The first thing you have to do when you even begin to
try to understand a phenomenon like the Haitian zombie
one thread woven through the fabric of
this amazing culture is to sort of eliminate
from your consciousness all your preconceptions.
In 1982, Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis traveled
to Port Au Prince to investigate the biological underpinnings
of the Haitian zombie.
As early as 1938, Zora Neale Hurston
found there was a voodoo potion that could induce a death-like state
though she concluded the ingredients were so guarded
no sorcerer would ever reveal them.
Wade Davis did what Hurston thought impossible,
and over the course of 4 years he gained the trust
of several voodoo sorcerers
uncovering the ingredients of the secret potion
and documenting his experience in the 1985 bestseller
The Serpent and the Rainbow.
Though Davis is quick to say he's not a zombieologist,
he's still considered the world's leading authority
on the Haitian zombie.
Now what is a zombie?
A zombie, by folk belief,
is a living dead.
It's an individual that has been brought to his demise
by sorcery, passed through the grave
or at least passed through a kind of a state of
of death and then somehow magically resuscitated.
Zombies were almost deemed to be
off limits for serious academic research.
But Lamarque Douyon had found
this really extraordinary case
of this man called Clairvius Narcisse.
What made the case unique is that
Narcisse had been pronounced dead
in the Schweitzer hospital and his death had been witnessed
by two physicians, both American trained,
one an American.
There were impeccable records describing
his pathology at the time of his demise.
18 years later this man
claiming to be Clairvius Narcisse
turns up in his home village
claiming that he'd been made a zombie.
All these lines of evidence led
Lamarque Douyon to go public
in about 1980, 1981,
saying that they had found the first
medically verifiable instance of a zombie.
That kind of opening
brought everybody back to a series of reports
that had existed in the folk literature
of the reputed existence of a folk poison
that was said to bring on a state of apparent
death so profound that it could fool a physician.
Lamarque Douyon had tried for some time
to secure the formula of that preparation to no avail.
And that's why I was sort of brought into the investigation.
Schultes, you know, my professor,
the man who sparked the psychedelic movement
he was very much my mentor.
I was working in the Amazon and one day
he summoned me to his fourth floor aerie at the Botanic Museum
and asked me if I wanted to sort of go down to Haiti
for two weeks over spring break and
try to find the formula of the drug used to make zombies
well naturally I said sure,
There are lots of plants and lots of animals that are poisonous
and that can kill you.
We weren't just looking for a toxin that could kill,
we were looking for a toxin that could bring a state of apparent death
so profound that it would bring someone literally to the edge of death
a threshold from which they could then recover.
And I went down to Haiti and
was able to secure the formula of the preparation.
The preparation contains a veritable Whitman's sampler of
poisons, showcasing the great diversity
of Haiti's medicinal flora and fauna,
spanning 2 kindgoms and 8 Linnaean classes.
The potions Davis collected included such ingredients as
daterous tremonium,
velvet bean,
cane toad,
puffer fish,
Hispaniolan boa,
bearded fireworm,
tarantula,
cashew leaves,
and the bones of a human child.
To the sorcerer who mixes the potions,
each ingredient serves a distinct purpose
with the human bones playing a role
every bit as important as the psychoactive plants.
But to Davis, two ingredients held the key
to understanding the phenomenon of zombiefication.
The puffer fish contains a chemical called
tetrodotoxin, or TTX.
If administered in the correct dose,
the victim will find themselves trapped in a flaccid paralysis
perfectly mimicking the appearance of death.
Upon their exhumation, the victim is fed a paste
of daterous tremonium, which obliterates their memory,
leaving them in a stupified, obedient delirium.
We never could prove really anything.
But we could show that this was
this was something that had a kind of coherence
within the worldview of the Haitian
people. If it could not be absolutely proven,
it was at least so provocative that it demanded investigation.
If you eliminate the other possibilities,
you have to allow the facts to speak for themselves,
and that's why I was prepared to say very strongly that
I thought this phenomenon existed.
In the years since the publication of Davis' work
there's been little formal investigation of the zombie phenomenon
Though teams of scientists and anthropologists
have traveled to Haiti in search of answers,
they often failed to find what they are looking for.
Some have been fooled in elaborate hoaxes,
or found that the zombies could be explained medically
with conditions such as schizophrenia
and others have been imprisoned or sent home with nothing at all.
In Haiti, the use of this powder is
a crime on par with murder,
and those who concoct it do so with the knowledge
that it will be used to destroy a human life.
In light of all this uncertainty,
I will travel to Haiti to investigate the zombie
and attempt to collect poison samples for the first chemical analysis
in almost 30 years.
My results could support Davis' theory
or redefine our concept of the Haitian zombie.
Or I could have a railroad spike driven through my scrotum.