Warning. This episode contains details that some listeners may find disturbing. Zombies. The Mindless Killers have taken over TV and film. What was once a marginal creature playing second or third fiddle to classic monsters of early pulp comics and horror movies like vampires and werewolves. Zombies have since risen, no pun intended. They are iconic. The idea of the zombie has changed and evolved over time, reflecting our innermost fears.
And that's the most amazing thing about the zombie, its adaptability. But where did the idea of the zombie begin? Generally speaking, your mind might race to images of voodoo ceremonies in the swamps of Louisiana or the Caribbean. And if that's the case, there's a little bit of truth in that. But it's also an image influenced by pop culture and the whitewashing of history. Belief in zombies, though, is very real.
Some claim that in Haiti there can be up to a thousand cases of zombie ification a year. This is a study of strange. All right, You ready? All right. Welcome to the show. I'm Michael May. Today. My guest is Molly Elfman. Hi, Molly. How you doing? Hi. I'm good. I'm very excited to be here. You've now been on two episodes because you're a part of one of our scary stories episodes over Halloween. You're the second, second guest. So Mr. Matt Glass. Back left. Of course. Competing against.
Matt. He's always doing. That, my nemesis. But I'm really excited to have you on. We will be talking about some history of the zombies and then going into some stories of actual accounts of people that may be real zombies. It's an exciting topic for me, and I actually wanted you on for a very specific reason with zombies. One is you're a filmmaker. For a zombie. Yes. You're a zombie. No, you're a filmmaker. We've known each other a long time. We've worked together a lot in the horror genre.
And this this is going to tie in nicely to your work. You'll be able to plug some things here. It's going to feel like I set this up strategically and I did not. But one of the things I've always appreciated about you is you are you look at the horror genre as I don't know how I want to say this. Basically, you're smarter than me. That's the simple way to see it.
Do you look at you look at the genre through this intellectual lens and you, you you have this ability to find deeper meaning and things. Are you strive to you strive to find meaning. And strive to be intellectual and smart. There you go. That's that's the goal that I don't know that I achieve it. But you are you have a feature film. Your directorial debut for a feature film is out. It's coming out in the UK this month as of this recording, Next Exit.
And with that movie particularly, we've talked a little bit about on the Pod before, so went off to talk about a lot. But you do look at ghosts in a in a new light, in a different light, and really explore the meaning of what that would be. And zombies to me have this ability where they can do something like that. They can mean whatever you want them to mean as a creative.
So that's why I sort of having you on, because I was like, I feel like Molly is going to bring some good stuff to this topic. So now I feel like I put too much pressure on you. And seriously, it's a lot to live up to. And especially I was about to say, like I was like, I'm the ghost girl. I'm not necessarily, but then I'm like, Oh no, we did make a zombie. I did Walker and Z. So actually I have been I have had my time to play with zombie Rainbow zombies.
I have a photo that keeps popping up in my like, Facebook memories thing and I just don't post on Facebook anymore, so I never share it. But it's both of us as zombies. When we were doing the sizzle reel for Jesus Hates Zombies. Yeah. So we've even both been zombies before. That was fun that day. Yeah. Do you So do you want to just briefly, because we brought it up, just tell people a little bit about next exit and where they might find it, and we can do that at the end of the episode as well.
Sure, I have it. Next Exit, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival last year and then got picked up by Magnolia and came out in November. It's available on Amazon, Apple and any of the other places that you buy your stuff and then it's bit, but you buy your stuff. I don't know. I guess if you buy stuff everywhere, it's still on demand, I guess is the way of probably saying that it is available on DVD as well. I don't know about Blu ray. Everybody keeps asking me that would make sense.
I haven't looked into that yet. And then it comes out February 20th in the UK and Ireland, which I'm very excited about. And yeah, it's the story of a world in which we've scientifically proven that ghost exists and you can choose to be a part of this new program to cross over to the other side and to people who are having trouble with this life, decide that they want to leave it and go on to the next and comedy ensues. And darkness, all those things, bugs, emotions. Now it's maze amazing.
