EsoteriaA library of sacred & hidden knowledge
Liber XXXIV · Vodou & Hoodoo

Liber XXXIV · Vodou & Hoodoo · Chapter VI: Myths & Misconceptions

The Zombie in Haitian Folklore: The Zonbi, Law and History

The zombie in Haitian folklore: the zonbi of body and soul, its roots in slavery, Haitian law, the Narcisse case and Wade Davis, and how Hollywood changed it.

8 min read 1,752 words Updated

In Haitian folklore a zombie (zonbi in Haitian Creole) is not a flesh-eating corpse but a person whose body or soul has been captured by a sorcerer and enslaved. The fear it expresses is of losing one's will and becoming another's property, a fear that historians connect with the memory of slavery in Saint-Domingue, and the flesh-eating monster of modern film is a much later American creation.

The Zonbi in Haitian Belief: Body, Soul and Sorcerer§

The zonbi belongs to the darker margins of Haitian religious life, not to the ordinary service of the lwa. Vodou practitioners distinguish between the houngan and manbo, priests who serve the spirits and heal, and the bòkò, a sorcerer said to "serve with both hands", that is, to work for harm as well as help. In popular belief it is the bòkò, not the Vodou priest, who makes zombies. (For the religion itself, see Haitian Vodou.)

Two kinds of zombie are commonly described. The zonbi kò, or zombie of the body, is a person who appears to die, is buried and is then taken from the grave by a sorcerer who has captured part of the soul. Without that part the body can work and obey but has no will, memory or speech of its own. Such zombies were said to be set to labour in distant fields, a picture that maps closely onto the plantation. The zonbi nanm, sometimes called the zonbi astral, is the reverse: a disembodied soul, often identified with the ti bonnanj, captured and kept in a bottle or other container, where it can be put to work or sold.

Several pieces of lore recur in ethnographic accounts. A zombie is said to be revived, or at least made aware of its condition, by tasting salt, which is why stories warn against giving zombies salted food. The guardians of the cemetery, Bawon Samdi and his family (see The Gede and Fèt Gede), are said to have to consent before a body can be taken, and families traditionally guard fresh graves or take measures to make the dead unusable. These beliefs reveal what Haitians fear about the zombie: not being attacked by one, but becoming one.

Origins: Kongo Words, Slavery and Saint-Domingue§

The origin of the word is not certain, but most scholars look to Central Africa. In Kikongo, nzambi means God or a high spirit, and in Kimbundu nzumbi refers to a spirit or ghost of the dead. Since a large proportion of the enslaved Africans brought to Saint-Domingue in the eighteenth century came from the Kongo and Angola region, a Central African origin is plausible. Ideas about captured souls also have parallels in Kongo traditions of spirit-filled medicines, discussed in Minkisi: Kongo Sacred Medicines.

The term appears in French Caribbean writing by the late eighteenth century, where it usually means a ghost or spirit rather than a reanimated body. Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, describing Saint-Domingue in the 1790s, noted the belief among the enslaved in zombis as spirits, and the nineteenth-century writer Lafcadio Hearn later recorded zombie lore in Martinique.

The Haitian zombie of body and soul took its familiar form in a society shaped by the plantation. Writers such as Joan Dayan, in Haiti, History, and the Gods, read the zombie as a memory of slavery: a person stripped of name, will and future, made to work for another without end. After independence in 1804 the image remained potent because the threat of forced labour did not disappear. It could be turned against new masters, landlords and political bosses, and in the twentieth century it was attached by rumour to the secret police of the Duvalier dictatorship.

Zombies and Haitian Law§

Haitian law addressed zombification directly. An article of the nineteenth-century Haitian penal code, usually cited as Article 246, defined as attempted murder the use of substances that produce a lethargic state resembling death, without killing, and treated the act as murder if the person was then buried. The article does not mention zombies by name, but it was widely understood as aimed at them, and travel writers from the 1920s onward quoted it as proof that Haitians took the zonbi seriously.

The law shows that the zombie was treated as a crime committed by human beings, not as a supernatural monster. Behind it stood real concerns about poisoning, which had haunted Saint-Domingue since the eighteenth century, when the colonial authorities blamed a wave of deaths on the maroon leader François Makandal. Whether any particular case of zombification ever involved a drug, however, is a separate question that the law did not answer.

