What Do We Know About Zombies?

What Do We Know About
Zombies?

On October 1, 1968, an audience of all ages settled into their seats in the Fulton Theater in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the premiere of a new film called Night of the Living Dead. At that time, movies did not yet have the ratings system we have today, which lets audiences know which movies are okay for kids to see.

Many of the people in the theater were teenagers and younger children. They had enjoyed plenty of fun scary movies, and were eager to see a new one. The lights went down and the movie began.

On screen, a girl named Barbra and her brother, Johnny, visited their father’s grave in rural Pennsylvania, not too far from the very theater where the movie was playing. Barbra’s brother made fun of her for being afraid of the spooky graveyard. As they laid some flowers on the ground, lightning flashed. They saw a man lurching and stumbling among the gravestones. “They’re coming to get you, Barbra!” Johnny teased her as the man came closer.

But it turns out that the man in the graveyard really was coming to get her. He was a dead person who had come back to life. He wanted to attack and eat them both. Barbra and Johnny had never heard of such a creature before and until that day in 1968, the movie audience had never heard of the concept of the living dead, either. While stories about vampires and werewolves had been around for hundreds of years, this shuffling, groaning, hungry monster had never been seen before.

Night of the Living Dead was much too scary for many of the younger kids in the theater. They weren’t even sure what these monsters were called.
In the months that followed, fans of the movie would start calling them zombies. That name came from a totally different kind of walking dead. The original zombie didn’t bite, it didn’t growl, and it didn’t eat people. The idea for this creature came from a Caribbean country called Haiti.

Chapter 1
The Magic Island
People disagree on the exact origin of the word zombie. But it became widely known in the United States thanks to a man named William Seabrook, who published a book called The Magic Island in 1929. The book was about his travels in Haiti, a nation that shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean Sea, east of Cuba and Jamaica.

At the time Seabrook visited Haiti, it was an independent country. Before that, it had been a colony, first of Spain, and then of France. A colony is a country controlled by a more powerful one, which often uses the colony’s natural resources to enrich itself.

Many valuable products, including sugar, coffee, indigo, cacao, and cotton, were once grown and harvested by enslaved people in Haiti. Slavery officially ended in Haiti in 1805. But before it did, most of the people in Haiti—-sometimes as much as 90 percent of the population—-were enslaved.

Fieldwork and other labor in Haiti was so difficult that the enslaved workers longed to be free of it, even if they had to die to do so. However, some whispered that even death might not free them. They told stories of people who rose out of their graves as zombies—-empty human shells without souls who returned to the fields like puppets who didn’t control their own bodies. A zombie had to do anything its master wanted them to do. Some say the enslavers themselves spread these stories to scare people out of trying to become free. They knew the worst thing their workers could imagine was being enslaved even after death.

Hispaniola
The island that Haiti sits on is four hundred miles long and one hundred and fifty miles wide. When Christopher Columbus landed there in 1492, he claimed the whole island for Spain and named it Hispaniola, which meant Spanish Island. Over the next few centuries, French settlers came to Hispaniola, too.

By 1697, the northwestern part of the island was controlled by France, who called it Saint--Domingue. It eventually became the country of Haiti. The rest of the island is now the territory of the Dominican Republic. The official language of the Dominican Republic is Spanish. The official languages of Haiti are French and Haitian Creole. Each country speaks the language of the larger one that originally colonized it.

William Seabrook was a journalist who traveled to places most Americans had never seen. He wrote stories that made them seem very exciting and mysterious. His descriptions of Haiti were no different.

One chapter of The Magic Island in particular got a lot of attention. It was called “. . . Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields.”

In it, Seabrook said he’d visited a field owned by an American sugar company that hired local people to work for it. Some of these workers looked strange to Seabrook. They shuffled when they walked. They didn’t speak. Their eyes seemed dull and lifeless. All these things could be explained by the exhausting work they were doing in the hot sun. But Seabrook claimed he was told they were “zombies.” A zombie was said to be the body of a person who had died and then been brought back to life to work for the sugar company.

Even though slavery had ended more than one hundred years before Seabrook wrote his book, people in Haiti still told stories about zombies forced to work or even commit crimes for the person who controlled them. People in Haiti didn’t really fear being hurt by zombies. They were afraid of becoming one themselves. They hoped that if they were ever turned into a zombie, someone would feed them salt. It was said that the taste of salt would make a zombie return to their grave.

