by Bob Curran
Voodoo Doctors
In the Low County beyond Charleston, voodoo and the dead intermingled as well. Here the various “hoodoo doctors” allegedly knew rituals that would make the corpses buried in the isolated cemeteries of the region return to some form of hideous life. Places such as Beaufort County thrived with all sorts of conjure men: Dr. Bug, Dr. Antoine, Miss Delphine Paysandu, and the intriguingly named Old Mother Go-Go, who also sometimes operated on Trapman Street in Charleston. She is an interesting personality, because her followers (those who attended her gatherings) claimed that she had died some 50 years before, but had risen from the grave to become a voodoo queen. This made her, in effect, one of the walking dead, and greatly enhanced her voodoo reputation amongst those who visited her.
Dr. Buzzard and J.E. McTeer
The greatest of all the South Carolina voodoo doctors was unquestionably Stephaney Robinson, who died in 1947, and was known far and wide throughout the Low Country as Dr. Buzzard. He was famous for his ongoing magical feud with the sheriff of Beaufort County and the Low Country, J.E. (Ed) McTeer, Dr. Buzzard was a dapper little man of African descent who looked more like a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church than a voodoo houngan or “root worker.” He was quite a wealthy man, and in 1943 he was described as an elderly, dignified gentleman “always dressed in quality black.” McTeer, by contrast, had come (on his mother’s side) from a South Carolina slave-holding family, the Heywards, and his forebears had signed the Declaration of Independence.
As a boy, he had witnessed the activities of the conjure-men and zombie-masters on his maternal grandfather’s plantation, and was convinced of their powers. He was also convinced that he had certain powers that were more than a match for the supernatural ways of any houngan, including Dr. Buzzard. The battle between McTeer and Dr. Buzzard became the stuff of South Carolina legend, with one gaining the upper hand and then vice versa, but, in the end, fortune favored the Sheriff. After McTeer had donned blue sunglasses (blue being a prominent voodoo color) Dr. Buzzard’s eldest son, who was famous for his hedonistic lifestyle, drove his car across a causeway in a blinding rainstorm and drowned in a saltwater creek. Dr. Buzzard believed that the sheriff had cursed his family and strove to make peace.
Both Dr. Buzzard and McTeer were thought by many of those around them to have the powers of a zombie-master and could raise the Low Country dead when they chose; there seems little doubt that McTeer himself believed that, too. Stories about his miraculous powers continued to circulate after he had stepped down as sheriff, perhaps mainly to help sales of his memoirs, Fifty Years as a Low Country Witch Doctor, which he published after Dr. Buzzard had died. The preponderance of voodoo practitioners in several of the southern cities and sorcerous feuds such as McTeer and Dr. Buzzard, which was later rather widely and popularly publicized certainly brought home the concept of the walking dead, motivated by African magic, to the North American mind.
Voodoo Today
In America today, however, voodoo has become slightly kitsch. Voodoo shops in New Orleans and Charleston flourish, all claiming to sell the “secrets of the ages.” Here such things as charms, amulets, and zombie memorabilia can be bought. Such items can be bought online as well—including such items as “goofer dust,” which allegedly has the power to raise the dead. This ties in well with the idea of the zombie as a representation of the walking dead.
In the Caribbean, too, variants of voodoo continued to thrive even to the present day, but here the idea is taken more seriously. Here is it known as obeah or obi. Although often classed as two separate belief systems, voodoo and obeah are nevertheless very close. Indeed in some instances there appears to be little difference between obeah, Kongo, or Petro voodoo, and the practitioners of Petro are sometimes known as “obeah men.” The name obeah is an Ashanti word meaning “sorcery” or “dark working,” coming from rural Ghana. Obeah is to be found on various islands scattered across the Caribbean including the Virgin Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Bahamas, and in countries such as Belize. Along with the curses and charms that were prepared, there was the alleged power to raise the dead; after doing so, they forced them to act as servants for the houngan, bokor, or obeah man, which was also a feature of Petro voodoo.
