Camp Adventure

When the Dead Return

Episode Summary

Do you believe that people can come back from the dead? Today, Ben shares a campfire story about zonbis (different than zombies) and whether the dead can actually come back to life.

Episode Notes

Do you believe that people can come back from the dead? Today, Ben shares a campfire story about zonbis (different than zombies) and whether the dead can actually come back to life.

* Share your camp adventures on social media using #AKCAsummer or write to us at listen@akidsco.com. We love, love, love hearing from you.

Follow the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever podcasts are found and check out other podcasts made for kids just like you by visiting akidsco.com. While you’re there, be sure to check out Ben’s book, A Kids Book About Adventure. 

Episode Transcription

Camp Adventure: A Kids Summer Camp Podcast

S2 E08 When the Dead Return

[INTRODUCTION]

[bugle plays a welcome]

Louis: Welcome to Camp Adventure. The camp in your bedroom or living room. The camp that's in the bus or in the car. Camp Adventure’s for everyone, no matter who you are. 

This week's theme is “When the Dead Return”. 

My name is Counselor Louis and I'm so excited to let you know it's evening time here at camp. That means the campfire is burning and when the campfire is burning, that means it's story time. 

So I'm gonna pass it over to Camp Counselor Ben.

[WELCOME]

Ben: All right. All right, here we go. Louis, thank you so much. And yes, this is Counselor Ben. 

It is time to settle in, get that blanket, find a nice cozy place and, uh, you know, get yourself situated because we're time to rock and roll for some story time. I'll tell you what, you might want to get an extra blanket this evening because we're gonna be talking about zombies.

Mm-hmm. No. Oh my goodness. Just the thought gives me the heeby jeebys. Zombies freak me out. I don't know if they do to you too, but they... They just make, they make me feel so weird. The dead coming back to life. I just don't know what to make of that. Well, our story is about that tonight.

The title of it is “When the Dead Return”. Okay? 

We gotta think about what is this whole idea of zombies? A lot of zombie stuff going on in the world today, or at least that's what it seems like sometimes. Okay. I don't know. 

You might wanna keep an extra flashlight nearby too, just in case it gets too freaky and you've gotta shed some light on the situation.

All right, campers. Here we go. It's time for story time.

[STORYTIME]

Ben: Okay. Tonight, we're gonna be reading from a book titled Strange, But True, which is written by Kathryn Hulick and illustrated by Gordy Wright. 

The title of our story is “When the Dead Return”. All right, here we go. 

A balding man with a scar on his cheek walks into a marketplace. He approaches a woman and says, he's her brother. The woman is shocked. How is this possible? Her brother is dead. 

The man and woman, Clairvius and Angela Narcisse, reunited in 1980 in the small town of l'Estère, Haiti. 18 years earlier, Clairvius had gone to the hospital with a fever and had begun coughing up blood. He then sank into a coma and a few days later with Angela at his side, he took his last breath. Two doctors pronounced him dead. The next day, his family buried him. 

But this man is very much alive. He tells Angela his childhood nickname, a name that only the family knew. He also says that he remembers his burial. He could not speak or move, but he was aware. “Even as they cast dirt on my coffin, I was not there,” Narcisse described later to researchers investigating his case. “My flesh was there, but I floated. I could hear everything that happened.” Narcisse says that the scar on his cheek comes from a nail inside the coffin. He also claims that after he was buried, a group of men came and took him from his grave. They beat him and brought him to a sugar plantation. He says he worked as a slave there for two years until the plantation owner died and he escaped. He says he didn't really die on that fateful day. 18 years ago, he became a zonbi. (That's spelled z-o-n-b-i).

Matthew: Oh, this is so cool! I’ve actually heard about zonbis. 

It comes from Haiti, right? And involves voodoo? And incantations? And being buried and coming back. 

Is that where our creation of zombies comes from? Zombies are all over TV and movies. I’m sure others listening have seen some zombie related thing in books or shows or video games, right?

Amazing. Sorry, Ben! Sorry to interrupt. I got really excited.

Ben: The word “zonbi” is spelled differently on purpose to distinguish it from a “zombie”, which is z-o-m-b-i-e. You've probably read books or watched movies or played video games with zombie characters. Zombies are horrific monsters. They're mindless, walking, corpses, hungry for brains or blood. The zonbis of Haiti inspired today's zombie stories. A zonbi is a dead person returned to life, but it is not dangerous to other people. Rather it is a slave with no will of its own. In the Vodou religion of Haiti, zonbis are one small part of a much larger set of beliefs. 

