REMASTERED – Episode 26: Brought Back

This is the story of the one.

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No one wants to die.

If a human design was scheduled for a revision, that's one of the features that would get an overhaul.

Our mortality has been an obsession since the dawn of humanity itself.

People long for ways to avoid death, or at least to make it bearable.

Some cultures have practically moved heaven and earth to do so.

Thousands of years ago, the Egyptians built enormous stone structures in order to house their dead and ensure them a place in the afterlife.

They perfected the art of embalming so that even after death, those bodies might be ready for a new existence in a new place.

Death, though, is a reality for all of us, whether we like it or not.

Young or old, rich or poor, healthy or sick, life is one long journey down a road, and we walk until it's over.

Some think they see a light at the end of it all, while others hope for darkness.

And that's where the mystery of it all comes in.

No one knows what's on the other side.

We just know that the proverbial walk ends at some point.

And maybe that's why we spend so much time guessing at it, building story and myth and belief around this thing we can't put our finger on.

What would be easier, some say, is if we just didn't die, if we somehow went on forever.

It's impossible, but we dream of it anyway.

No one returns from the grave.

Do they?

Most sane, well-adjusted people would say no, but stories exist that say otherwise, and these stories aren't new.

They've been around for thousands of years and span multiple cultures.

And like their subject matter, these stories simply refuse to die.

One reason for that, as hard as it is to believe, is because some of those stories appear to be true.

Depending on where you look and who you ask, there are whispers of those who beat the odds.

Sometimes the journey doesn't end after all.

Sometimes the dead really do walk.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this

is Lore.

The quintessential zombie movie, the one that all the commentators say was responsible for putting zombies on the map 50 years ago, was George A.

Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead.

The creatures that Romero brought to the big screen managed to influence generations of filmmakers, giving us the iconic zombie that we see today in television shows like The Walking Dead.

The trouble is, Romero never used the word zombie to describe the creatures from his landmark film.

Instead, they were ghouls, a creature borrowed from Arabian folklore.

According to the mythology, ghouls are demons who eat the dead, and because of that, they're usually found in graveyards.

But Romero's ghouls were not the first undead creatures to hunger for the flesh and blood of the living.

Some think that honor falls to the Odyssey, the epic Greek poem written by Homer nearly 3,000 years ago.

In the story, there's a scene where Odysseus needs to get some information from a long-dead prophet named Tiresias.

To give the spirit strength to speak, Odysseus feeds him blood.

In a lot of ways, the creatures we think of today as zombies are similar to the European tales of the Revenant.

They've gone by many names.

The ancient Irish called them the Niyav Mari, meaning the undead.

In Germany, they are the Viederganger, the one who walks again.

And in Nordic mythology, they're called the Drauger.

And the name Revenant itself is Latin and means the returned.

The basic concept is pretty easy to guess from that.

Revenants are those who were once dead, but have returned to haunt and terrorize their neighbors and family.

It might sound like fantasy to our modern sensibilities, but some people really did believe that this could happen.

Historians in the Middle Ages wrote about revenant activity as if it were fact.

One man, William of Newbury, wrote in 1190 that, and I quote, It would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead should sally from their graves and should wander about to terror or destruction of the living, did not frequent examples occurring in our own times suffice to establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony.

Were I to write down all the instances of this kind which I have ascertained to have befallen in our times, the undertaking would be beyond measure laborious and troublesome.

Newbery goes on to wonder why the ancient writers never mentioned events like these, but doesn't seem to take that as proof that revenants are fantasy.

They mentioned all sorts of boring things, mundane and important mostly, so why not the unnatural or the unusual?

He was wrong, of course.

The ancient Greeks did have certain beliefs surrounding the dead and their their ability to return to haunt the living.

But to them, it was much more complicated, and each revenant came back with its own unique purpose.

You see, the Greco-Roman culture believed that there was a gap between the date of someone's actual death and the intended date of their death.

Remember, this was a culture that believed in the Miri, the fates, who had a plan for everyone's life.

So, for example, a farmer may be destined to die in his 80s from natural causes, but he could instead die in an accident accident in his field or at the market.

And these people who died early, according to the legends, were doomed to wander the land of the living as spirits until the date of their intended death had arrived.

Still with me?

Good.

So, what the Greeks believed was that it was possible to control those wandering spirits.

All you needed to do was make a curse tablet, something written on clay or tin or even parchment, and then bury it in the person's grave.

Like a key in the ignition of a car, this tablet would would empower someone to control the wandering dead.

It might sound like the world's creepiest Martha Stewart how-to project, but to the Greeks, magic like this was a powerful part of their belief system.

The dead weren't really gone, and because of that, they could serve a purpose.

