The story of a man who lived for 20 years in the form of a zombie is still a mystery to the scientific community.
In 1980, Clairvius Narcisse showed up at a hospital in Deschapelle, Haiti, nearly 20 years after his family had personally buried him in the village cemetery.
Narcisse’s sudden return shocked his loved ones. It was only then that they revealed that not long after Narcisse was buried, his grave was dug up. But no one knew that Narcisse’s “body” was stolen by the village witch and turned into a zombie, according to the Epoch Times.
Botanist, ethnographer, and anthropologist Wade Davis explained this controversial case in an interview with Canada’s CBC in 1986.
Clairvius Narcisse returns home after nearly 20 years of living a zombie life.
According to Wade, the appearance and disappearance of Narcisse was related to tetrodotoxin, a neurotoxin 160,000 times more potent than cocaine. This substance will produce a coma that is sometimes mistaken for death.
Wade believes that a local sorcerer somehow poisoned Narcisse with tetrodotoxin, causing everyone to think he was dead. When buried, this person will steal the body and use another hallucinogen, Datura stramoniumk , also known as Jimson weed, to turn Narcisse from a comatose person into a zombie, losing consciousness and losing consciousness. act on the instructions of the poisoner.
The sorcerer is said to have used this method to keep Narcisse working on a sugarcane plantation in Haiti for many years. It was only when this person died that Narcisse was freed, returning home with his story that sounded like a myth.
In 1980, some scientists claimed this was the first recorded case of a zombie, although they could not come up with convincing arguments to prove it. A few years later, Mr. Wade was sent to Haiti to study herbal substances that were said to produce the undead.
Wade once said that he never believed in the existence of zombies but had to change his mind when researching tetrodotoxin and Haitian culture.
” The belief in zombies in Haitian culture is key. Part of the effect of tetrodotoxin also stems from this belief,” Davis said, although he admits this is a difficult problem to explain.
Mr. Narcisse at his own grave. (Image: Getty Images).
Tetrodotoxin is in fact the toxin found in puffer fish and has caused many deaths in Japan. Chefs must be very careful to handle puffer fish to remove this toxin, but unfortunate cases are still unavoidable.
“The victims in Japan don’t become zombies even though they die from the poison,” Wade said.
The reason that Wade gives is that under the influence of hallucinogens, a person’s thoughts and beliefs will have a direct effect on his perception.
“Some Haitians believe in zombies, so they are prone to it if they take drugs, while the Japanese do not because they do not have faith in this phenomenon,” said the scientist from Canada.
Despite this, many people disagreed with Wade and dismissed his research as unscientific. But others, including the African-American historian Robert Farris Thompson, support these analyses.
“I’ve never been guided to take the ‘zombie’ seriously or see it as a social phenomenon. Without Wade Davis, I wouldn’t have drawn on the research in this book. this book,” Thompson said in the introduction to “The Dark Way,” which he penned.