that would get an overhaul. Our mortality has been an obsession since the dawn of humanity itself. Humans long for ways to avoid death, or at least make it bearable.
Some cultures have practically moved heaven and earth doing so. Thousands of years ago, the Egyptians built enormous stone structures in order to house their dead and ensure them a place in the afterlife. They perfected the art of embalming so that even after death, their bodies might be ready for a new existence in a new place.
Death, though, is a reality for all of us, whether we like it or not. Whether we’re young or old, rich or poor, healthy or sick, life is one long journey down a road, and we walk until it’s over. Some think they see light at the end of it all, while others hope for darkness. And that’s where the mystery of it all comes in. No one knows what’s on the other side; we just know that the proverbial walk ends at some point.
And maybe that’s why we spend so much time guessing at it, building story and myth and belief around this thing we can’t put our finger on. What would be easier, some say, is if we just didn’t die. If we somehow went on forever. It’s impossible, but we dream of it anyway.
No one returns from the grave…do they? Most sane, well-adjusted people would say no. But stories exist that say otherwise, and these stories aren’t new. They’ve been around for thousands of years and span multiple cultures.
And like their subject matter, these stories simply refuse to die. One reason for that—as hard as it is to believe—is because some of those stories appear to be true. Depending on where you look and whom you ask, there are whispers of those who beat the odds.
Sometimes the journey doesn’t end after all. Sometimes the dead really do walk.
THE RETURNED
The quintessential zombie movie—the one that all the commentators say was responsible for putting zombies on the map nearly fifty years ago—was George A. Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead. The creatures that Romero brought to the big screen managed to influence generations of filmmakers, giving us the iconic zombie that we see today in television shows like The Walking Dead.
The trouble is, Romero never used the word “zombie” to describe the creatures from his landmark film. Instead, they were “ghouls,” a creature borrowed from Arabian folklore. According to the mythology, ghouls are demons who eat the dead, and because of that, they’re usually found in graveyards.
But Romero’s film was not the first story featuring undead creatures that hunger for the flesh and blood of the living. Some think that that honor falls to the Odyssey, the epic Greek poem written by Homer nearly three thousand years ago. In the story, there’s a scene in which Odysseus needs to get some information from a long-dead prophet named Tiresias. To give the spirit strength to speak, Odysseus feeds him blood.
In a lot of ways, the creatures we think of today as zombies are similar to the European tales of the revenant. They’ve gone by many names. The ancient Irish called them neamh mairbh, meaning “the undead.” In Germany there is the Wiedergänger, “the one who walks again.”
The word “revenant,” if you remember, is Latin, and means “the returned.” The basic idea is pretty easy to guess from that: revenants were those who were once dead but returned to haunt and terrorize their neighbors and family.
It might sound like fantasy to our modern sensibilities, but some people really did believe that this could happen. Historians in the Middle Ages wrote about revenant activity as if it were fact. One man, William of Newbury, wrote in 1190:
It would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead should sally from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living…did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony. Were I to write down all the instances of this kind which I have ascertained to have befallen in our times, the undertaking would be beyond measure laborious and troublesome.
Newbury goes on to wonder why the ancient writers never mentioned events like these (though he doesn’t seem to take that as proof that revenants are pure fantasy). In fact, he was wrong about that. The ancient Greeks did have certain beliefs surrounding the dead and their ability to return to haunt the living. But to them, it was much more complicated, and each revenant came back with its own unique purpose.
You see, in the Greco-Roman world people believed that there was a gap between the date of someone’s actual death and the intended date of their death. Remember, this was a culture that believed in the Moirai—the Fates—who had a plan for everyone. So, for example, a farmer might be destined to die in his eighties from natural causes, but he might instead die earlier in an accident at the market or in his field. People who died early, according to the legends, were doomed to wander the land of the living as spirits until the date of their intended death arrived.
Still with me? Good. So the Greeks believed that it was possible to control those wandering spirits. All you needed to do was make a curse tablet, something written on clay or tin or even parchment, and then bury it in the person’s grave. Like a key in the ignition of a car, this tablet would empower you to control the wandering dead.
It might sound like the world’s creepiest Martha Stewart how-to project, but to the Greeks, magic like this was a powerful part of their belief system. The dead weren’t really gone, and because of that, they could serve a purpose.
Unfortunately, that’s not an attitude that was unique to the Greeks. And in the right culture, at the right time, under the right pressure, that idea can be devastating.
