Reanimation, Zombies, and Other Weird Tales of Returning From the Dead

One thing that seems to be inescapable in life is death. It is the end that awaits all of us, a certainty that seems impossible to avoid. However it is always truly unavoidable, or are there ways to cheat this impending doom? Throughout the centuries there have been many tales of people who have seemingly managed to do just that, dodging the cold embrace of death through weird science, dark magic, or outright miracles. 

People have been trying to intentionally beat death and revive the deceased for a very long time. Serious efforts to clinically confront and defy death date back to at least the 18th century. In the 1700s, a Catholic priest and professor of natural history at Pavia University by the name of Lazzaro Spallanzani became obsessed with the idea of reanimating dead tissue after noticing that some seemingly dead microscopic life seemed to spring back to life after adding water to them. Spallazani became convinced that it was possible to resurrect dead organisms and he turned to the famous French skeptic and atheist Voltaire for guidance on this discovery. Voltaire believed Spallazani’s claims and when asked what his opinion was on where souls went after death he is said to have replied that it was up to Spallazani to find that out for himself. Taking this as an encouragement to proceed, Spallazani moved on with his experiments. He graduated to more complex lifeforms, notably cutting the heads off of snails to see if they’d grow back. Although he never did find the secret to resurrecting the dead that he had so hoped to find, his research led him to be the first to discover chemicals in the body that aided in digestion, as well as to observe white blood cells.

In 1794, the Royal Humane Society of London carried out a series of experiments to restore life to those deemed “apparently dead,” arguing that in some cases corpses were not really dead, but rather in some sort of state of suspended animation from which they could be revived and brought back to the land of the living. These efforts were in response to the widespread fear of premature burial at the time, which was rampant and seen as proof that the soul could hang someplace between life and death and be revived. The Royal Humane Society sought to not only establish methods for reanimating such corpses but also spread awareness and share their knowledge of such procedures all over the world. To be sure, their methods were crude. Most often the main techniques were to use electricity, massage, and the rather odd use of liquor forced down the throat, as well as tobacco smoke siphoned up the rectum of all places.

As dubious as these methods may seem to us now, news of such experiments reached far and wide, with the city of Charleston, South Carolina, particularly embracing the theory. The Medical Society of South Carolina purchased equipment from the Royal Humane Society in 1793 and went about trying to raise public awareness of the possibility of resurrecting such “apparently dead” cadavers. Their efforts were so convincing that eventually a law was passed on 19 August 1793, that required all owners of places where alcohol was sold, as spirits were a key ingredient to the process, to take in persons deemed "apparently dead" and attempt to use the Society's techniques to bring them back to life. The law also mandated that all such establishments were to post a complete list of printed directions on how to do so.

As time went on and the 19th century dawned, a great deal of stock was put into electricity as a means to reawaken the dead.  This was an age when electricity and its effects were still little understood, and it seemed like the influence of electrical currents was almost magical in nature. Many experiments were done to measure the effects of electric currents running through all manner of things such as plants, animals, and even human beings, just to see what would happen. It was even supposed that electricity had the power to create life from nothing, a theory that would gain traction in 1837 when physicist Andrew Crosse claimed he could form small organisms shaped like mites by simply running a current through an empty petri dish. It seems only natural then that the mysterious forces of electricity began to be seen as a possible route to the reanimation of the dead.

In the 1800s, a physicist by the name of Giovanni Aldini carried out a series of twisted experiments involving the use of electricity to reanimate dead animals. The son of famous scientist and electricity pioneer Luigi Galvani, Aldini was an ardent believer in his father’s theories on the application of electricity to bring the dead back to life. Aldini started out small, demonstrating how current could send dead frogs and other small animals into twitching spasms, but his experiments quickly began to devolve into more sadistic, morbid affairs. In one gruesome display, Aldini applied a Leyden jar which had been charged with a potent current to the decapitated head of an ox, which much to the horror of onlookers began to convulse and spasm, its tongue lolling about in its mouth as if alive. Although this may seem like a natural outcome to us, at the time it was seen as something magical on par with witchcraft, and it was thought that such movements were tantamount to the presence of life. It certainly seemed to be powerful evidence at the time that yes, indeed electricity could reanimate dead tissue.

Aldini soon graduated from animals to humans as his experiments escalated in morbidity. Through no doubt nefarious means, he was somehow able to procure a steady flow of freshly executed criminals for use in his experiments. One of the earliest such efforts was when Aldini performed a demented procedure on a freshly killed 30-year-old man. An incision was made in the nape of the deceased man’s neck and a jolt was provided with a battery-powered prod. Aldidni wrote of the experiment:

"The posterior half of the Atlas vertebra was then removed by forceps, when the spinal marrow was brought into view. A profuse flow of liquid blood gushed from the wound, inundating the floor. A considerable incision at the same time was made in the left hip through the great gutteal muscle so as to bring the sciatic nerve into sight, and a small cut was made in the heel; the pointed rod with one end connected to the battery was now placed in contact with the spinal marrow, while the other rod was placed in contact with the sciatic nerve. Every muscle of the body was immediately agitated with convulsive movements resembling violent shuddering from the cold…On moving the second rod from the hip to the heel, the knee being previously bent, the leg was thrown out with such force the assistants, who in vain attempted to prevent its extension."