And like I said, you found a new way to look at that topic and turn it into a movie. And it's very refreshing and very interesting. It makes you question a lot of things, which is what you want. You also produced birth, rebirth, which just premiered at Sundance, and we had Laura on a few episodes ago, so we can kind of plug that at the end because it is fresh in our listeners minds. And if you're new to the show, check out that episode with Laura moss just a few again a few few episodes ago.
All right, so zombies, zombies. Molly Here we go. We're getting into them now. As soon as I find my place in my outline, we will move in to zombies Before we get into zombies. Everybody, please hit that subscribe button. Is that what the kids say? Molly I always used to be like. You're asking me. Yeah. You know, you're younger than me. You're a kid. It's. Oh, dear God. What does I. Do? But hit that subscribe button, Smash it. Get it, click it. I don't know.
I don't know what you bop and give us a review and stay up to date. Our audience is growing week after week, so thank you, everybody that's done that already. It's really amazing to see numbers just go up week after week and it puts more pressure on me to actually know what I'm doing and I still don't know what I'm doing. So it's it's an interesting process and check out our Patreon.
You can find that through our website, a study of Strange E-Comm where you can find unedited episodes and additional content just for Patreon members. All right, there we go. Get the best out of the way. Molly, I'm going to have you start us off to talk about zombies. If you find it. Can you find that email? And I have number one with some things for you to read. Okay, you have homework. All right, you ready? Go for it when you're ready.
In February of 1988, a teenager named Wilfred Dawson, who lived in a small Haitian village, became ill. He looked pale and his eyes turned yellow. No one knew why he was sick or what ailment he was suffering. Thing About eight days later, Wilfred had failed to improve and passed away. Doctors confirmed the death and the family buried the body in September of 1989. There was a local cockfight, which is a big social event for the village. When suddenly people saw Wilfred.
He was walking around the event and not paying attention to the fight. Everyone was shocked. The door family was notified. They came up and they were amazed to find that their supposedly dead son was wandering around. Wilfred wasn't his usual self. He couldn't speak well. He didn't seem to respond to his surroundings. Village determined Wilfred was a zombie, but then the village determined that Wilfred was a zombie. You're reading it cold. It's good. Yeah. That was cold. Sorry.
No, that's. That's part of the fun. Yes. So that is just a taste of one of the tales that we will explore and others like it, including the case of Clare Vas Narcisse, who's kind of like the most famous, quote unquote, real zombie. He inspired the book The Serpent, The Rainbow and the following film that came out after it as well.
Before we get into that, I wanted to say a word about tonight's episode or episodes, because I'm going to break this into two parts, and both parts are almost like different ideas. I had this big, broad goal. I wanted to learn about the etymology, the history of zombie, and also look at some so-called real zombie stories that I had heard vaguely about. And the statement I want to make clear up top is that this topic is complex.
Zombies are tied to cultures and religions that have historically been misunderstood, and there's even a lot of disagreement about the beliefs and stories within them. And so for specificity sake, I'll primarily be talking about the Haitian Vodou Zombie, which is different, but related in some ways to the to Louisiana voodoo. And this is the Haitian zombie is where a lot of the lore comes from.
And if you want to learn more on the subject and kind of go deeper into the history which includes slavery and colonialism and American occupation and rebellion and religious subjugation and all these things, the best thing I can do is just I'll provide links in my show notes to various books that go deep into this subject, and you're welcome to read those just as sort of a jumping off point. To learn more about the subject.
We will do some of that history tonight because we get to learn what the zombie came from. But then in part two, we will be going into these accounts of real zombies and ask, Molly, are zombies actually walking around with us? There's there's some people out. There. That might. Yeah. I used to live in Hollywood when I first moved to L.A.. There's a lot of zombies out there. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of zombies. Yeah.
So. Well, what do you like about zombies when you think about I know in this can be sort of related to movies and TV or just stories or ideas, but what do you like about zombies? Well, I love that you brought me on. And you gave me this big intro. Like, I'm so smart like that. One of the ways that I'm getting all this. But let's roll with this. Yeah, do it.