Unfortunately, that's not an attitude that was unique to the Greeks, and in the right culture, at the right time, and under the right pressure, it was an idea that could be devastating.

In Haiti, the vast majority of the people there are genetically connected to West Africa to some degree, up to 95% according to some studies.

It's a reminder of a darker time, when slavery was legal and millions of Africans were pulled from their homes and transported across the Atlantic to work the sugar plantations that filled the Spanish coffers.

We tend to imagine African slaves as being shipped to the New World with no possessions besides their clothing on their back, but they came with their beliefs, with their customs and traditions, and with centuries of folklore and superstition.

They might not have carried luggage filled with precious heirlooms, but they held the most important pieces of their identity in their minds and hearts, and no one could take that away.

There are a few ideas that need to be understood about this transplanted culture.

First, they believed that the soul and the body were connected, but also that death could be a moment of separation between the two.

Not always, but it could be.

I'll explain more about that in a moment.

Second, they lived with a hatred and fear of slavery.

Slavery took away their freedom.

It took away their power.

They no longer had control over their lives, their dreams, or even their own bodies.

Whether they liked it or not, they were doomed to endure horribly difficult labor for the rest of their lives.

Only death would break the chains and set them free.

And third, that freedom wasn't guaranteed.

While most Africans dreamed of returning to their homeland in the afterlife, there were some who wanted to get there quicker.

Suicide was common in colonial Haiti, but it was also frowned upon.

In fact, it was believed that those who ended their own life wouldn't be taken back to Africa at all.

Instead, they would be punished.

The penalty, it was said, was eternal imprisonment inside their own body, without control or power over themselves.

It was, in a sense, just like their life.

To the slaves of Haiti, hell was just more slavery, but a slavery that went on forever.

These bodies and trapped souls had a name in their culture, the zombie.

It was first recorded in 1872 when a linguistics scholar recorded a zombie was, and I quote, a phantom or ghost not infrequently heard in the southern states in nurseries and among the servants.

The name, it turns out, has African roots as well.

In the Congo, they use the word nzambi, which means the spirit of the dead person.

It's related to two other words that both mean god and fetish.

Fetish in this sense being a manufactured thing, a creature that has been made.

The walking dead, at least according to Haitian lore, are real.

And what do these zambi look like?

Well, thanks to Zora Neale Hurston, we have a first-hand account.

Hurston was an African-American author known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, and is regarded as one of the pillars of the Harlem Renaissance.

And it was while researching folklore during a trip to Haiti in 1936 that she encountered something strange.

In her book, Tell My Horse, Hurston recounts what happened.

I had the rare opportunity to see and touch an authentic case, she wrote.

I listened to the broken noises in its throat.

If I had not experienced all of this in the strong sunlight of the hospital yard, I might have come away from Haiti interested, but doubtful.

But I saw this case of Felicia Felix

which was vouched for by the highest authority.

So I know that there are zombies in Haiti.

People have been called back from the dead.

The sight was dreadful, she said.

That blank face with the dead eyes.

The eyelids were white all around the eyes as if they had been burned with acid.

There was nothing you could say to her or get from her except by looking at her, and the sight of this wreckage was too much to endure for long.

Wreckage.

I can't think of another word with as much beauty and horror as that in this context.

Something was happening in Haiti, and the result was wreckage.

Lives broken and torn apart by something.

But what?

The assumption might be that these people all had attempted suicide.

But suicide is common in many cultures, not just in Haiti.

When you dig deeper, though, it's possible to uncover the truth.

And in this case, the truth is much darker than we'd like to believe.

Zombies, it turns out, can be created.

On the night of April 30th of 1962, a man walked into the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti.

He was sick and complained of body aches, a fever, and, most recently, coughing fits that brought blood up from his lungs.

Naturally, the medical staff was concerned, and they admitted him for tests and treatment.

This man, Clervius Narcis, was seen by a number of medical doctors, but his condition quickly deteriorated.

One of his sisters, Angelina, was there at his bedside, and according to her, his lips turned blue and he complained to her of a tingling sensation all over his body.

But despite the hospital's best efforts, Narcis died the next day.

Two doctors, one American and one American-trained, each confirmed his death.

The man's sister Angelina signed the death certificate after confirming the man's identity.

Because she couldn't read or write, she did so by pressing her thumbprint onto the paper.

And then his family began the painful process of burying their loved one and trying to move on.

Death, as always, is a part of life.

Never a pleasant one, but a part nonetheless.

Over 18 years later, in 1981, Angelina Narcisse was walking through the market in her village, something she did nearly every day.

She knew the faces of each vendor.

She knew the scents and the sounds that filled the space there.

