Shocking Secrets of the Mysterious Zombies: Voodoo Rituals, Supernatural Powers, and the Undead Phenomenon Revealed!
Zora Neale Hurston writes: "They are the bodies without souls. The living dead. Once they were dead, and after that they were called to life again." We're talking of the zombies . While the concept entered pop culture in the 20th century and became a type of horror monster more similar to the medieval style vampires , the concept was at first a folk belief and somewhat less gorey than the brain-eating, contagion-spreading creatures of Hollywood. The earliest mentions of zombies in English describe only evil spirits, usually ghosts of the dead. The Oxford English Dictionary admits the probability that the word is related to duppy and jumbie , other regional terms for such spirits. They bear some similarity to the intranquil spirits (plural) of Latin American lore. The idea of the zombie as a fully reanimated dead person seems to be uniquely Haitian. Carlos Esteban Deive mentions them in his book of Dominican magic, Vodu y Magia en Santo Domingo , but specifying that ...