Could Zombies exist? Hmm what if..

Zombies exist but not in the Hollywood sense. There was a science show that studied voodoo shamans. They said they made people their zombie slave by blowing some powder into their face. The ingredients of the powder included puffer fish poison known to cause paralysis and death. Taken in small amounts the person could feel enough paralysis that the heart would appear stopped.

In Haiti, a doctor said he treated a patient for a broken leg that he knew had died years earlier and the patient said that he was under the spell of a shaman and died but was resurrected by the shaman and made his slave.it was only recently that the shaman had died and he was freed.

So zombie ism seemed to be mostly hypnotic control of a subject using the puffer fish poison to instill the belief that they died and were resurrected.

i think the toxin wears off after time. There was a wrestler in Japan who ate a bad dich of fugu (puffer fish) and was paralized but survived thats when doctors realized that someone could survive.

Interesting. Do you have links/citations for any of this so that the rest of us could see?

T A Torda et al (Medical Journal of Australia 1973; 1: 599-602) quote a vivid description of puffer fish poisoning from Captain Cook’s journal of his second voyage. On 7 September 1774, an unfamiliar fish was obtained from natives of newly discovered New Caledonia. Before it was cooked, Mr Forster, the ship’s naturalist, examined the specimen:

“...luckily for us the operation of drawing and describing the fish took so much time that it was too late so that only the liver and roe was dressed of which Mr. Forster and myself did but taste. About three to four o’clock in the morning, we were seized with most extraordinary weakness in all our limbs attended with numbness of sensation like to that caused by exposing one’s hands and feet to a fire after having been pinched much by frost. I had almost lost the sense of feeling nor could I distinguish between light and heavy objects, a quart pot full of water and a feather was the same in my hand. We each took a vomit and after that a sweat which gave great relief. In the morning one of the pigs which had eaten the entrails was found dead.”

As far as I knew, the powder made them appear dead to local doctors with limited technology. They'd then be buried, and would rise out of the grave (if possible) after it wore off. This is why people thought they were "walking dead".

The victims soon appear dead, with an incredibly slow breath, and an incredibly slow and faint heartbeat. In Haiti, people are buried very soon after death, because the heat and the lack of refrigeration makes the bodies decay very rapidly. This suits the zombie-making process. You have to dig them up within eight hours of the burial, or else they'll die of asphyxiation.

I think any longer effects were just psychological. If I'm there when you come out of the grave, I might be able to persuade you into slavery.

Back in Haiti, once you've got the zombie-in-waiting out of the ground, you make them mad, by force-feeding them a paste made from datura (Jimsons Weed). Datura breaks your links with reality, and then destroys all recent memories. So you don't know what day it is, where you are and, worst of all, you don't even know who you are. The zombies are in a state of semi-permanent induced psychotic delirium. They are sold to sugar plantations as slave labour. They are given datura again if they seem to be recovering their senses.