When The Magic Island was published in the United States, it became a bestseller. American readers were fascinated by these creatures called zombies and the strange power that was needed to create and control them.

Chapter 2
Vodou
Haiti was a colony of France from 1659 to 1804. During that time, the French passed a law saying that every enslaved worker had to be baptized into France’s official religion, Catholicism. Once a person was baptized as Catholic, they were taught about their new faith and ordered to give up any religious beliefs they had before.

As life for enslaved people in Haiti was so difficult, their lives were often very short. New people were constantly being enslaved and brought to Haiti to fill the need for labor. Usually, those people were taken from the African continent. They brought with them their beliefs and rituals.

The enslaved workers didn’t all come from the exact same part of Africa, and didn’t all share the exact same ideas. But their beliefs had more in common with each other than with the Catholic faith of France. Over time, the enslaved people created their own religion by combining different traditions into something new. This new religion was called Vodou. It was practiced in secret because it was against the law for anyone in the colony to be anything other than Catholic.

There is only one god in Vodou, called Bondye, which means “good god.” There are also thousands of spirits, called loa (or lwa). The loa have mysterious powers. They can heal illness and protect people from harm, punish those who do wrong, and give people advice to guide them to good fortune. They can even guide a revolution to victory. The loa sometimes speak through dreams or provide signs for religious leaders to interpret. Vodou priests are called oungans. Priestesses are called manbos. They often lead ceremonies with drumming and dancing. During these ceremonies, people can be taken over by the loa spirits to speak for them or do their will.

Haitian Revolution (1791–-1804)
On the night of August 21, 1791, thousands of Haiti’s enslaved workers snuck away to a secret Vodou ceremony. At that time, the country was still a French colony called Saint--Domingue. The leaders of the meeting were planning something shocking. They wanted to rise up against their French colonizers and claim their home for themselves. It was a stormy night full of thunder and lightning. The violent weather must have seemed like the loas’ way of telling them they would succeed. Inspired by the ideas they heard at the meeting, the participants began attacking their enslavers and burning their houses. News of the revolt quickly spread. Within weeks a hundred thousand enslaved people had joined the fight against the French.

The war was fought off and on for thirteen years and ended with Haiti becoming a free country. The Haitian Revolution remains the only successful slave revolt in history.

The loa spirits were a source of great magical power, and great power could be dangerous. Some Vodou leaders refused to do anything for the loa that they considered destructive or wrong. Others chose to serve the loa “with both hands.” That meant they were willing to do magic that could be dangerous or scary. Those priests are called bokors, and the priestesses caplatas.

A houngan or a manbo would not make a zombie. That is the kind of magic that only a bokor or a caplata would do.

By the time William Seabrook published The Magic Island in 1929, some people in the United States—­but very few—­were already familiar with Vodou. During the Haitian Revolution, many French slaveowners had fled their country, bringing enslaved people with them. Those slaves introduced their religion to people in the United States, especially in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The practice of Vodou became so widespread in the city of New Orleans that it developed into its own special version with its own spelling: voodoo. A visitor to New Orleans today can see the Voodoo Spiritual Temple there, as well as a historic museum of voodoo.

Marie Laveau (1801–-1881)
Marie Catherine Laveau was one of the most famous American followers of voodoo. She was born in New Orleans to a single mother. Although slavery was still legal in the United States at that time, Marie’s mother was a free black woman. Marie became the leader of New Orleans’s voodoo community, and was often called the “Voodoo Queen.” It was said she could predict the future. She worked as a healer and sold charms to protect people from danger. Today, tourists and believers visit her tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans to make wishes on it, believing she still has the power to grant them.

Vodou is still practiced all over the world by millions of people. It is intended to bring healing and comfort, beauty and joy to the world. To many outside the faith, however, Vodou remains the same scary and mysterious tradition that William Seabrook wrote about in his book.

Seabrook’s book inspired other authors to write their own stories about zombies created by magic. There was even a play called Zombie on Broadway for a short time in 1932. Once Seabrook’s zombies had shuffled from the page to the stage, it wasn’t surprising that they would go on to conquer the silver screen.