Clairvius Narcisse and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Zombie Life | 518

What if you died, got pronounced dead by doctors, buried by your family, and then showed up 18 years later with one hell of an excuse for missing Thanksgiving? Enter the bizarre true story of Clairvius Narcisse, the Haitian man who allegedly became a real-life zombie after being poisoned, buried alive, dug back up, drugged, and forced into labor.

We explore the terrifying history of Haitian zombies and Vodou, Wade Davis and his controversial search for zombie powder, and the surprisingly real science behind pufferfish toxin, tetrodotoxin, Datura, paralysis, and premature burial.

Could ancient knowledge of neurotoxins actually turn someone into a living zombie, or did science take a fascinating Haitian tradition and run a little too far with it? Plus, we examine the skeptics and competing explanations that make the answer considerably messier than "dead people don't walk."

Poison fish, stolen souls, questionable pharmacology, family land disputes, zombie plantations, and perhaps the worst return-to-work story in human history... All that and more this week on Hysteria 51.

Sources

• Wade Davis – The Serpent and the Rainbow
• https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Serpent-and-the-Rainbow/Wade-Davis/9780684839295
• Wade Davis – Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie
• https://books.google.com/books?id=tVxZAAAAMAAJ
• Wade Davis – “The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombi” – Journal of Ethnopharmacology
• https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-8741(83)90029-6
• William Booth – “Voodoo Science” – Science
• https://doi.org/10.1126/science.3353722
• Wade Davis – “Zombification” – Science
• https://doi.org/10.1126/science.3381089
• Roland Littlewood & Chavannes Douyon – “Clinical Findings in Three Cases of Zombification” – The Lancet
• https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(97)04449-8
• Harvard Magazine – “The Secrets of Haiti’s Living Dead”
• https://www.harvardmagazine.com/sites/default/files/zombie_1986_small.pdf
• TIME – “Zombies: Do They Exist?”
• https://time.com/archive/6697896/medicine-zombies-do-they-exist/
• PBS American Experience – “What Happened When Zora Neale Hurston Studied Voodoo in Haiti?”
• https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/claiming-space-when-happened-when-zora-neale-hurston-studied-voodoo-haiti/
• Zora Neale Hurston – Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
• https://www.harpercollins.com/products/tell-my-horse-zora-neale-hurston
• Library of Congress – “Does the Haitian Criminal Code Outlaw Making Zombies?”
• https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2014/10/does-the-haitian-criminal-code-outlaw-making-zombies/
• Chen-Yuan Kao & Takeshi Yasumoto – “Tetrodotoxin Intoxication: A Worldwide Problem” – Toxicon
• https://doi.org/10.1016/0041-0101(86)90067-8
• Jean Price-Mars – “The Story of Zombi in Haiti”
• https://sites.duke.edu/haitilab/files/2014/11/Mars-1945-The-story-of-zombie-in-haiti.pdf

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