But when she looked down the dirt road toward the small crowd of people, something frightened her and she screamed.

There,

walking toward her, was her brother, Clervius.

He was, of course, older now.

but it was him.

She would have recognized him anywhere.

And when he finally approached her and named himself with a childhood nickname, any doubt she might have had melted away.

What followed was a whirlwind of revelations as Clervius told his sister what had happened to him.

And it all started, he said, in the hospital room.

According to him, his last moments in the bed there were dark but fully aware.

He could no longer see anyone and he couldn't move, but he remembered hearing the doctor pronounce him dead.

He remembered the sound of his sister weeping, and he even remembered the rough cotton sheet sheet being pulled up and over his face.

That awareness continued on to his funeral, where he claimed to hear the procession.

He even pointed to a scar on his face and claimed that it was a result of one of the coffin nails cutting him.

Later, the family brought in a psychiatrist who performed a series of tests on Clervius to see if he was a fraud, but the man passed with flying colors, answering questions that no one but Clervius himself could have known.

In addition, over 200 friends and family members vouched for the man's identity.

This, all of them confirmed, was Clervius Narsis.

So what happened to him?

According to Clervius himself, he was poisoned by his brother over a property dispute.

How, he wasn't sure.

But shortly after his burial, a group of men dug up his coffin and pulled him free.

That's a thought worth locking away deep in the back of your brain, by the way.

Trapped inside a coffin beneath the earth, blind and paralyzed, cold and scared.

It's a wonder the man didn't lose his mind.

The men who dug him up were led by a priest called a Bokor.

The men chained Clervius and then guided him away to a sugar plantation where he was forced to work alongside others in a similar state of helplessness.

Daily doses of a mysterious drug kept all of them unable to resist or leave.

According to his story, he managed to escape two years later.

But fearing what his brother might do to him if he were to show up alive, he avoided returning home.

It It was only the news of his brother's death many years later that coaxed him out of hiding.

The story of Clervius Narcissus has perplexed scientists and historians for decades.

In the 1980s, Harvard sent an ethnobotanist named Wade Davis to investigate the mysterious drug, and the result of his trip was a book called The Serpent and the Rainbow, which would go on to be a New York Times bestseller, as well as a Hollywood movie.

But few agree on the conclusions.

Samples of the drug that Wade collected have all been disproven.

No illegal sugar plantation staffed by zombie slaves has ever been discovered.

And the doctors who attended to Clairvius in 1962 have all been accused of misreading the symptoms and prematurely declaring the man dead.

There are so many doubts.

To the people closest to him, though, the facts are solid.

Clairvius Narcis died.

His family watched his burial in the cemetery.

He was mourned and missed.

And 18 years later, he came back into their lives.

The Walking Dead.

Medical mishap or the result of Haitian black magic?

We may never know, for sure.

Stories of the Walking Dead are everywhere these days.

It's as if we've traded in our obsession with extending our life and resigned to the fact that normal death, the kind where we die and stay dead, might just be better.

We fear death because it means the loss of control, the loss of purpose and freedom.

Death, in the eyes of many people, robs us of our identity and replaces it with finality.

It's understandable then how slavery can be viewed through the same lens.

It removes a person's ability to make decisions for themselves and turns them, in a sense, into nothing more than a machine for the benefit of other people.

But what if there really are individuals out there, the Bokor, or evil priests, who have discovered a way to manufacture their own walking dead, who have perfected the art of enslaving a man or a woman deeper than any slave owner might have managed before, to rob them of their very soul and bind them to an afterlife of tireless, ceaseless labor?

In February of 1976, Francine Ilias was admitted to her local hospital in Haiti.

She said she felt weak and lightheaded, Her digestive system was failing and her stomach ached.

The doctors there treated her and then released her.

Several days later, she passed away and was buried in the local graveyard.

She had only been 30 years old.

Three years later, Francine's mother received a call from a friend a few miles away.

She needed her to come to the local marketplace there and it was urgent.

Francine's mother didn't know what the trouble was, but she made the journey as quickly as she could.

Once there, she was told that a woman woman had been found in the market.

She was emaciated, catatonic, and refused to move from where she was squatting in a corner, head down and hands laced over her face.

The woman, it turned out, was Francine Ilias.

Her mother brought her home and tried to help her, but Francine seemed to be gone.

She was there in body, but there was very little spirit left.

Subsequent doctors and psychiatrists have spent time with Francine, but with very little progress to show for it.

On a whim, Francine's mother had the coffin exhumed.

She had to see for herself if this woman, little more than a walking corpse, truly was her daughter.

Yes, the woman had the same scar on her forehead that her daughter had.

Yes, they looked alike.

Yes, others recognized her as Francine.

But she needed to know for sure.

