The chapter that first carried the word "zombie" into the English-speaking world: W. B. Seabrook's electrifying account of Haitian Vodou and the labouring undead of the sugar plantations.
Taken from The Magic Island (1929), the sensational travelogue that made W. B. Seabrook famous, this piece records his encounters in rural Haiti with the belief in reanimated corpses set to toil in the fields. Seabrook (1884 – 1945), an American journalist and adventurer with a taste for the extreme, blends reportage, folklore, and unease into a document that shaped a century of horror. Whatever the truth behind the tales he was told, this is the source to which almost every later zombie can be traced.
This edition features:
- The original Western account that introduced the term zombie and the labouring undead of Haiti
- An extract from Seabrook's notorious 1929 travelogue of Vodou, ritual, and the Haitian countryside
- A founding text for a century of horror cinema, fiction, and popular fascination with the undead
- First-hand reportage blending eyewitness travel writing with the folk belief of the sugar plantations