This Day in History: It was on this day (May 2) in 1962, a Haitian man named Clairvius Narcisse was exhumed from his grave and was turned into a zombie and forced to work as a slave. A bokor (vodou witch) who recovered him, managed this using administering a combination of psychoactive substances (often the paralyzing pufferfish venom tetrodotoxin and the strong deliriant Datura), which rendered him helpless and seemingly dead. When the bokor died, and regular doses of the hallucinogen ceased, he eventually regained sanity and returned to his family after another 16 years. Narcisse was immediately recognized by the villagers and his family. When he told them the story of how he was dug up from his grave and enslaved, the villagers were surprised, but they accepted his story because they believed his experience resulted from the power of voodoo magic. He was seen as the man who was once a zombie.
This case puzzled many doctors because Narcisse's death was documented and verified by the testimonies of two American doctors. The case of Narcisse was argued to be the first verifiable example of the transformation of an individual into a zombie. Narcisse's story intrigued Haitian psychiatrist Lamarque Douyon. Though dismissing supernatural explanations, Douyon believed there was some degree of truth to tales of zombies and he had been studying such accounts for decades. Suspecting zombies were somehow drugged and then revived, Douyon reached out to colleagues in America. Davis traveled to Haiti, where he obtained samples of powders purportedly used to create zombies.
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