Haitian Zombies

Real life zombies The people of Haiti believe that the poison in pufferfish causes real life zombies.

Haitian zombies. Life on the sugar plantations there wasnt good to say the least and half of the slaves ended up being worked to death within a few years of their arrival which created a perpetual need for fresh bodies. Zombies are featured widely in Haitian rural folklore as dead persons physically revived by the act of necromancy of a bokor a sorcerer or witch. Zombi also spelled zombie in Vodou a dead person who is revived after burial and compelled to do the bidding of the reviver including criminal acts and heavy manual labour.

Haiti is located in the Caribbean Sea on half of the island of Hispaniola. I t is estimated that 80-90 of Haitians serve the spirits or practice Vodou. Legend has it that zombies are the living dead raised from their graves and animated by malevolent voodoo sorcerers usually for some evil purpose.

At about the time he reappeared in 1980 two women turned up in other villages saying they were zombies. It was said that zombies were routinely employed to do slave labor on farms and sugarcane plantations. The myth evolved slightly and was folded into the Voodoo religion with.

The bokor is opposed by the houngan priest and the mambo priestess of the formal voodoo religion. Haitian culture believes that zombies are mindless slaves that are brought back to life by bokor or sorcerers. The true story of Clairvius Narcisse.

Rumor has it that there is a secret drug in Haiti that can turn the living into Zombies. 50 of the population self-identify as Vodou and most of the rest call it Catholicism though its really a syncretism of the Afro-diasporic roots along with what the French missionaries taught. A zombie remains under the control of the bokor as a personal slave having no will of its own.

In part 4 we went searching for the secret ingredient in the zombif. The zombies of Haiti were said to be corpses that were reanimated through black magic by powerful voodoo priests or shamans known as bokor for various purposes but most commonly for manual labor. He then claims that he would be dug up and continually injected with Datura stramonium a plant in the nightshade family in order to keep him in his zombie-like state as he worked on a plantation for two years.