I think the funny thing about zombies for me, which are different Bingo's ghosts, are emotions and spirit, spiritual city and what happens in the afterlife. For me, zombies are what happens is more about the physical body than necessarily the mental one. And it is more about the physical body remaining when the mental is gone.
And so for me, that's always the real intriguing one, where it does lend itself to instead of spooky, it's more creepy, it's more off putting, it's more gross, which can tend to be in the right setting, I think, for horror films, a little bit more fun and a little bit more playful. And I think that's my thing about those jumping jacks. I think that's my thing about zombies that I really like.
And the one time that I decided to tackle zombies, it was more of a social messaging than it was necessarily about the the body itself. So I think that's something that I like and have gotten to experience is what happens when the mind is gone and the body remains. Yeah, and I'll probably say this towards the end of these parts or talk about it a little bit more. But what I like about zombies, you kind of hit it on the head is they can be used so easily.
They can they can be almost like held up like a mirror to ourselves or to society, whatever the fears might be of the time. And we've even seen in the last 20 or so years in movies, zombies have always been related to like pandemics or viruses or things of that nature. And but they didn't start off that way. Like, that's what's so interesting and why I wanted to do the history of it, because they were really more originally like mindless slaves, which I'll get into kind of why that is.
So it's really interesting how zombies can be used for whatever your fear is, and I think that's even true for why they started off as mindless slaves, because the zombies that will be exploring, they really come about in Haiti and the Caribbean. And actually here I'll read this according to a law in Haiti, a zombie is an individual of living death reduced to servitude by a sorcerer who has stolen his soul. So, yeah, there's no virus, there's no rage virus.
There's no, you know, not walking dead or anything. It is really somebody that is a slave. And Haiti has a history of slavery. And it's really like the ultimate slavery because zombies don't have an afterlife in this belief. So it's in eternal servitude. So it is like the worst thing in the world imaginable. And why they're so scary. When you when you when I read that, by the way, the first thing that came to my mind was medical malpractice.
And so it's like, yeah, yeah, Well, that's I think that's a fear. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Now, the term zombie, no one really knows the origin of it. It's definitely got an influence from kind of equatorial in West Africa and Gabon, there's a Togo language where it cut into zombie or near zombie excuse me four, which basically means corpse and Angola. There's zombie, which is an object that can be inhabited by a spirit. There's similarities to words in the Congo region, like in a zombie.
Even in the Americas, the Arawak, which were in the Caribbean to term called Jimmy, which also means Spirit. So there's all these interesting correlations, and as all language, the history of language is it always evolves, it has influences from other places and people and things. And you know, it kind of grows together and evolves over time. So that's probably what happened with the term zombie. And the first time it appeared in text is in 1819, in a book called The History of Brazil.
And it was actually a person that they were writing down whose name was Zombie, but they spelled it zombie. So it's unrelated, but it still starts to appear because no one's agreeing. Unlike the spelling, it's being spelled a lot of different ways, too. So that's like the first time it appears in text and then it appears in a few other books that start to bring it up in terms of life around either Africa or the Caribbean.
In 1887, a writer named Love Katie O'Hearn was Harte was hired by Harper's Magazine to write about the West Indies, which is for those who don't know, that's the islands in the Caribbean. And he lived on the island of Martinique for about two years, and he wrote of the zombie and he couldn't quite figure out what it was. There is just like locals were talking about the zombie and they were scared of the zombie. And it was very much this like vague spiritual old saying.
And even in the book he talks about asking his landlady's daughter what a zombie was. And he asked, Are these are the dead folks zombies? And she replied, No, the zombies go everywhere. The dead folk would remain in the graveyard. It is the zombies who make all the noises at night. No one can understand. So I just. I love that little anecdote.
