[MUSIC PLAYING] [CRYING] [SINGING] WADE DAVIS: The first thing you
have to do when you even begin to try to understand a
phenomenon like the Haitian zombie, which is just one
thread woven through the fabric of this amazing culture,
is to sort of eliminate from your
consciousness all your preconceptions. HAMILTON MORRIS: In 1982,
Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis traveled to Port-au-Prince
to investigate the biological underpinnings
of the Haitian zombie. As early as 1938, Zora Neale
Hurston found there was a vodou potion that could induce a
death-like state, though she concluded the ingredients were
so guarded, no sorcerer would ever reveal them. Wade Davis did what Hurston
thought impossible. And over the course of four
years he gained the trust of several vodou sorcerers,
uncovering the ingredients of the secret potion, and
documenting his experience in the 1985 bestseller "The Serpent
and the Rainbow." Though Davis is quick to say
he's not a "zombieologist," he's still considered the
world's leading authority on the Haitian Zombie. WADE DAVIS: Now what
is a zombie? A zombie, by folk belief,
is the living dead. It's an individual who has been
brought to his demise by sorcery, passed through the
grave, or at least passed through a state of death, and
then somehow magically resuscitated. Zombies were almost deemed to
be off-limits for serious academic research. But Lamarque Douyon had found
this really extraordinary case of this man called Clairvius
Narcisse. What made the case unique is
that Narcisse had been pronounced dead in the
Schweitzer Hospital. And his death had been witnessed
by two physicians, both American trained,
one an American. There were impeccable records
describing his pathology at the time of his demise. 18 years later, this man
claiming to be Clairvius Narcisse turns up in his home
village, claiming that he'd been made a zombie. All these lines of evidence
led Lamarque Douyon to go public in about 1980, '81,
saying that they had found the first medically-verifiable
instance of a zombie. That kind of opening brought
everybody back to a series of reports that had existed in
the folk literature of the reputed existence of a folk
poison that was said to bring on a state of apparent death so
profound that it could fool a physician. Lamarque Douyon had tried for
some time to secure the formula of that preparation,
to no avail. And that's why I was brought
into the investigation. Schultes, my professor, the
man who sparked the Psychedelic Movement, he was
very much my mentor. I was working in the Amazon, and
one day he summoned me to his fourth-floor aerie at the
botanical museum and asked me if I wanted to go down to
Haiti for two weeks over spring break and try to find the
formula of the drug used to make zombies. Well naturally, I said, sure. There are lots of plants and
lots of animals that are poisonous and that
can kill you. We weren't just looking for
a toxin that could kill. We were looking for a toxin that
could bring on a state of apparent death so profound that
it would bring someone literally to the edge of death,
a threshold from which they could then recover. And I went down to Haiti and was
able to secure the formula of the preparation. HAMILTON MORRIS: The preparation
contains a veritable Whitman's Sampler of
poisons, showcasing the great diversity of Haiti's medicinal
flora and fauna, spanning two kingdoms and eight
Linnaean classes. The potions Davis collected
included such ingredients as datura stramonium, velvet bean,
cane toad, pufferfish Hispaniolan boa, bearded
fireworm, tarantula, cashew leaves, and the bones
of a human child. To the sorcerer who mixes the
potions, each ingredient serves a distinct purpose, with
the human bones playing a role every bit as important as
the psychoactive plants. But to Davis, two ingredients
held the key to understanding the phenomenon of
zombification. The pufferfish contains
a chemical called tetrodotoxin, or TTX. If administered in the correct
dose, the victim will find themselves trapped in a flaccid
paralysis, perfectly mimicking the appearance
of death. Upon their exhumation, the
victim is fed a paste of datura stramonium, which
obliterates their memory, leaving them in a stupefied,
obedient delirium. WADE DAVIS: We never could prove
really anything, but we could show that this was
something that had a kind of coherence within the worldview
of the Haitian people. If it could not be absolutely
proven, it was at least so provocative that it demanded
investigation. If you eliminate the other
possibilities, you have to allow the facts to speak
for themselves. And that's why I was prepared
to say very strongly that I thought this phenomenon
existed. HAMILTON MORRIS: In the years
since the publication of Davis's work, there's been
little formal investigation of the zombie phenomenon. Though teams of scientists and
anthropologists have traveled to Haiti in search of answers,
they often failed to find what they're looking for. Some have been fooled in
elaborate hoaxes, or found that the zombies could be
explained medically, with conditions such as
schizophrenia. And others have been imprisoned
or sent home with nothing at all. In Haiti, the use of this powder
is a crime on par with murder, and those who concoct
it do so with the knowledge that it will be used to
destroy a human life. In light of all this
uncertainty, I will travel to Haiti to investigate the zombie
and attempt to collect poison samples for the first
chemical analysis in almost 30 years. My results could support Davis's
theory or redefine our concept of the Haitian zombie. Or I could have a
railroad spike driven through my scrotum.
