London - Screaming in fear, villagers ran for their lives as the naked woman shuffled into their midst.
Her eyes were blank and an awful rasp emanated from deep in her throat.
But what truly terrified them that October morning in the early Thirties was the realisation that she looked frighteningly familiar. Back in 1907, they had attended the funeral of a girl named Felicia Felix-Mentor. Now here she was, years later, a demented, staggering wreck, apparently risen from the dead.
For the residents of this remote Haitian village, here was proof of their ancient belief that the earth is stalked by what we know as zombies - the subject of a fascinating new book that charts our obsession with these monstrous manifestations of the undead.
Today, zombies exert a powerful hold on our psyche thanks in part to a multi-billion-pound industry that has them lurching menacingly through every form of entertainment, from TV’s The Walking Dead to voodoo king Baron Samedi in James Bond classic Live And Let Die and Michael Jackson’s Thriller video - as well as schlock horror films including World War Z and British comedy Shaun Of The Dead.
In the run-up to Halloween, eBay UK reported that zombie outfits were its top-selling fancy dress costumes, selling at a rate of 2 000 an hour. And if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to fight off these mindless marauders, various companies offer “zombie experiences” - one charging £139 (about R2 900) for the privilege of being chased through a derelict shopping centre in Reading by actors in gruesome make-up.
All knockabout fun, of course, but it leads to an intriguing question: what is the truth about zombies? Can you really turn a living (or dead) person into a lumbering automaton? The answer is as surprising as it is frightening.
That our fascination with zombies stretches back nearly a century owes much to a US journalist who visited Haiti in the Twenties and decided to investigate voodoo beliefs imported to the Caribbean by African slaves.
William Seabrook heard stories that evil witch doctors had in their medicine bags a powerful powder that sent victims into a coma so deep they appeared to be dead. After they were buried, the witch doctors snatched them from the grave and brought them back to consciousness, but in a mindless state, which meant they could be bent entirely to their will.
“They make of the zombie a servant or a slave,” Seabrook wrote. “Occasionally this is for the commission of some crime, but more often simply as a drudge around the habitation or the farm, setting it dull, heavy tasks and beating it like a dumb beast if it slackens.”
“Zombification” was so feared that it was listed as a crime in Haiti’s statute books. One night, Seabrook was taken to a sugar plantation to see three zombies at work.
“They were plodding like brutes, like automatons. The eyes were the worst. It was not my imagination,” he wrote. “They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused, unseeing.”
He recalled his travels in a book, which in 1932 inspired the film White Zombie. It was thrown together in just 11days using recycled sets from productions including Dracula, Frankenstein and The Hunchback Of Notre Dame.
The first ever zombie movie, it was ridiculed on both sides of the Atlantic, with one critic describing it as “unblushingly bizarre”.
But when it opened at a cinema on Broadway, promoted by actors dressed as zombies milling around the entrance, crowds gathered - and the craze was born.
A Zombie fruit punch cocktail was launched, so heavily laced with Caribbean rum that it “zombified” the drinker: sales were cleverly limited to two per person to increase the controversial appeal.
What made the zombie myth so potent was that it appeared to have a basis in fact. Such as the tale of the long-dead woman who had supposedly staggered naked into the village in Haiti. She was eventually discovered in 1936 by American writer Zora Neale Hurston in a Haitian mental hospital.
Hurston described a chilling encounter with her. “The sight of this wreckage was dreadful,” she wrote. “That blank face with the dead eyes as if they had been burned with acid. It was too much to endure for long.”
No one could establish an alternative identity for the woman other than that she was indeed Felicia Felix-Mentor nor explain how she came to be found wandering naked on the roadside. It has since been suggested she was suffering from schizophrenia, but Hurston preferred a more dramatic explanation.
“I know there are zombies in Haiti,” she declared in a book featuring photos of the woman. “People have been called back from the dead.”
While fictional zombies became more popular than ever, the people of Haiti remained fearful of being zombified in real life, particularly during the oppressive rule of president ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier between 1957 and 1971.
The Tonton Macoute, his brutal secret police, were said to employ powerful sorcerers and threaten zombification to quell resistance among the superstitious populace.
But was there a more rational explanation? Did the witch doctors’ feared powers actually rely on tricks found in the natural - rather than the supernatural - world? Such was the conclusion of Wade Davis, a Harvard anthropologist and exotic plant expert who visited Haiti in the early Eighties on the trail of substances that might induce a zombie-like state.
Doctors in Haiti had been baffled anew by the case of Clairvius Narcisse, a man in his 40s who in 1962 suffered a mysterious fever and within a fortnight was pronounced dead by two doctors, and buried.
Eighteen years later, his sister was traumatised when a heavy-footed and vacant-eyed man approached her at the market, claimed to be her brother and told her he had been zombified by a witch doctor and put to work on a sugar plantation in the intervening years.
At the time of his “death’ he had been conscious but rendered immobile, he said, listening to his sister weeping as he was pronounced dead, powerless to protest as his coffin was lowered into the ground.
When two Haitian psychiatrists quizzed him on aspects of the family’s past that only a relative would know, he correctly answered all their questions - and many villagers insisted he was the Clairvius Narcisse they had known. Intrigued, Wade Davis persuaded a local sorcerer to part with a recipe for zombie powder, with samples.
The ingredients included the crushed skull of a baby and a dead toad wrapped in a dried sea worm. But the most potent element came from a puffer fish whose reproductive organs contain a nerve poison called tetrodotoxin, which lowers a victim’s metabolic rate almost, but not quite, to the point of death.
In Japan, where such fish are a delicacy, there had been several famous cases of poisoning, including that of one man who apparently ‘died’ after eating puffer fish, but regained consciousness seven days later in a morgue.
Another victim had an even narrower escape, coming round soon after he was nailed into a coffin.
Davis sent the samples for analysis in the US, where they were applied to laboratory rats. Within six hours the animals were comatose and appeared to be dead but for the faintest of heartbeats.
Davis’s theory was that once the toxin had worn off and the victims dragged from the grave, they were kept in a compliant state by a substance derived from a plant known as “zombie cucumber”, said to cause amnesia and delirium and make victims pliant.
Once this was no longer being administered, perhaps because the witch doctor responsible had died, the victim would slowly recover, returning to scare the wits out of friends and relatives.
This theory, described in Davis’s book The Serpent And The Rainbow, was largely dismissed by his fellow researchers. They questioned, not least, whether the samples analysed contained anything like the dose of tetrodotoxin required to have the effect on humans it did on rats.
Whatever the scientists say, such stories continue to exert a powerful hold. Take the case of Francine Illeus, a 30-year-old woman who ran a market stall in a town called Ennery. After suffering digestive problems she died and was buried in 1976.
Three years later, the women who had worked alongside her reported that they had found a pale and very thin creature who appeared to be Francine, squatting disorientated by the site of her former stall. Her mother was convinced this was her daughter, returned from the grave.
Unlike Clairvius Narcisse, Francine could give no explanation of what had happened in those missing years. But suspicion that this was another case of zombification grew when her coffin was dug up - and found to contain only rocks.
Zombies, A Cultural History by Roger Luckhurst (Reaktion Books).
Daily Mail