In 1927 journalist William B. Seabrook went to live in the jungles of Haiti, an island in the Caribbean, where he stayed with the family of a voodoo priestess who had agreed to instruct him in the island's religious customs. One day, Polynice, a Haitian farmer who lived on the island of La Gonave, took him in the broad daylight of afternoon to distant cane fields, where he had promised to show Seabrook authentic Haitian zombies, the walking dead. Seabrook wrote:

They were plodding like brutes. The eyes were the worst. It was not my imagination. They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused, unseeing. The whole face, for that matter, was bad enough. It was vacant, as if there was nothing behind it. . . . For the flash of a second I had a sickening, almost panicky lapse in which I thought...