Zombies are very popular at the moment. Zombies have been very popular, at least in the field of horror, for quite a long time now. They never seem to die. Last night's Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub talk. The Living Dread - Zombies in their Natural Habitit with the ever reliable cultural anthropologist Deborah Hyde, was a chance to look at, not fictional zombies roaming shopping malls and eating people's brains, but real zombies.
Or at least the real events that gave us the notion of zombies. Not that everyone in attendance really understood that. After about an hour of explaining where zombie myth is likely to have come from, a guy in front of me, during the Q&A, asked, and I paraphrase, "so zombies don't exist then?". Well they do and they don't. They exist in fiction and they exist, as an idea at least, in reality.
Film zombies, according to Deborah, began with Bela Lugosi playing "Murder" Legendre in 1932's Victor Halperin film White Zombie. Based on William Seabrook's 1929 novel The Magic Island, Legendre is a voodoo master who commands a crew of zombies in Haiti. Zombies also started appearing in the pulp fiction (not Pulp Fiction) of the time and they've stayed with us, pretty much, ever since.
Perhaps most famously in George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead series (which began in 1968, 1978's Dawn of the Dead is believed to be the first time zombies attacked a shopping precinct) but also in films like 28 Days Later, Train To Busan, and, er, Shaun of the Dead and TV series like The Last Of Us, All Of Us Are Dead, and The Returned - and let's not forget 1998's straight to DVD Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island.
Some of which were mentioned in last night's talk. But it wasn't long before we were thrust back in time and across the Atlantic to the island of Hispaniola. Discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492 (which was news to the people already living there and who had already discovered it), Hispaniola is split into two countries:- the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
It's Haiti that zombie fans are interested in. A slave island ruled first by the Spanish and then by the French where life expectancy (for the slaves, not the slave owners) was so low and health conditions so poor that it was easier to constantly ship new slaves in than to look after the ones that were already there. Many of those slaves came from Dahomey, now Benin, in Western Africa sandwiched between Nigeria and Togo.
The slaves, for which we should really use the word people, brought with them their religion and in Haiti they mixed these African folkloric beliefs with the Catholicism (which, essentially, is also a folkloric belief system) of the French masters to create a syncretic religion that we now know as Voodoo (in Haiti, often written as Vodou).
The Haitian Revolution took place between 1791 and 1803 and it is still regarded as the only revolution in history where an enslaved people freed themselves with no help from outside forces. Their freedom, and one that came at a price - gunboat diplomacy had them paying reparations to the French for well over a hundred years - would not last forever. In 1915 the USA took control of Haiti and did not relinquish it until 1934.
American interest in Haiti was due to the lucrative sugar industry and one of the island's main employers was the Haitian American Sugar Company - or HASCO. HASCO were not good people to work for. Long hours, no sick pay, and all the wealth created by the company went back to America. It seems unlikely they had breakout areas, flex time, or options to work from home.
During this period, some curious US travellers and tourists (as well as anthropologists) started to visit Haiti. Among them were the journalist William Seabrook whose visit inspired The Magic Island (and, indirectly, White Zombie) and the author and prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance Zora Neale Hurston who, in 1938, wrote a book called Tell My Horse:Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. Which, as an aside, in the above image, uses the same image of the Wilmot EP by Sabres of Paradise.
In Tell My Horse she, as Seabrook had done a decade earlier, mentioned zombies and described seeing a zombie with a "blank face and dead eyes". A photograph of a zombie, described as a "shambling relic" came to light. Of course, the lady in question wasn't a zombie. She wasn't undead, she was unwell. She was starving and walked with a limp because she had a broken leg that hadn't healed properly. When she'd been able to have a wash, eat some food, and her leg had got better nobody thought she looked like a zombie anymore.
But it was too late. Zombie belief had begun and, as I found out last night, some people still cling to it. The Vodou religion did its bit to help spread the belief. It was believed that priests could be possessed by spirits and pass messages on from those spirits, many of which would have been ancestors who had died. In that respect no so different to Derek Acorah or Uri Geller.
The spirits would hang out at crossroads where they would convene with blacksmith gods and while in the Western tradition we tend to think of human beings consisting of a body and a soul, in the Haitian Vodou tradition (for there are other Voodoo traditions, not least in Louisiana) the essence of a human can be boiled down to five parts:-
Corps - the body
N'ame - the energy of the body
Z'etoile - destiny
Gros Bon Ange
Ti Bon Ange
Gros Bon Ange and Ti Bon Ange relate to angels, or spirits, that are believed to watch over us. If you are somehow able to, and don't ask me how, bottle the last two you have a spirit in a bottle - and not the kind that gets you drunk. A spirit without a body - and a spirit without a body is called a duppy. Bob Marley sang about them in Duppy Conqueror.
