Yes, says a Harvard scientist, who offers an explanationOn a brilliant day in the spring of 1980, a stranger arrived at L'Estre
marketplace in Haiti's fertile Artibonite Valley. The man's gait was
heavy, his eyes vacant. The peasants watched fearfully as he approached
a local woman named Angelina Narcisse. She listened as he introduced
himself, then screamed in horror—and recognition. The man had given
the boyhood nickname of her deceased brother Clairvius Narcisse, a name
that was known only to family members and had not been used since his
funeral in 1962.This incident and four others in recent years have sparked the most
systematic inquiry ever made into the legendary voodoo phenomenon of
zombiism. According to Haitian belief, a zombie is an individual who
has been “killed” and then raised from the dead by malevolent voodoo
priests known as “bocors.” Though most educated Haitians deny the
existence of zombies, Dr. Lamarque Douyon, Canadian-trained head of the
Psychiatric Center in Port-au-Prince, has been trying for 25 years to
establish the truth about the phenomenon, no easy matter in a land
where the line between myth and reality is faintly drawn. More
recently, Douyon has been joined in his search by Harvard Botanist E.
Wade Davis. Next month Davis is publishing a paper on his findings in
the Journal of Ethnopharmacology. His startling conclusion: “Zombiism
exists and is a societal phenomenon that can be explained logically.”Douyon set the stage for Davis' study by foraying into rural Haiti,
where he met with purported zombies and fearsome bocors. At least 15
individuals who had been branded zombies by terrified peasants turned
out to be victims of epilepsy, mental retardation, insanity or
alcoholism. The case of Clairvius Narcisse, however, gave Douyon good
evidence. Medical records showed he was declared dead in 1962 at Albert
Schweitzer Hospital, an American-run institution in Deschapelles. Yet
more than 200 people recognized him after his reappearance.The best explanation, Douyon believed, was that Narcisse had been
poisoned in such a way that his vital signs could not be detected. The
psychiatrist obtained a sample of a coma-inducing toxin from a bocor.
The poison is apparently used to punish individuals who have
transgressed the will of their community or family. Narcisse, for
example, said that he had been “killed” by his brothers for refusing to go
along with their plan to sell the family land. Ti-Femme, a female
zombie also under study by Douyon, had been poisoned for refusing to
marry the man her family had chosen for her and for bearing another
man's child.