Le Zombi
It has been necessary to give this admittedly brief history of such a complex belief system in order to set the idea of the zombie—the walking dead man, which is our usual perception of such a being—in context. In its purest voodoo form “le Zombi” does not refer to the walking dead at all, but to a snake that is the embodiment of Damballah Wedo. Although there are tales in Haitian, American, and West Indian voodoo folklore concerning the walking dead, how were they enticed to rise from the grave? And what were they? Were they truly the cadavers of the dead person who had been buried, or were they motivated by some unholy loa or ghede? Were they, in effect, akin to the walking corpus of medieval Europe, motivated by some vindictive or malevolent spirit drawn by sorcery from the spirit world of Guinee? These were questions that have taxed (and continue to tax) the European mind.
William Seabrook
The man who unquestionably brought notions of the Afro-Caribbean belief systems to the West, however, was William Buehler Seabrook (1884–1945). Seabrook was an extremely colorful and widely traveled individual who had worked at a number of jobs before beginning to write on the esoteric and the occult.
Born in Westminster, Maryland, he began his career in newspapers working as reporter and city editor on the Augusta Chronicle in Georgia. In 1915 he enlisted in the French army, but was discharged out after being gassed at Verdun in 1916. Nevertheless, he awarded the Croix de Guerre for his service. Returning to journalism, he became a travel writer, contributing articles to such publications as Reader’s Digest and Vanity Fair.
As part of an assignment he traveled to French West Africa where he lived among a tribe called the Guerre, whom he claimed were cannibals. It was here that Seabrook claimed to have had his first taste of human flesh, for which he professed to have a liking. Whether this is true or not is open to question, but it gave him something of an exotic status among the travel writers of his day. By now, Seabrook considered himself to be a writer in the style of what Ernest Hemingway called “the Lost Generation”: young writers and poets who had served in the First World War and who had gravitated toward Paris as a city of culture. He was also exhibiting a taste for the arcane, and, in 1920, he spent a week with Aleister Crowley, the celebrated English Satanist, occultist, and drug addict, which only seemed to inspire and excite him further. He was allegedly drinking heavily and using a lot of drugs, which seemed only to drive his passion further toward the occult.
He began to travel again, seeking out esoteric places and writing books and articles about them. In 1924, for instance, he traveled to the Arabian Peninsula where he lived among the Bedouin and the Yezidi, who had a reputation of being devil worshippers (worshipping Melek Tau, the Peacock Angel whom Christians have equated with Lucifer), an aspect that Seabrook certainly dwelled upon. The resultant book, Adventures in Arabia: Among the Bedouins, Druses, Whirling Dervishes, and Yezidee Devil Worshippers, was published in 1927, and, in keeping with much of his work, was a rather sensationalist mix of fantastic claims and hints at arcane knowledge and terrible rites.
Inspired by tales of Caribbean voodoo, he subsequently traveled to Haiti and in 1929 published a book on the subject that many count as a seminal work on the subject: The Magic Island. In this, Seabrook drew attention to a strange and sinister dark organization that he called Culte des Mortes (Cult of the Dead). This, he claimed, had originated in the earlier ancestor worship of Africa and was centered on spirit possession and the raising of the dead. Arguably, it was Seabrook more than anyone else who painted lurid pictures of wild and ecstatic dancing, mysterious incantations, and the dead rising and walking among the living.
Taking the Niger-Congo word nzambi, meaning “god” (which is probably the root of Le Gran Zombi
as applied to Damballah Wedo) he used it to describe the risen cadaver, giving us our word zombie. The nzambi was, in all probability, a fertility god, linked to the changing of the seasons and to growth and may well have been associated with rebirth and resurrection. This probably fit in with the idea of returning from the grave and of risen corpses. Whether the Culte des Mortes actually existed or whether it existed in the way that Seabrook said that it did is a matter that is open to question, but now the idea of a zombie as a walking dead person, strongly connected with voodoo practices, was beginning to germinate in the popular mind.