According to Vodou beliefs, a sorcerer called a bokor has the power to turn people into zonbis. The process involves trapping a dead person's soul. In Vodou, each person has two souls. One is the life force in the body, and the other is that person's unique identity and willpower. The second soul is the one that a bokor captures to make a zonbi.

In most cases, the bokor never revives the dead body. Instead he makes a zonbi of the spirit. This involves sealing the soul inside of a bottle, along with a variety of ingredients that are meant to bestow magical powers. A zonbi of the spirit supposedly brings good luck, beauty, fortune, and other benefits to its owner.

Anthropologist Elizabeth McAlister of Wesleyan University, purchased one of these bottles early in her career without knowing exactly what it was. She watched the bokor make it. “He burned an American dollar bill and put the ashes in the bottle. He poured perfume in the bottle. …and he took out from under his bed, a human skull. And he proceeded to grate small shavings from the skull and put those into the bottle.” She later learned that the skull had been specially prepared in a ritual that was meant to extract its soul. The dollar bill tells the spirit to bring her wealth and the perfume is meant to keep her attractive. 

To make a zonbi of the body, a bokor supposedly poisons a victim with a magical powder. Then the victim sickens and seems to die. And then right after the burial, the bokor digs up the body and revives the person as a zonbi. He also keeps the person's soul trapped in a bottle. Supposedly he can use this captive soul to control the zonbi slave. 

In 1973, a French missionary named Jean Kerboull was working in Haiti when he met Médélia, a person who claimed to be a zombi. She recalled what happened to her: “I was 13 years old and a strong ailment completely paralyzed me in the morning. In everyone's opinion, I was dead… but I maintained enough lucidity to realize what was happening to me… I heard the earth falling on my casket. And then after a brief moment, I distinctly heard a voice crying out- ‘Soul… earth!’ And quickly I found myself outside standing between two young people, still conscious, but without will.” According to lore, zonbis stare into space, speak very little or repetitively, and they move in an awkward or clumsy fashion. They toil as slaves, but may escape if their souls are released or if they are allowed to taste salt.

Zonbi stories recall Haiti's disturbing history as a slave nation. The country was once the French colony called Saint-Domingue, a leading producer of sugar and coffee. To grow these crops, plantation owners captured hundreds of thousands of people from Africa and forced them to work in horrific conditions. The slaves rebelled, and in 1804, they won their independence,. Yet in zonbi stories, slavery continues. 

The belief in zonbis is so pervasive that the Haitian criminal code addresses it. If a poisoning leads to a state of near death and the victim is then buried, this is considered a murder. People sometimes take special steps to protect their dead, such as having the body cremated or guarding a new tomb at night. Still, cases similar to Narcise or Médélia are occasionally reported in Haiti, even still today.

Louis: All right. It is Counselor Louis and I'm back. 

So, is it only me or is this story super interesting? And I'm sure you want to hear the rest just like me, but we do have to take a quick break and we'll be right back. 

[BREAK]

Louis: Hello and we're back. 

So I saved you a spot by the campfire as always, so come on over, get comfortable so we can hear the rest of the story. 

Are you comfortable? You ready? All right, Counselor Ben, let's hear the rest.

[STORYTIME CONTINUED]

Ben: Wilfred D died when he was just 18 years old, after suffering from an unknown illness. His family laid the body to rest in a tomb on a cousin's land. A year and a half later, the young man returned. His family says he recognized his father and remembered comments from the funeral, but he wasn't the same. They had to tie his legs to a log, to keep him from wandering. 

He rarely spoke and needed help to bath or change clothes. He occasionally experienced fits in which he cried out and thrashed his arms and legs. Everyone agreed that he was a zonbi. In fact, his uncle was arrested and convicted of ordering the zonbification. 

A woman identified only as MM also died at the age of 18 after taking part in prayers for a neighbor who everyone believed had been zonbified. 13 years later, she showed up in her hometown. She said she'd been kept in a village, a hundred miles away and had given birth to a child there. After the bokor died, she walked home. She was not a typical zombi since she spoke normally, laughed easily and independently cared for herself. However, she was less intelligent than before her death and her brother attempted to heal her with prayers.