I think. That. Yeah. And then, yeah, that might have that honestly might have been like the first mass publication that talks about the lure of the zombie that kind of got out to at least the Eurocentric sort of Westernized to the world outside of the Caribbean and Louisiana. And there is a difference with like the Martinique Zombie like anywhere in the Caribbean. They're all going to have slight differences.
I just wanted to point that out because I was reading about Martinique and we're going to spend time on Haiti today because, yeah, it definitely sounds like in Martinique the zombie is a bit more ghostlike. It's not so much the mindless creature walking around, but anyway, Haiti, that is where really the zombie comes together. And from 1517 to 1804, so almost 300 years, France and Spain were enslaving thousands of Africans, primarily from West Africa and bringing them to the island.
What we know is Hispaniola, that's where Haiti and Dominican Republic are today. But at the time it was called Saint Domingo and they were working on sugar and tobacco plantations and the island, the population was 90% slaves, which just always blows my mind.
It Yeah. And what you have and you can it's kind of easy to kind of see this happening, but you have all these people from different cultures and backgrounds and towns and countries from Africa being forced to live together, come to a place they don't know. So all their beliefs are blending together. You know, it's like a stew of these religions and beliefs and cultures. And that starts blending together with Catholicism on the island.
And from this you get this new kind of belief system that they refer to as Vodou And Vodou. I'm going to I'm boiling this down to a very simple thing. Again, this is complex. This is like trying to boil Christianity or any major religion down to load. One thing, you can't do it. They're all different. People disagree. But let's do it right now. Let's do it today. Here we go. Anyway, so in Vodou, they believe that the soul is made up of two spiritual elements and those can be stolen.
Like somebody can sort of take those for good or for bad. And this is how somebody creates a zombie, because after death, they believe that kind of these parts of the soul can wander for a short period of time in Haiti, it's generally said to be wander for seven days. Some people say three days. I think in Louisiana, with voodoo, they say three days. And the person who can make a zombie is someone called a bokor and they come in after somebody has died and they can take over the body. And.
Yeah, and I do want to say this as well. Again, complex. There are some in voodoo and voter religions they call a bokor is sort of a derogatory term. But from Haiti, people actually like admit their boat cause even though they're technically like malicious, like they're kind of bad priests is like a really stupid way to describe them. They tend to have malicious intent with turning somebody into a zombie.
Now, the zombie, as you can kind of tell, my first thought when you hear this, is they're a victim, like they're not the monster from Hollywood movies now where you got to be scared of zombie like that is the victim someone has taken control over the body started the biting. Where did the fighting come? Sorry Movies, movies, movies did that. Yeah. I think it's probably because I actually the original intention for this episode was to do like the history of the zombie through movies.
But so many people have done it that I was like, No, I'm going to go even further back in time. But it's Romero. Like Romero had the zombie sort of biting people and and all of that. And I know there's a lot of movie nerds that know more specifically to me how it how it evolved. But yeah, no, no brain eating right away and. No, I was going to say yeah, all that.
Laura come from because it seems like it's just it does seem like all these zombies are just victims and they're kind of just wandering around after people have used them up. That's so sad. But they got turned into these villains. Absolutely. Yeah. They they're a victim in this. That is it is a very sad thing. And there's a writer in 1913, a guy named Steven Bonzo wrote this book called The American Mediterranean. And he it's really funny because you can find it online.
And I pulled up a bunch of it. I didn't read the whole thing. It's kind of like breezed through it. He's very racist. It and everything. He was writing about Haiti, he's a very, very racist. But he was one of the first to imply that the Bowker these guys making zombies were using a mix of like a drug, like a poison to create the zombies. So he's like the first one that I can find. Anyway, he was putting almost like a logistical method to how they do this.
And so he's suggesting that there's a poison that makes the appearance of death, and then there's an antidote that can bring somebody out of it and they're supplied with something else to sort of take control over their mind. There is a way that. Yeah, there you go. That's what I was thinking of, too. Yeah. You got to appear like you're dead. And then when they come out, they a lot of times we'll get into this a little bit more.
