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Revenants · Spectral creatures and night demons

Clairvius Narcisse – the Man Who Came Back as a Zombie

When
2 May 1962–1980 date from records made at the time
Where
L'Estère, Artibonite department, Haiti
Verdict
Disputed

Buried in 1962, a Haitian man stood before his sister eighteen years later and said he had been turned into a zombie. Psychiatrists and an ethnobotanist took up his case.

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19.31°, -72.61° · dimmed: other phenomena within 1,500 km

What happened

On 30 April 1962 Clairvius Narcisse from the village of L'Estère in the Artibonite valley was admitted to the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Deschapelles with fever, exhaustion and coughing up blood. Three days later doctors pronounced him dead, and on 2 May he was buried in the local cemetery. In 1980 a man approached his sister Angelina in the market at L'Estère and introduced himself as Clairvius. As proof he used a childhood nickname only the family knew and recalled details of their family past; other villagers recognised him too. He said he had been conscious as he was declared dead and as his grave was filled in, and that a bokor, a sorcerer, then dug him up and forced him, along with other ‘zombies’, to work as a slave on a plantation until their overseer was killed; after that he wandered for years. The case was investigated by the Haitian psychiatrist Lamarque Douyon, and in 1982 a Harvard ethnobotany student, Wade Davis, arrived. Davis concluded that Narcisse had been given a powder containing tetrodotoxin from pufferfish, which produces a death-like state. He described this in The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985), which Wes Craven turned into a horror film.

Witnesses

His sister Angelina Narcisse and the villagers of L'Estère who recognised him; the psychiatrist Lamarque Douyon; Wade Davis (The Serpent and the Rainbow, 1985); records of the hospital at Deschapelles.

Explanations and hypotheses

Davis's theory sparked a fierce dispute. The toxicologists C. Y. Kao and T. Yasumoto found no significant tetrodotoxin in samples of ‘zombie powder’, and a 1988 article in Science, ‘Voodoo science’, quoted critics who called the work simply bad science; Davis replied that the preparations varied and the detection methods were unreliable. Sceptics also point to other possibilities: mistaken identity, or mental illness in the man who claimed to be Narcisse. No one, however, has disproved the fact that his family and neighbours recognised him, and the case remains the best-documented instance of a Haitian zombie – a phenomenon scholars treat as part of a real system of violence and punishment rather than as fantasy.

Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.

Sources

  1. Harvard Magazine – Gino Del Guercio, The Secrets of Haiti's Living Dead (1986)
  2. Science – W. Booth, Voodoo science (1988)
  3. Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow (Simon & Schuster, 1985)
  4. Skeptical Inquirer – Terence Hines, Zombies and Tetrodotoxin (2008)

More: Wikipedia (en)