When Voudun came to the city of New Orleans in the United States, it became suffused with a whole new energy—and a most remarkable new hierarchy of priests and priestesses, including the eternally mysterious Marie Laveau. And, of course, with Voodoo came the chilling accounts of zombies.
Some Voodoo traditions maintain that the only way that people can protect themselves from a zombie is to feed it some salt.
Marie Laveau, the greatest of all the Voodoo Queens of New Orleans, learned the power secrets of zombification from her mentor, Dr. John (art by Ricardo Pustanio).
Lisa Lee Harp Waugh said that the story of not feeding salt to a zombie is actually overrated. “Yes, it can destroy a zombie,” she said, “but if given to them in moderation, it tends to keep a zombie frozen for a few years until its services are once again needed. A full dose of pure white salt—and that’s about a full teaspoon today—would put an end to animated corpse in a minute or less. They usually fall to the ground with violent convulsions and all the fluid drains from their bodies.”
Recently, one of my colleagues, Paul Dale Roberts, told me of his interview with a man who claimed to have been turned into zombie: “Pete claims that when he was vacationing in Haiti, he had a fling with a Haitian girl, whose father is a Voodoo shaman of the island. When the Haitian girl saw him with another, he was a marked man.
“One night in a disco, he was stabbed in the arm with a hypodermic needle. He passed out and awakened in a coffin. He was buried alive. He was paralyzed, but aware of his surroundings. Later, he was dug up from his grave and used as a slave, picking sugar cane for six months. He somehow managed to get out of his comatose state of mind and escaped the island back to California. He claims to this very day that he has skin lesions on his arms, legs, and torso, because of his zombie transformation in Haiti.”
When William Michael Mott, author of Pulp Winds, learned that I was doing a book on real zombies, he wrote a poem, “The Awakening of a Zombie,” which aptly describes the classic and traditional fate of one chosen to be a zombie victim of a Voodoo sorcerer:
Awake in the dark, closed in tight,
Where am I? In what hole unfound?
The memories of a funeral rite
Still haunt my ears with mournful sound.
And now I hear the digger come
Shovel pounding like a drum
Casket breaking, pale moonlight
And falling clods blot out my sight.
I must be dead! Can’t move a finger
As I’m pulled from the recent grave
And I think I’d rather linger,
Than become a zombie slave.
The potion forced between my lips
Brings tingling life back to my flesh
And I’m led away from tombs and crypts,
My gaping grave still moist and fresh.
No urge for brains or bloody fodder,
Just meager gruel, not born of slaughter
And I barely recall Romero’s films—
As I fight just to move my limbs.
This death-life is a sullen dream
In which I mind each barked command
And passing days of labor seem
An hourglass and grains of sand.
Poison of toad, and blowfish too
Went into that Voodoo brew
That I know is mixed into my gruel—
And I must eat, for reasons cruel.
I simply cannot disobey
And slowly, memories fade away
Of another time, or place, or land
When I wasn’t dead—I’d been a man. At night when torches gutter low Into a shackled cell I go And then I struggle to awaken From an existence most forsaken. The gruel’s consumed by scuttling things Before I bring myself to eat So I eat the thieves that fill my bowl— I’ve found a source of food, of meat. A few more nights, the rats and roaches Will fill my belly and free my mind And someday soon, when dawn approaches I’ll burst these chains, to vengeance find! A zombie terror from the grave Will take the lives of those who preyed, Turned a man into a slave, Who watched his own humanity fade. The price will then be paid in full For when the foreman comes around I’ll take my chains and break his skull— Then find the one who brought me down. But I won’t kill him, not then, oh no, I’ll take his tongue, then bind him tight And deep into that hole, he’ll go, Beneath the dirt, and endless night.
Legend has it that each of the 23 cemeteries of old New Orleans has a Devil’s Chair placed among its gravestones and crypts. There is, however, only one cemetery that has a Devil’s Throne where the Voodoo folk, the witches, and all those seeking to make a pact with the Master of Darkness go to meet with him eye to eye. That awesome throne is located in St. Louis Cemetery Number 1.
Old Voodoo tales relate that Marie Laveau, the Queen of New Orleans Voodoo, learned the powerful secret of the chair from her immortal, zombified Voodoo master and mentor, Dr. John. Laveau’s many followers tell how Dr. John would sit in the throne on nights when the moon was covered by clouds and converse with the Devil about the secrets of zombification, the power to turn someone into a zombie. According to some accounts, the Devil taught Dr. John over 100 rituals or hexes that would almost immediately transform a living or dead man into a real zombie.
The Devil’s Throne in St. Louis Cemetery Number 1 is often called the Zombie Making Chair, because, according to Voodoo lore, it was while Dr. John was sitting on the Devil’s Throne that his satanic majesty turned him into the first living, immortal zombie to walk the earth. Only the Devil himself would be able to bestow such powers upon a mortal.
Voodoo practitioners believe that if you sit on the Zombie Making Chair on a dark, moonless night and ask the Devil to transform you into a living zombie, you will live a healthy, immortal life and will not age, die, or be able to be hurt or maimed.
The catch to the bargain is that when Judgment Day comes and Satan is thrown into the dark, bottomless pit, it is you upon whom he will sit for 1,000 years.
ZOMBIES VERSUS VAMPIRES
When a horror-buff friend learned I was doing a book about zombies, he remarked, “Well, you know, zombies are pretty much like vampires. They both need to feed on human blood.”
I agreed that zombies “are pretty much like vampires” in the films after George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the dozens of zombie movies that were spawned by that single low-budget, black-and-white, independent production.
“But,” I stressed, “this is a book about real zombies, the undead that lie in their graves until they are summoned to serve their masters as mindless slaves. There are some stories of zombies that attack people on the orders of their masters; there are many accounts