From Seabrook to Hollywood: The American Zombie§

The zombie reached the English-speaking world during the United States occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). In 1929 the American writer William Seabrook published The Magic Island, a sensational travel book that described zombies working in the cane fields of the Haitian American Sugar Company. The book sold widely and inspired White Zombie (1932), starring Bela Lugosi as a sorcerer who controls a mill worked by zombies. Films such as I Walked with a Zombie (1943) followed, mostly set in imagined Caribbean islands.

Zora Neale Hurston, in Tell My Horse (1938), reported on Felicia Felix-Mentor, a woman found in 1936 who was said to be a zombie, and published a photograph of her that circulated widely. Hurston took the belief seriously as a social fact while also suggesting that drugs might be involved. The anthropologist Alfred Métraux, in Voodoo in Haiti, recorded zombie stories with a cooler eye and noted how often supposed zombies turned out to be people with mental illness or confused identities.

The decisive break came in 1968 with George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, whose cannibal corpses were not even called zombies in the film. Later audiences gave them that name, and the flesh-eating, contagious undead of modern horror took over the word. Roger Luckhurst's Zombies: A Cultural History traces how far this figure travelled from its Haitian source. For the broader history of stereotypes, see Voodoo Myths and Misconceptions.

Wade Davis, Clairvius Narcisse and the Zombie Powder Debate§

The best-known modern case is that of Clairvius Narcisse. According to the published accounts, he was declared dead at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Deschapelles in 1962 and buried, and in 1980 a man who identified himself as Narcisse appeared in his home village, claiming to have been made a zombie and forced to work on a distant plantation. The Haitian psychiatrist Lamarque Douyon investigated the case and others like it.

In the early 1980s the Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis went to Haiti to investigate. In The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) and the more academic Passage of Darkness (1988), he argued that some zombification could be explained by a powder containing tetrodotoxin, a nerve poison found in certain pufferfish, which might produce a death-like state, followed by a psychological and social process in which the victim came to believe he was a zombie. He linked the practice to secret societies, the Bizango, which he described as using zombification as a punishment for social offences.

Davis's thesis provoked strong criticism. Toxicologists who analysed powder samples reported finding little or no tetrodotoxin, and some argued that a dose capable of producing apparent death would very likely kill. Davis replied to these critiques, and the debate has never been fully settled. In 1997 the psychiatrists Roland Littlewood and Chavannes Douyon published an examination of three supposed zombies in The Lancet, concluding that their cases were better explained by mental illness, learning disability and mistaken identity. The film loosely based on Davis's book, released in 1988, added its own layer of horror.

The Zombie in Haitian Culture Today§

In Haiti the zonbi remains part of folklore, rumour and art rather than of the regular practice of Vodou. Vodou priests interviewed by ethnographers often describe zombification as the work of sorcerers they condemn. Haitian writers have used the zombie as a powerful metaphor: René Depestre's novel Hadriana dans tous mes rêves (1988) centres on a young woman apparently zombified on her wedding day, and many writers have used the figure to speak about dictatorship, poverty and the loss of agency.

Scholars of Haiti stress the irony of the zombie's global career. A figure that expressed the horror of enslavement became, through American occupation-era writing and film, a symbol of Haitian "primitivism", and finally a mindless monster that says nothing about Haiti at all.

Frequently asked questions§

What is a zombie in Haitian Vodou?§

Strictly, the zonbi belongs to Haitian folklore and sorcery rather than to the worship of the lwa. It is a person whose body or soul has been captured by a sorcerer (bòkò) and made to serve without will. Vodou priests generally condemn such practices.

Are Haitian zombies real?§

Haitians have reported cases of supposed zombies, and the law treated deliberate induced death-like states as a crime. Whether any case involved a drug is disputed: Wade Davis proposed a tetrodotoxin powder, but critics found the evidence weak, and medical studies have explained several cases through illness or mistaken identity.

Where does the word zombie come from?§

Most scholars derive it from Central African words such as Kikongo nzambi (God, spirit) or Kimbundu nzumbi (a spirit of the dead), brought to Saint-Domingue by enslaved Africans. The exact path of borrowing is uncertain.

Do zombies in Haitian folklore eat people?§

No. The flesh-eating zombie comes from American horror cinema, especially after 1968. The Haitian zonbi is feared as an enslaved worker or captured soul, not as a predator.

Sources and further reading§