A section of the book entitled “Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields” was reprinted in several American magazines and journals portraying risen corpses working tirelessly in the Haitian cane fields at the behest of some bokor or zombie master and for no pay. It reinforced the image of the lumbering dead man—the image that we now traditionally associate with the zombie—without reason or thought, slavishly following the instructions of some Haitian sorcerer, and it filled the Western mind with dread—so much so that, inevitably, Seabrook’s article and book formed the basis for the 1932 horror film White Zombie, which even today is regarded as the finest of the early film genre and has become something of a cult classic.
Was Seabrook’s vision of the Haitian cane field workers true? Were there indeed corpses working there as unpaid labor? Perhaps part of the image went back psychologically to the old days when slaves worked, almost thoughtlessly, on the plantations in the West Indies. And of course, there is much speculation about the use of drugs. Could it be that the workers were not dead at all, but instead were “zombified” by using from some drug (known only to the voodoo bokors), which renders the victim extremely liable to suggestion and could give the appearance of death?
Perhaps as a result of his expeditions and writings (and possibly his own imaginings), Seabrook descended further into alcoholism and sadistic sexual practices. In 1933, he was committed at his own request to Bloomingdale, a mental sanatorium in Westchester County in New York State in order to seek treatment for his alcoholism. However, he discharged himself and wrote another book, Asylum, about the experience and treated it as if it were yet another foreign expedition. In 1935 he married Marjorie Ward Worthington, but the couple divorced in 1941 due to Seabrook’s persistent drinking and his sadistic sexual demands. In 1945, William Seabrook committed suicide by overdosing on drugs while living in Rhinebeck, New York. But he had left a legacy behind him: the cultural legacy of the zombie.
Zombie Culture
Following Seabrook’s death, a number of books and films all centered around voodoo, and zombies began to appear. White Zombie was the first of these, but it was not to be the last. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, a number of films emphasizing the power of voodoo and the walking dead were released with such sensationalist titles as King of the Zombies, Revolt of the Zombies, and Revenge of the Zombies, culminating in 1943 in Jacques Tourneur’s early zombie classic I Walked with a Zombie. Many of the plots were set in Haiti or other Caribbean countries, and involved white planters being killed and brought back to life through the power of voodoo, functioning as a kind a robotic figure that shambled along, carrying out the wishes of some malignant sorcerer. This was accompanied by books that played up the zombie theme and that, in most instances, followed the direction of the films and also of Seabrook’s rather fantastic writing on the subject. Many also portrayed the zombies as being flesh-eating monsters, dwelling perhaps on the ideas of cannibalism, which had come out of Africa at the time. Books and stories with lurid titles such as The Killing Dead, Where Zombies Walk, and Island of Zombies appeared with sensationalist regularity throughout the late 1930s and 1940s, all following roughly the same pattern in content and plot. Most had the air of Gothic romances where heroes and heroines investigated some decaying plantation house on some remote Caribbean island or the steamy swamps of the southern United States, only to find themselves trapped by the shambling dead.
New aspects of zombie lore were sometimes introduced—one of these being the zuvembie, which appeared in 1938 in a short story, “Pigeons from Hell” by noted fantasy writer (and creator of Conan the Barbarian) Robert E. Howard. This, according to the tale, was a kind of female zombie—somewhere between the walking dead and a witch—that lived in a crumbling southern mansion somewhere in the swamps. There may be such a creature in some voodoo folklore, but if there is, it is extremely obscure.
There were, of course, some serious and ethnographical works on the subject such, as the 1958 book Voodoo in Haiti, written by the French anthropologist Alfred Metraux. Metraux was a close friend of the notorious French “philosopher of evil,” Georges Bataille—the infamous “Lord Auch” (literally, Lord to the Shithouse) and like Seabrook, he committed suicide in 1963. However, none of them really dealt with the matter of zombies. The lurid tales concerning the rising and wandering dead continued and took a hold on the popular imagination, particularly in the West.