But there could be a hallucinogenic compound that's given to them after they're they're, quote unquote, dead, because that's how you can basically control the person. You make them grow. They're all hallucinate, eating and feeling crazy. There is even a local sort of fruit called the zombie cucumber, because this is a thing that grows on a tree that actually has these hallucinogenic compounds that might be used in some of the Bocas concoctions.
And you don't really hear this come up again through the history of people writing about Haiti and zombies and stuff. Until the 1980s, when Wade Davis wrote Serpent in the Rainbow, he's the one that actually was like trying to figure out what is in these concoctions that brokers are using to turn people into zombies and actually studied them from a scientific element. And we're going to come back to that later because that relates to one of our real zombie stories.
Molly is going to read a section of Basil's book here. Okay. Let's see. There are many who believe that even at this late day, if the medicine man who first administered the poison to this unfortunate could also be found in the can't wait. I think there's a bit of it's a bit of a run on sentence. So that's not my fault. That is his fault. I'm trying to.
Okay. There are many who believe that even at this late day, if the medicine man who first administered the poison to this unfortunate could be found an antidote that might be forthcoming, that there would that they will restore the victim of these barbarous practices to help and to reason.
In fact, if a serious prosecution of these malefactors who work in the guise of religious servants is ever undertaken, the most serious obstacle is to success will be the unfortunate victims themselves and their families who dread the power which has been demonstrated upon those who are near and dear to them. Yeah, yeah. Good job, because that. Is that is a hard sentence.
Yeah. I don't he doesn't quite use commas correctly like he uses a lot of commas and then he uses no commas for like a long time. It's really frustrating and strange. Now the law of the Vodou zombie, it starts to become more specific to outsiders. People outside of Haiti, in the Caribbean in the early 20th century because of books like this, but because of this like racist view of Haiti, it's scary. It's almost scarier than it should be.
Like the idea of voodoo in voodoo just is scarier because it's so secretive. And the reason this religion in these practices became so secretive is really tied into the history of Haiti, which I'll do like a brief saying, and I don't know why Hollywood has never made a movie about the Haitian rebellion because it's just unbelievable. So Haiti, like we said earlier, it was 300 years of slavery. And during that time, as you can imagine, the slave owners outlawed Vodou.
They saw these weird ceremonies and dances and they're like, Oh, that must be the devil. Even though they're French, I'm going British because that's what I do. And they're just they're like, Oh, they must be worshiping the devil and sacrificing babies and whatever. So they just kind of like, You guys can't do this anymore. So Vodou becomes this backwoods up in the mountains, secretive practice. And then Haiti has a revolution. They they win their independence.
They're the first kind of former slave slave rebellion that wins their independence. And they win that independence in 1804. And which is amazing because they go up against the most powerful military in the world at the time. The French to win their independence. Now, that is a tangent, but Haiti, one of the reasons they're so poor to this day is they basically promised France that give them everything of value forever. So they're just like completely never really had a chance.
But yeah, they won independence and that's amazing. That's so. Sad. And then the the leaders of Haiti, though, they are they're trying to appeal to the outside world. They kind of see the religion of voodoo as this peasant religion. So even though they were formerly slaves and stuff, they kind of still see it now as this peasant religion. So they continue to outlaw it. So again, it kind of keeps it in the backwoods, secretive kind of thing.
And as any topic I cover on this podcast, anything mysterious just drives more speculation, which makes it even more mysterious and more scary. Yeah, Yeah. So it's it's really interesting. So even today, voters more accepted and welcomed. And some estimates say that 50% of Haitians are believers in Vodou, but it still has this like secretive feeling.
And I've watched a bunch of documentaries now on the subject, and it still has this like, Oh, you have to talk to this person to get you, this person to get to this person. And then they have to talk to you before they're really, really willing to share what they do. And yeah, so it's definitely got this mysterious aura about it.
It also makes sense with any any group of people that is being suppressed that they're trying to find ways in which that is happening and occurring and in which ways you can find power or hurting other people. Yeah, it's also like all all of these different things kind of folding again into the social issues that are going on. Yes. At the time. And but it is so crazy to think that.
