the zombies are coming…

Zombies are real. They're just not the undead risen from their graves to feast on human flesh...

Though they're coming very slowly and they're not really dead. In 1983, there was an interesting report by Time magazine about real life zombies in Haiti. In what sounds like a script for a low budget horror movie, voodoo priests in rural Haiti created their very own army of zombies to slave on sugar plantations as a pliant workforce. There wasn't any supernatural process involved because these zombies were actually quite alive, but they were drugged out of their minds with a plant known to Haitians as a zombie cucumber.

After feeding their victims with powerful coma-inducing toxins and allowing them to be buried by their friends and family, the voodoo priests dig them out, revive them and keep the hapless souls stoned out of their mind on hallucinogenics. Because they were presumed to be dead by anyone who would want to search for them, the victims could be used as slaves with absolutely no repercussions.

And in their completely shattered mental state, they were barely able to do a simple task, much less plot an escape. However, one zombie slave managed to wander off and his story attracted the attention of a Harvard botanist who's research lead to the reports of this bizarre tale in the international media.

So what intoxicants would be powerful enough to turn you into a real life version of a mindless, meandering creature which seems more dead than alive? In the case of the Haiti zombies, they come as a paste of sweet potato and a monstrously potent hallucinogenic called datura. People forced to eat this concoction on a regular basis completely lose touch with their memories and their basic sense of how time passes by.

In the case of ex-zombie Clairvius Narcisse, it took an alarming 18 years for him to find a way back. There are also tales of zombie-like behavior from Japan but rather than a criminal enterprise draped in ritual, these so-called zombies ate a badly prepared fugu fish which left them paralyzed and unresponsive but fully conscious. When they recover, these food poisoning victims seem to rise from the dead.

Just goes to show that before trying some extreme local cuisine, you should make sure that the food on your plate won't expose you to a cocktail of neurotoxins that could do all sorts of very strange and unpleasant things to you. Like turn you into a lumbering zombie for example…