When the men pulled the coffin out of the earth, it was heavy.

Too heavy, they murmured, to be empty.

More doubtful by the minute, Francine's mother asked them to open it, and when the last nail had been pulled free from the wood, the lid was lifted and cast aside.

The coffin wasn't empty after all.

It was full of rocks.

There's a universe of folklore wrapped up in what we think we know about words like voodoo and zombie.

In fact, for centuries, centuries, an entire belief system thrived and evolved around the activities and services of the head priests known as the Bokor.

But the more you learn about them and the stories of their deeds, the easier it becomes to realize something important.

Fear can often be a way of preserving yourself.

Just how powerful were they?

Well, I've tracked down one more story that should illustrate that nicely.

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In the world of vodu, there are many flavors.

Depending on the region or country you are in, the expression of the religion might be slightly or wildly different, but few locations have such a rich well of folklore as the island nation of Haiti.

In the world of Haitian vodu, there are some core beliefs that are important for us to understand.

First, because because it's a synchronistic religion, meaning a product of mixing a few different larger traditions like Catholicism and West African religions, it has a structure that might feel familiar to many of us.

There are local temples, where priests known as Hungan or Bokor serve the people there.

The priests even have altars.

Back in the 1950s, researchers tried to document a number of those altars and do an inventory on the types of things found on them.

Common objects included candles, matches, one one or more crucifix, red paper or flags, small metal boxes, and various broken objects.

Where the Bokor depart from our image of a priest is in the fact that Bokor charged for their services, similar to a doctor taking a fee for their assistance.

The size of the fee depended on the type of ceremony needed, but unhappy customers would sometimes return and ask for a refund or a portion of their funds to be restored.

And what sort of services did they provide?

Well, some of it was pretty mundane.

Help with crops, potions to give your love life a boost, and medical treatment.

But there was a darker side as well.

It was common for clients to visit a bookhorse and ask for a rival to be poisoned or killed.

But to do that properly, you needed to know their name.

Of course, that sounds a bit obvious, doesn't it?

But apparently there was a huge tradition in Haiti over the centuries that involved the difference between birth names and public names.

A person's real name would be listed on their birth records, but those records weren't something that just anyone had access to, making them private and in some cases, unknowable to most strangers.

And one reason for that was to protect oneself from evil deeds.

It was thought that if someone intended to harm you with a spell or a ritual, that spell wouldn't be able to work without the target's true birth name.

So most people kept their name private and just used a less powerful nickname, one that didn't allow others to control them.

Because as we've already talked about earlier, freedom and control were a constant source of stress for the people of Haiti.

And even in the spiritual realm, that battle had dire consequences.

There were so many things to be careful of, and doing something incorrectly ran the risk of putting yourself at danger.

Or worse, upsetting the gods.

One story might help us understand that relationship better.

In 1953, a man in Haiti found himself with a problem.

Many years before, he had converted to a denomination of Christianity known as the Seventh-day Adventists.

But having grown up in and around Vodu, he started to feel uncomfortable about the various Vodu paraphernalia still lying around his house, so he reached out to his pastor for help.

They had known each other for many years, and the pastor was more than happy to help out.

This man requested that the pastor come and burn one of his god stones, what I'm assuming was a small stone figurine of a specific god.

And so he did just that.

He showed up at the house, took the statue, then set it on fire.

I imagine the man felt better after that.

In his worldview, at least, he had removed an evil influence from his dwelling, and he went about life as if that were the case, that his past was finally behind him, and the old gods no longer had power over him.

But three days later, that man suddenly and tragically passed away.

The night of his death, two neighborhood friends were working late at the nearby coffee processing facility when a noise outside the building caught their attention.

The darkness of night was a risky time to be up and about for those who truly believed all the folklore of the land there.

There were evil spirits and unnatural creatures like the Lugaroo to worry about, and of course, zombies.

As these two men scrambled over to a window, they caught movement outside along the nearby river.

Under the light of the moon, they could see a group of men beginning to cross, as if they were on their way to some destination on the other side.

And while these two men didn't recognize most of the people beside the river, they did see someone they knew.

the dead man who had had his statue of a local god burned by his pastor.

But that man had died, which made the scene they witnessed all the more terrifying.

According to their testimony, the dead man was walking naked beside the others, his hands bound at the wrists.

And as his captors led him at the end of a long, leash-like rope, he groaned over and over again.

It was the sound of a man utterly terrified by what was happening and yet unable to do anything about it.

This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

A television show, by the way, produced by the makers of The Walking Dead.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make an executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think you'd enjoy.

My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical.

You can learn more about all of our shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com.

And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

And when you do, say hi i like it when people say hi and as always thanks for listening

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