But what this again, time is back to medical practice and tying this back to people that are doing this in order in order to make others subservient is pretty terrifying because it is you could understand where the fear would come from because it feels as if you could be taken over because somebody chooses to.
I completely agree with you, but you just made me think of one of the things I read that is not in my outline where some people saw the idea of like zombie ification with there's two sides of the coin. So there's the side of like eternal slavery and fear of being taken over and controlled. And the other side of that is you could turn somebody that's in charge of you into a zombie as well. There is that possibility.
So there's kind of like it's like a dual yeah, there's a dual side to it as well, which I just. Found to be able to hurt those people that have hurt you or you. Yeah. I mean that makes sense. That's, I mean that's an issue that we can talk about for a while. So we should that the desire of that is very clear, especially with all, especially when you just said that they made a deal with France in which they perpetually have to give them all these things, which is the problem.
And it's like, Oh, that's so disruptive, so dramatic. It is. It is. And it's sadly, there's there's more to come in that in that world. No, it doesn't get happier. No, no, no. Oh. No, no, no. This sort of the secrecy around Vodou and the idea of zombies and things like that, it starts to change because between 1915 and 19, it's like 1934, I think the U.S. actually actually occupies Haiti. And so this kind of perpetuates this idea that Haiti's. Yeah, Haiti is now in debt to the U.S.
They were in debt to France for like a hundred. Now they're in debt to the U.S. And the U.S., of course, takes this very, like, racist attitude towards the local customs and practices. So it keeps it being weird.
But however, there are Americans there who are now writing about it and they're writing about the rumors they might take that American point of view of it, which affects things, but they're still at least like the stories are starting to become more just aware to, again, kind of the Western quote unquote Eurocentric kind of Western world. And this includes a guy named William SEABROOK. He wrote a book called The Magic Island. He actually wrote a few other books about stuff around there, too.
But the Magic Island is kind of his big one. And he wrote of actually seeing people that looked like dead men working in the fields who were expressionless and had strange eyes that had no life behind them. And he he calls it voodoo. So it was voodoo locally. But of course, he's American. He's just going to call it voodoo and it becomes American ized. And it talks about weird ceremonies and black magic and starts to describe zombies. And here I'm actually going to read this one. Mali.
This is not one I shared with you, but this is a segment of William Seabrook's broke book. He writes, The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life. It is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive.
People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up the body before it has had time to rot, galvanize it into movement, and then make it a servant or slave occasionally for the commission of some crime, more often simply as a drudge around the habit ization or the farm setting it dole heavy tasks and beating it like a dumb beast. If it's slack, it's Oh, that was actually hard to read too. So what does this mean? Sorry, my head is in zombies.
I have to be buried in order to come back out. But in order to be a zombie within this type of law, does that mean that there's probably, like a lot of zombies that are buried that just didn't get back up out of the surface? You know, actually, I was going to talk about that in part two and I'm sorry. No, no, no, no. It's a fantastic that's that's what that's what the show is about. It's about me getting my like basically losing my place in my outline.
No, it's a perfect time to bring it up because I actually people in Haiti believe that to this day, like that is the important thing to remember is there are people that believe in zombies. And some accounts say that there's like sals, like a thousand reports of zombies a year in Haiti. We don't have a lot of data on that. There's I'm going to share the quote unquote, real stories I've been able to find. But you can't find a lot of details about. A lot of these stories are more like anecdotal.
But if if this powder if this concoction that bankers use to try to create a zombie is real, it is very dangerous and not just in terms of trying to have an effect on someone's mind, but if it is real and if it works, my theory is that it kills people a lot when you try it like there's going to be brain damage if they do survive. Yeah, it's just I think it's a very dangerous thing.
So I think if you look at like sedatives too, and things like that, because there's definitely I don't do very well with like what was the last thing that I had that I had to take after a surgery.