One of the earliest films of recent times to develop and expand upon the zombie theme was Night of the Living Dead, released in 1968 and directed by George A. Romero—a director who was to make his mark with zombie/walking dead films. The plot is relatively straightforward—the brains of the recent dead are reactivated by some form of unspecified virus and the cadavers are brought back into a type of horrid life. A number of teenagers are trapped in a remote and abandoned farmhouse by a group of these mobile corpses who are hungry for their flesh. The film created something of a sensation when it first came out (it has gone on to become a cult horror classic) and established Romero’s name as a horror director. The film was hailed as a “new dawn in horror” and spawned a host of substandard imitators, many of which were simply gorefests with names such as Zombie Holocaust, Zombie Dawn Blood for the Zombie, The Hunger, and Flesh Eaters from the Tomb. Thankfully most of them have not survived to the present time.
Romero would return to the subject of zombies and to the horror that they evoked 10 years later in his much-lauded Dawn of the Dead (1978), which was refilmed for release in 2004 by Zack Snyder. Although the remake had mixed critical reviews, it was a commercial success and remains one of the top-grossing American horror films. Once again, some form of unexplained virus reanimated the brains and bodies of the recently dead and caused them to turn on the living, devouring their flesh. Cities and centers of high population became death traps with a handful of survivors trapped in a shopping mall, reinforcing the immediate horror of the shambling dead in the minds of the viewers.
Spurred on by the lucrative franchise, Romero made another zombie film in 1985—a sequel entitled Day of the Dead, in which a number of scientific military personnel become trapped in an underground bunker by marauding zombies. The lukewarm critical reception that the film received deterred the director from making any further films until 2005, when he returned to the screen with Land of the Dead. This concerned a community in a post-Apocalyptic world who were surrounded by zombies—the walking dead, reanimated by some unknown disease—who were trying to break in. The film was a success and has inspired Diary of the Dead, which Romero released in February 2008. This concerns a video diary released by a group of independent filmmakers who are trapped by mindless zombies.
Zuvembie
Romero is not the only successful film maker concerned with what might be described as “the zombie menace.” In 2007, Damon Lemay’s Zombie Town achieved some acclaim when he portrayed a town of dead people, resurrected and motivated by mysterious parasites. But the most notable contemporary film on the subject must be Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend (2007). Based on the 1954 novel of the same title by Richard Matheson (and previously in 1971, The Omega Man directed by Boris Sagal), the film tells the story of Robert Neville, who believes that he is one of the few survivors of a fearsome plague that has mutated out of a cure for cancer in 2009. This has killed almost 90 percent of the world’s population, only to resurrect them as flesh-eating zombies who can only travel at night or
in the shadows. The film became a box-office success and further established the reputation the lead actor Will Smith as Neville.
A much more interesting and thoughtful film, however, is the 2004 French film Les Revenants, directed by Robin Campillo. In this, the dead rise from their graves in a small French town, but, instead of attacking the living, they attempt to reintegrate themselves into the society and into their former lives. It provides a completely new slant on the traditional zombie theme.
Concomitant with the zombie film revival was a rise in the interest of the walking dead through books and comics. A number of collections of zombie-centered mass-market paperbacks appeared with titles such as Zombie Island, Terror of the Zombies, and The Restless Dead, as well as a number of anthologies, all of which included Seabrook’s “Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields.” Some of these texts combined both scientific and voodoo themes, and introduced relatively new elements into zombie lore. For example, it was said that using salt might defeat zombies. There is no real evidence from Haitian folklore that salt can affect the walking dead, although salt was often used in European lore as a protection against witchcraft and demon possession, and it may appear in some voodoo rituals, but this is not certain.
And there were specific zombie comics as well. One of the most notable (and finest) was Deadworld, which was released in the United States by Arrow Comics (and later by Caliber) during 1986–1987. It ran for at least six distributed issues. It featured a series of short zombie stories written by Gary Reed and brilliantly drawn by Vince Locke. Currently, a comic named The Walking Dead, published by Image Comics and written by Robert Kirkman and drawn by Tony Moore is enjoying much success. This features the community of Cynthiana, Kentucky, which is surrounded by a world in which zombies rule. The comic serves to establish the terror of the walking dead in both the popular mind and in popular culture once more.