Clairvius Narcisse

Also called: the Living Zombie

Folklore and mythUndead1968 to 1999

Clairvius Narcisse is the most famous real person claimed to have been a zombi. A Haitian man documented as dead in 1962 turned up alive eighteen years later saying he had been drugged, buried, exhumed and enslaved. The ethnobotanist Wade Davis built a pharmacological theory of zombification around the case, which toxicologists have largely rejected. Whatever happened to him, his story shaped how the outside world has imagined the Haitian zombi ever since.1 2

⚔️ Battle it

First recorded

1980

Reappeared in 1980, claiming to have been buried in 1962

Origin

Haitian

Haiti

What causes it

Other

By his own account a bokor took his soul; Wade Davis proposed poisoning with a tetrodotoxin powder followed by doses of datura.

How you become one

He said he was conscious but paralysed through his burial, then dug up and put to forced labour.

When did it first appear?

Ancient world

Middle Ages

1500 to 1899

1900 to 1967

1968 to 1999

2000 to 2009

2010 to today

1980

Reappeared in 1980, claiming to have been buried in 1962

field notes

What the sources say

Born 1922 in L'Estère; pronounced dead at the Schweitzer Hospital in Deschapelles in May 1962 and buried1 2

In 1980 he approached his sister and identified himself by a childhood nickname1 2

He said he had worked on a sugar plantation for two years until the bokor died1 2

A brother with whom he had quarrelled over land was suspected of ordering it1 2

Toxicologists Kao and Yasumoto called the tetrodotoxin claim 'without factual foundation'1 2

His story was the basis of The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)1 2

Sources

Every fact on this page comes from these sources, written in our own words. Spotted a mistake? Tell us at hello@zombiewiki.app.

Folklore from the same lands

Zombi (Haitian)Haitian (Vodou folklore), 1750

Felicia Felix-MentorHaitian, 1937

The Lancet zombi cases (FI, WD and MM)Haitian, 1997