Haiti's "Zombie": In 1980, a man claimed he had died eighteen years prior

Haiti's "zombies" are not like those in movies. In movies, they are corpses that bite people; in Haitian folklore, a zombie is a living person controlled by another: first made to appear "dead", buried, then dug up by a sorcerer, stripped of will, and forced to farm and do hard labor.

The most famous case occurred in 1980. At a market in northern Haiti, a man approached a woman and said: I am your brother. His name was Clairvius Narcisse. His sister was terrified because her brother had been declared dead at a hospital in 1962; the family held a funeral and buried him in the village cemetery.

Narcisse said that on that day, he had been in the hospital due to a serious illness. While lying in bed, he could hear everything around him. The doctors declared him dead; he wanted to shout, but couldn't; he wanted to move, but couldn't. He was buried in the ground. A few days later, a sorcerer dug him up and gave him something to eat. From then on, his mind was clouded, and he was taken to a sugarcane plantation to work. He worked there for two years. Later, the master who controlled him died, and he escaped. He wandered outside for over a decade and never dared to return home.

He said his brother had sold him to the sorcerer for land.

The story spread abroad and was heard by Wade Davis, a Canadian ethnobotanist. He went to Haiti to investigate and obtained a powder said to be used by the sorcerer. Analysis showed it contained tetrodotoxin. He proposed that this toxin could put a person into a death-like state; upon waking, they would be confused and easily controlled. He wrote about this investigation in a book called The Serpent and the Rainbow, which was later adapted into a film.

Many toxicologists who reviewed his experiments said the toxin levels in the powder did not match, and it was even less likely to make someone truly "fake die" and then wake up. This conclusion was never replicated by others.

Narcisse died in 1994—this time for real. Haitian criminal law still contains a provision: administering drugs to a person to induce a death-like coma; if that person is buried, it is treated as murder.

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