THE CRUCIBLE
In Haiti, the vast majority of the people—up to 95 percent, according to some studies—can trace their roots to West Africa. It’s a remnant of a darker time, when slavery was legal and millions of Africans were pulled from their homes and transported across the Atlantic to work the Caribbean sugar plantations that filled European coffers. And while African slaves were shipped to the New World with no possessions besides the clothing on their backs, they did come with their beliefs—with their customs and traditions, and with centuries of folklore and superstition. They might not have carried luggage filled with precious heirlooms, but they held the most important pieces of their identity in their minds and hearts, and no one could take that away.
There are a few ideas that need to be understood about this transplanted culture. First, they believed that the soul and the body were connected, but also that death could be a moment of separation between the two. Not always, but it could be. I’ll explain more about that in a moment.
Second, they lived with a hatred and fear of slavery. Slavery took away their freedom. It took away their power. They no longer had control over their lives, their dreams, or even their own bodies. Whether they liked it or not, they were doomed to endure horribly difficult labor for the rest of their lives. Only death would break the chains and set them free.
Third, that freedom wasn’t guaranteed. While most Africans enslaved in
the Caribbean dreamed of returning to their homeland in the afterlife, there were some who wanted to get there quicker. Suicide was common in colonial Haiti, but it was also frowned upon. In fact, it was believed that those who ended their own life wouldn’t wind up back in Africa at all; instead, they would be punished. The penalty, it was said, was eternal imprisonment inside their own body, without control or power over themselves. It was, in a sense, just like their life. To the slaves of Haiti, hell was just more slavery, but a slavery that went on forever.
These bodies and trapped souls had a name in their culture: the zombi. It was first recorded in 1872, when a linguistic scholar recorded the word “zombi” and defined it as “a phantom or ghost,” noting that the term was “not infrequently heard in the Southern States in nurseries and among the servants.” The name, it turns out, has African roots. In languages spoken in west central Africa, where many of the Africans enslaved in the New World were captured, there are similar-sounding words that refer to divinities, ghosts, and objects that get their power from ancestors or spirits.
The walking dead, at least according to Haitian lore, are real.
What did these zombies look like? Well, thanks to Zora Neale Hurston, we have a firsthand account. Hurston was an African American author, known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, and regarded as one of the pillars of the Harlem Renaissance. And it was while researching folklore during a trip to Haiti in 1936 that she encountered one.
In her book Tell My Horse, Hurston recounts what happened:
I had the rare opportunity to see and touch an authentic case. I listened to the broken noises in its throat….If I had not experienced all of this in the strong sunlight of a hospital yard, I might have come away from Haiti interested but doubtful. But I saw this case of Felicia Felix-Mentor which was vouched for by the highest authority. So I know that there are Zombies in Haiti. People have been called back from the dead.
The sight was dreadful. That blank face with the dead eyes. The eyelids were white all around the eyes as if they had been burned with acid….There was nothing you could say to her or get from her, except by looking at her, and the sight of this wreckage was too much to endure for long.
Wreckage. I can’t think of another word with as much beauty and horror as that, in that context. Something was happening in Haiti, and the result was wreckage. Lives broken and torn apart by something. But what?
The assumption might be that these people had all attempted suicide. But suicide is common in many cultures, not just in Haiti. When you dig deeper, though, it’s possible to uncover the truth. And in this case, the truth is much darker than we’d like to believe.
Zombies, it turns out, can be created.
NARCISSE
On the night of April 30, 1962, a man walked into the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti. He was sick, complaining of body aches, a fever, and—most recently—coughing fits that brought blood up from his lungs. Naturally, the medical staff was concerned, and they admitted him for tests and treatment. This man, Clairvius Narcisse, was seen by a number of medical doctors, but his condition quickly deteriorated. One of his sisters, Angelina, was there at his bedside, and according to her his lips turned blue and he complained to her of a tingling sensation all over his body.
Despite the hospital’s best efforts, Narcisse died the next day. Two doctors, one American and the other American-trained, each confirmed his death. Angelina signed the death certificate after confirming the man’s identity. Because she couldn’t read or write, she did so by pressing her thumbprint onto the paper. And then his family began the painful process of burying their loved one and trying to move on. Death, as always, is a part of life. Never a pleasant one, but a part nonetheless.
More than eighteen years later, in 1981, Angelina Narcisse was walking through the market in her village, something she did nearly every day. She knew the faces of each vendor; she knew the scents and the sounds that filled the space there. But when she looked down the dirt road toward the small crowd of people, something frightened her, and she screamed.
There, walking toward her, was her brother Clairvius. He was, of course, older now, but it was him. She would have recognized him anywhere. And when he finally approached her and named himself with a childhood nickname, any doubt she might have had melted away.