But if you have a spirit without a body you may also have, somewhere, a body without a spirit and, as you'll have worked out by now, that's a zombie. These zombies were said to be "degraded", said to "plod like brutes", to have the eyes of dead men, and, perhaps less threateningly, to speak in a nasal twang. They were never said to attack people, less so eat their flesh, and, if anything, were regarded as wretched victims stuck in limbo between life and death for all eternity. Or until someone throws some salt at them.
The Swiss-Argentine anthropologist and, oddly - in the circumstances, human rights flag waver Alfred Metraux wrote a book, Voodoo in Haiti, about a zombie called Monsieur Celestin whom he claimed to know. It told a story of a man driving a car, the car got a puncture and an old man with a white beard came over to assist. The old man claimed he caused the puncture using the power of his mind and the driver of the car thought this ridiculous and laughed at him.
Offended by this, the old man decided to show him his special powers and soon a man the driver had known but who had died six months previously walked backwards towards them and offered the car driver a drink. The driver had the sense to turn down the drink because, despite not believing in any of this - at least until this moment, he knew you should never accept a drink from a zombie. Contagion. You become one.
Then there's the story of T Joseph. When in 1980, HASCO had a bumper crop on their hands and couldn't find enough workers, T Joseph brought them a fairly large group of "bumbling people". He was paid handsomely for bringing them. These "bumbling people" not so well. T Joseph's wife, perhaps feeling this was unfair, visited a festival and bought sugared pistachios for the workers.
But because the sugared pistachios had been salted the workers couldn't eat them. That's because they were zombies and zombies can't have salt. Saddened, depressed, the zombies left the HASCO plantation, plodded (like brutes no doubt) back to their mountain village, made their way back to the graveyard, climbed forlornly into their graves and led there slowly rotting away.
The 1980s was a busy decade for zombies and people interested in zombies. When the Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis wrote a book, 1986's The Serpent and the Rainbow (Wes Craven later based a film around it), about his visit to Haiti and his experience with zombies. He believed, controversially, that people were 'making' zombies using drugs though the drugs he suggested people were giving to others to turn them into zombies would be more likely to kill you than zombify you. You'd end up dead rather undead.
Davis spoke of a zombie who'd been dead for twenty years and when he interviewed people about this man and what he was like when he was alive he found he was not a liked man. He was selfish, he'd abandoned his children, and enriched himself while doing nothing for others. This seems to be a common theme with people who reappear as zombies. They're often people who, in life, were not liked. Perhaps that explains how these zombies moved from being wretched victims to terrifying monsters. Perhaps not.
Elsewhere a lot of zombie sightings are simple cases of mistaken identity. Possibly as a result of grief, bereaved people may see somebody walking down the street that reminds them of a parent or grandparent and unable to process the loss they believe their ancestor has come back to life - or at least some form of undeadness - and, yes, that's definitely a word.
The theory that holds the most water for me is that Haiti, through not fault of its people but due to some of its terrible leaders - both colonial and homegrown, has had a really rough history. There is, and never has been, any form of welfare outside of friends and family doing their best to help others. When people suffer from conditions like schizophrenia or bipolarity there isn't much that well meaning but untrained family members can do. Quite often the sufferers will simply wander about in a daze. With education rudimentary at best and with zombie belief high due to the Vodou religion, it is easy to mistake these people for zombies.
While fictional zombies do make for great entertainment, it seems the real people who are being mistaken for zombies are the ones who are genuinely suffering. Far more than their fictional victims. So next time you see a zombie don't run away screaming, stop for a chat, offer them a cup of tea. They won't eat your brain - and if they do it's just because they're hungry.
Thanks to The Star of Greenwich, Professor Chris French, and Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub for hosting, thanks to Paula for (briefly) joining me, thanks to Goddards Pie and Mash for tasty food beforehand (so much nicer than human flesh - though, to be fair, I've not tried that - yet), and thanks to Deborah Hyde for another illuminating talk. I may not have touched the free mince pies (full of pie and mash and not keen on mince pies anyway) but I had a great evening. The last evening of Skepticism (or, indeed, Forteana) of 2023. Thanks to everyone who has been part of it this year. Looking forward to catching up for more of it in 2024.
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