What is going on in these stories and others like them? Have the dead really come back to life?

It's a scientific fact that dead people do not return to life, but what if they were never dead to begin with? Author, Zora Neale Hurston, visited Haiti in the 1930s and met several people, said to be zombis. She wondered if bokors introduced a deathlike state using drugs.

Beginning in the 1960s, the psychiatrist Lamarque Douyon began tracking zombi cases. He found Narcissa story especially interesting. The death certificate in his name seemed to prove that he had died. 

DNA tests did not exist yet, so Douyon interviewed Narcisse and his family. It seemed to Douyon that Narcisse knew too much about his former life to be an imposter. If he was the real Narcisse, then his death must have been faked. But how? Perhaps a bokor really had poisoned him, making him seem dead for a short period, and then later revived him.

Matthew: Oh, yeah! Like when you are having surgery and they give you anesthesia so that your body sleeps through the surgery and any pain you might feel is numbed by the anesthetics. 

That totally makes sense!

But also, these experiences being described involving bokors and the process of capturing and enslaving people’s souls through zonbification are completely new to me. This is outside of my cultural experience. 

Really intriguing. 

Oh, sorry Ben. Please continue.

Ben: In Haiti, people don't often keep careful records of births, deaths, and other important life events. The hospital where Clairvius Narcisse supposedly died charged patients money for care. It's possible that someone who couldn't afford these fees used his name to check in. So the real Narcisse never died at all.

But what about his family? They also claim that he had died. So perhaps there was no stranger who died under the wrong name. The family may have faked the documents because they no longer wanted him in their family. He had fathered several children and never supported them. He had also argued with his brother over land. Even after Narcisse returned 18 years later, the family didn't really want him back.

In 1997, researchers analyzed the cases of Wilfred D and MM. They did DNA testing and they found out that neither Wilfred D nor MM were actually related to the families that had claimed them. They could not be the same people who had died. So what made the families accept them as their own? Both families had watched a teenager die. The loss must have been devastating. When each family later encountered a person who resembled the deceased young person, they welcomed them home. The idea that dead people may return as zonbis is part of Haitian folklore and culture. This fact combined with the family's grief at the untimely deaths likely made them open to the idea that their loved ones had returned.

To the relatives, the horrific process of zonbification also seemed to explain the impairments both young people had. However, researchers actually diagnosed Wilfred D and MM with different mental illnesses.  With MM's permission, the researchers brought her back to the place where she had said that she was held as a zonbi. People there recognized her as a local woman known to have a mental disorder. She seemed to have simply wandered away from home. In these cases, the belief in zonbification offers a way to understand and sometimes care for people with mental illnesses. Haiti's population struggles with poverty and many illnesses go untreated. If someone with a mental illness is recognized as a zonbi, then in some cases he or she may end up adopted into a family willing to care for him or her.

It seems that the real mystery of the zonbi is not about the dead somehow returning to life, but about understanding Haitian culture and the Vodou religion. The real power of zonbis of the spirit, zombi powders, and even zonbis of the body lies in the strength of human belief. 

The end.

Louis: What an amazing story from Counselor Ben, as always. 

This week's theme has been great and next week's theme is being someone others can count on. 

I want to let you know it has been super duper, fantastic spending time with you. And before we go, Camp Counselor Matthew wants to say a few words.

[CLOSING CREDITS]

Matthew: Thank you, Louis! And thank you Ben for sharing that story with us. As the campfire’s dying down, I’ve just got a few reminders and bits of information to share. 

A reminder to all campers to share your camp adventures on social media using #AKCAsummer or write to us at listen@akidsco.com. We love, love, love hearing from you.

Camp Adventure is written by Ben Tertin with help from the A Kids Podcast About team. 

Permission to use excerpts from Strange But True, written by Kathryn Hulick and illustrated by Gordy Wright, was granted by the publisher Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, an imprint of The Quarto Group.

The show is edited and produced by Matthew Winner. 

Audio production is by Chad Michael Snavely and the team at Sound On Studios. Our executive producer is Jelani Memory. And this show was brought to you by A Kids Podcast About.

Follow the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever podcasts are found and check out other podcasts made for kids just like you by visiting akidsco.com. While you’re there, be sure to check out Ben’s book, A Kids Book About Adventure. 

See you back at camp next week for another adventure!