What followed was a whirlwind of revelations as Clairvius told his sister what had happened to him. And it all started, he said, in the hospital room. According to him, his last moments in the bed there were dark but fully aware. He could no longer see anyone, and he couldn’t move. But he remembered hearing the doctor pronounce him dead. He remembered the sound of his sister weeping. He even remembered the rough cotton sheet being pulled up and over his face. That awareness continued on to his funeral, where he claimed to have heard the procession. He even pointed to a scar on his face and said that it was the result of one of the coffin nails cutting him.
Later, the family brought in a psychiatrist, who performed a series of tests on Clairvius to see if he was a fraud, but the man passed with flying colors, answering questions that no one but Clairvius himself could have known. In addition, more than two hundred friends and family members vouched for the man’s identity. This, all of them confirmed, was Clairvius Narcisse.
So what happened to him? According to Clairvius himself, he was poisoned by his brother over a property dispute. How, he wasn’t sure. But shortly after his burial, a group of men dug his coffin up and pulled him free. That’s a thought worth locking away deep in the back of your brain, by the way—the man was trapped inside a coffin beneath the earth, blind and paralyzed, cold and scared. It’s a wonder he didn’t go insane.
The men who dug him up were led by a priest called a bokor. The men chained Clairvius and then guided him away to a sugar plantation, where he was forced to work alongside others in a similar state of helplessness. Daily doses of a mysterious drug kept all of them unable to resist or leave.
According to his story, he managed to escape two years later, but, fearing what his brother might do to him if he showed up alive, he avoided returning home. It was only the news of his brother’s death many years later that coaxed him out of hiding.
The story of Clairvius Narcisse has perplexed scientists and historians for decades. In the 1980s, Harvard sent an ethnobotanist named Wade Davis to investigate the mysterious drug, and the result of his trip was a book called The Serpent and the Rainbow, which would go on to be a New York Times bestseller as well as a Hollywood movie. But few agree on the conclusions.
Samples of the drug that Wade collected have all been disproven. No illegal sugar plantation staffed by zombie slaves has ever been discovered. And the doctors have been accused of misreading the symptoms and prematurely declaring the man dead. There are so many doubts.
To the people closest to him, though, the facts are solid. Clairvius Narcisse died. His family watched his burial in the cemetery. He was mourned and missed. And more than eighteen years later, he came back into their lives. The walking dead.
Medical mishap or the result of Haitian black magic? We may never know for sure.
EMPTY
We fear death because it means the loss of control, the loss of purpose and freedom. Death, in the eyes of many people, robs us of our identity and replaces it with finality. It’s understandable, then, how slavery can be viewed through the same lens. It removes people’s ability to make decisions for themselves and turns them, in a sense, into nothing more than machines for the benefit of another person.
But what if there really are individuals out there—the bokor or evil priests—who have discovered a way to manufacture their own walking dead? Maybe there are people who have perfected the art of enslaving a man or a woman more deeply than any slave owner might have managed before, robbing them of their very soul and binding them to an afterlife of tireless, ceaseless labor.
In February 1976, Francine Illeus was admitted to her local hospital in Haiti. She said she felt weak and light-he
aded. Her digestive system was failing, and her stomach ached. The doctors there treated her and then released her. Several days later, she passed away and was buried in the local graveyard. She was only thirty years old.
Three years later Francine’s mother received a call from a friend a few miles away. She needed her to come to the local marketplace there, and it was urgent. Francine’s mother didn’t know what the trouble was, but she made the journey as quickly as she could.
Once there, she was told that a woman had been found in the market. She was emaciated and catatonic, and refused to move from where she was squatting in a corner, head down and hands laced over her face. The woman, it turned out, was Francine Illeus.
Her mother brought her home and tried to help her, but Francine seemed to be gone. She was there in body, but there was very little spirit left. Subsequent doctors and psychiatrists have spent time with Francine, but with very little progress to show for it.
On a whim, Francine’s mother had the coffin exhumed. She had to see for herself if this woman—little more than a walking corpse—truly was her daughter. Yes, the woman had the same scar on her forehead that her daughter had. Yes, they looked alike. Yes, others recognized her as Francine. But she needed to know for sure.
When the men pulled the coffin out of the earth, it was heavy. Too heavy, they murmured, to be empty. More doubtful by the minute, Francine’s mother asked them to open it. And when the last nail had been pulled free from the wood, the lid was lifted and cast aside.
The coffin wasn’t empty after all. It was full of rocks.
IT WAS THE walk through the trees that reminded him of his dream. Stuckley was used to trees, as was Caleb, who walked beside him. After all, he tended an orchard for a living, so trees were, in a very real sense, his life. But walking through them now, for this reason, with this purpose…didn’t feel right.