I don't have it or some type of it, but like, I definitely don't think my mind was there for a while and I was like, I mean, it does seem like it would be very possible, but if you could control that where it's not coming back on or where you whenever part of the mind that has access with that drug doesn't come back online, it's not that hard to think of how you could literally with chemicals create that. Yeah you know, it is a soul in the mind or in the body or where is the soul?
I mean, a whole bunch of questions here. A bunch of questions. Bunch of questions. And we will hopefully will be able to dive into that a little bit more as we tell some of these real stories of people that might have been turned into zombies. It's getting more creepy. It's getting creepier as we go. It is. It is creepy. It is creepy. And that's part of the horror. Yeah, it's okay. It's it's okay. Well, I'll tell you what.
I'll tell you about the first zombie movie because we see Brooks book in the thirties. Like these stories are coming out of Haiti now. So of course, that influences Hollywood. So the first zombie movie is called White Zombie. It was produced in 1932. It had Bela Lugosi plays kind of like the evil Sorcerer guy. But of course it is Hollywood in the 1930. So the victim is a white woman. He lusted after a white woman and sort of made her a mindless zombie.
And that is the first zombie movie ever made. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's so problematic. Oh, no. Oh, God, yes. Yes. No. So anyway, that is again, a very kind of brief overview of the history of kind of zombies being established in Haitian religion and beliefs and law and local customs. Again, I'm not focusing on Louisiana voodoo. Voodoo. I did not go into that.
They do share a similar background because you had slavery and immigrants from West Africa bringing their beliefs combining together, and you also had Haitian immigrants coming from Haiti during the rebellion into Louisiana. So you do there's there's a combination of things, but it is different. And I did not I spent so much time researching this and didn't have time to look at voodoo, too. So another another day. Another day. But yes.
So the zombie starts to come to public's attention because of movies, because of books in this time period. And then our first kind of like our first real zombie story comes out, at least to the public's attention in America, from the author Zora Neale Hurston, who is a legend of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. She was an anthropologist. I think she even made some films and stuff, too. And she wrote about the struggles in the South.
She had also written about Voodoo in the 1920s, and so in 1936 she applied and got a Guggenheim grant to go to Haiti to study Vodou and study the local local customs. And she was the perfect person to do it because she had already been writing about this stuff again in Louisiana, in the south. And so in Haiti, she published or after her travels to Haiti, she published the book Tell My Horse in 1938, and she has a whole chapter about zombies. And I will link the book.
You can find this book for free online. Now, she had heard of a variety of cases of real zombies, including a story of a Protestant missionary minister who told her of a man who fell dead on a dance floor that said and he saw the man placed in his tomb buried. And then a few weeks later, this man was found alive again, but in prison, locked up. I could not find more details on this guy, but that's one of the stories she hears.
She's also told of the case of Marie M, which apparently is a very famous story in the early 1900s in Haiti in 1909, a young girl died. And five years later, I think she was a teenager. Five years later, friends of hers were walking down the street and they saw Marie in a house like through a window. And so people came to the house are knocking the door. They're like our friends here. What's going on? And the person who lived there wouldn't let them in.
Marie's father got a warrant and the house was searched because it was found empty. They dug up Marie's coffin and they found a skeleton that was too long for the coffin, so it might not have been her and sort of the local legend goes that this man, they. Found somebody else and put her in that coffin. Really? Somebody else? Yeah. So I say, okay, this is. This is a local legend, too. There's no like, there's no actual evidence to this tale that she's hearing.
Now, the story goes that the man who owned that house died and brokers, brokers are in control of the zombies. If a broker dies, the zombie is now set free. So the man dies. And apparently his wife didn't like having all these zombies around. So she set them free. And apparently Marie had been sent to France, where she lived in a convent. Again, local legend. No, no basis to fact in any of this. But that is. A so stories. Of dying.
She died in 1909. It's five years later that she her friends see her. But this story is being told. It's like 30 years after that. So. Okay, it's been some time. It's age. Do we know if she aged? I don't. I that is all. All I read is what I've kind of shared there. Yeah. I don't have a lot of questions. I'm going to need to do an interview. We're going to need to bring somebody else on here. Absolutely. I don't. I would love to.
In fact, that being said, please, if anybody out there, if you are a practitioner of voodoo or voodoo or you know somebody that is or somebody that studied the history of Haiti or anything like this, let me know. M Email me a study of strange at gmail.com. I would love to do an interview or something. We can both do it. Molly You can come to Will have a long chat.
And then now those two little anecdotal stories, I think I'm going to, I'm just assuming sort of inspired Zora to, to explore this topic further. And she got intrigued and I'm going to have you read the next thing, Molly I think number three. So this is from her book. All right. What is the truth about Nothing else. I can't read the truth about nothing else about zombies. Some funny. Okay. What is the truth about nothing else about zombies? I do not understand the sentence. My answer to about.
I don't know, thinking about. Did I? Maybe I. Maybe I messed up typing it. I might have messed up. You know what? Why don't you just skip that first and just. Start on the next one? What is the truth about zombies? I had the good fortune to learn of several celebrated cases in the past. And then in addition, I had the rare opportunity to see and touch an authentic case. I listened to the broken noises in its throat, and then I did what no one else had ever done. I photographed it.
Dun, dun dun dun. So this is where we're going to. In part one, we've done our kind of nerdy history chat and we're going to be getting into our real zombie stories, including the first one we're going to start with is what it what Zora Neale Hurston is talking about. And yeah, this is this includes again, the story of Player V Narcisse.
There's also a supposed zombie case with someone named Felicia mentor and two other real zombie stories that we're going to talk about in our next episode, which I am super excited about. They're so interesting. So Molly and I get to see the photographs. Oh, yeah, I can. I can share that with you. Let's first, though, I'll share with you at the beginning of part two. Okay. But is there anything you want to plug? Can you tell people where to find your movies, including Birth Rebirth?
Because we didn't get to really talk about that much or you on social, whatever you want to share. Oh, yeah. Well, you can't find birth rebirth yet. We just premiered at Sundance a couple of weeks ago. There was a blast. I've never played Sundance before, so my first time as many times trying first time, actually going there with the film, it was a blast. We'll have more information. It'll be coming out through Shudder later this year and next.
Sense8 on demand and on DVD and available in the UK starting February 20th. Oh, and also I should say this, the other one that actually both you and I worked on your book. Yeah, that's right. I'm just an alternate. You can find it on YouTube very easily as well. Yeah, that's with Karen Gillan and John Bass, written by Nick Kocher with Laramie once again directing. Yeah, and my friend Dustin just interviewed Laura and Nick. So yeah, that was fun. It was fun. I know.
I saw that interview put you, but I haven't seen it. You should read it. It's very fun. Yeah, very cool. But thank you again, Molly, for coming on and I will talk to you very shortly for part two. Can't wait. Thank you for listening. Thank you to Molly Elfman for being here.
And tune in next week when we conclude this two parter about our zombies real, where we're actually going to go into the detailed accounts of real zombies and also ask what zombies might mean, why people believe in them, and how they've been utilized and used effectively by media. Make sure you are following us on Instagram at a study of strange as usual. Send me thoughts, notes, ideas, comments. You can email me a study of strange all one word at gmail.com.
Check us out on Patreon where you can listen to these episodes free of commercials and unedited so you get to hear me make mistakes constantly, which is pretty fun. So you can check that out through our website. WW iwd a study of strange dcoms in the next couple of weeks besides concluding zombies, we have another episode I'm really excited about, about the Connecticut Witch trials and then I'm going to do something maybe, I don't know, maybe let me know.
Listeners send me a message if this is a good idea or not, I may do a Bigfoot episode and my guest would be my six year old son who is obsessed with Bigfoot. It would be a different sort of episode because it would be very kid friendly. Send me a message. Let me know if you think that would be a good idea. It honestly kind of comes down to him. Will he sit here and talk to me for a little bit of time? I think that's the big question in the matter.
But yeah, so anyway, stay tuned for those things and thank you for listening. Goodnight.