Creepy to be sure, but at the time seen as a very promising result. Yet, Aldini was not satisfied and would go on to take his experiments to even loftier heights of depravity. So convinced was he that electricity was the key to restoring life after death that Aldini sought to prove that even a body was not necessary for his theory to work. He took the horror factor up a notch and started applying current to just the freshly decapitated heads of criminals by wetting their ears with brine solution and then stuffing electrified wires into their ears. This had the predictable effect of causing the disembodied heads to grimace, convulse, and twitch wildly. Aldinin was particularly fascinated by the movements of the eyelids during the procedures, once writing “The action of the eye-lids was exceedingly striking, though less sensible in the human head than in that of an ox.”

Such gruesome experiments gained widespread notoriety as Aldini brought his experiments on the road in order for all to see the wonders he was able to produce. In 1803 he infamously put on a public display in which he created lifelike movements upon applying current to a newly deceased man named George Forster, fresh from the gallows for killing his wife and child. The demonstration was done on a stage in front of an audience of shocked, gasping onlookers and Aldini finally got the recognition he was after when the Royal College of Surgeons took notice and ended up awarding him their prestigious Copley Medal for his work. In addition to trying to bring back the dead, Aldini also claimed that he could use electricity to resuscitate nearly dead people such as those who have nearly drowned, and his work was some of the earliest evidence to pave the way for the use of electricity for resuscitation.

Such recognition by the medical community seemed to cement the legacy of electricity as a means of cheating death, and it was still being pursued well into the 1900s. A professor by the name of Albert Hoche was strongly convinced that electricity could jolt the dead back to life and conducted similar experiments to those of Aldini. Hoche was similarly able to procure the corpse of a freshly executed criminal for the purpose of his demented experiment. The criminal had been decapitated and wasting no time Hoche proceeded to run a strong electrical current through the exposed spinal cord. Although again what happened next is perhaps no surprise to us, at the time it was mind-boggling, and observers were bewildered by how the body convulsed spastically for a good 10 minutes before going still. This was still seen as miraculous proof of life after death, but Hoche was stumped as to how he could extend the effects and why the body had ultimately ceased its jerky dance. In the end, he wrongly theorized that the cooling of the body and loss of blood were to blame for the loss of movement, but he was never able to overcome this obstacle.

Starting from the 1930s, creepy reanimation experiments began to pop up mostly using dogs as subjects. One rather infamous figure in the field of trying to resurrect dogs was the American biologist Dr. Robert E. Cornish of the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his doctorate and carried out his research in the 1930s. Before his field of interest took a turn for the macabre, Cornish had already accrued a reputation for being a bit of an odd one, designing weird inventions such as underwater reading glasses, but it was when he started his reanimation experiments that he really earned the title of mad scientist.

Cornish became obsessed with the idea of life after death and, after several false starts trying a variety of bizarre techniques, he truly believed that he had figured out a way to do it. The theory was that a dead subject could be restored to life if the body was swung up and down rapidly on a seesaw-like contraption to simulate blood circulation while at the same time being fed oxygen through a tube and injected with a cocktail of adrenaline, liver extract, gum arabic, blood, and anticoagulants. Cornish was so convinced that the technique would work that he immediately began testing the theory on animals, namely dogs. Cornish acquired fox terriers for the purpose of his ghoulish experiments, all of which he named Lazarus, after the biblical figure who had risen from the dead. Cornish would asphyxiate the animals with nitrogen gas, after which he would wait 10 full minutes after death before starting the revival process. Lazarus I, II, and III proved to be failures, staying as dead as they had been before the process, but Cornish had more luck with Lazarus IV and V.

Lazarus IV was claimed to have woken up with a “whine and a feeble bark” 5 minutes after its heart had stopped. Although the dog had gone blind and sustained severe brain damage, Cornish reported that after several days Lazarus IV was able to hobble around, sit up on its own, bark, and even eat. Encouraged by such promising results, Cornish moved on to Lazarus V, whom he considered an even bigger success than Lazarus IV. It was reported that Lazarus V was brought back to life a full 30 minutes after it had stopped breathing, and even so, exhibited more of a range of movement and cognizance than Lazarus IV had. Both of these shambling zombie dogs went on to live for months, and it was said that other dogs displayed a marked fear of them.

Cornish was extremely excited and emboldened by his successful results and went to the scientific community with his findings, but they were less enthused. His experiments became very controversial and derided as nothing more than twisted, Frankenstein-esque grotesqueries. The public found the idea of killing and zombifying cute little dogs to be repellant, and the outcry over Cornish's experiments prompted the University of California to evict him from the campus, after which he continued his work on his own from a garden shed, apparently upsetting the neighborhood with the odious fumes he produced. The mad scientist continued to perfect his techniques, going through who knows how many dogs until finally in 1947 he had an opportunity to finally experiment on a human being.

Cornish was contacted by the convicted child murderer Thomas McMonigle, who had heard much of the experiments and was willing to offer his cadaver for experimentation upon his execution at San Quentin Penitentiary. Cornish was ecstatic to finally have the opportunity to try out his outlandish methods on an actual human corpse and went about working out the best way to do so. He believed that a technique using a homemade heart-lung machine and 60,000 shoelace eyes would do the trick if he could have access to the corpse quickly enough. Although he made his preparations and manufactured the machine he had planned to use, alas Cornish's grand plan would be thwarted by several obstacles. Besides the fervent opposition he met from the warden of the prison at the time, Clifton Duffy, there was also the problem that McMonigle was to be executed by gas chamber, which required around an hour after death to air out all of the poisonous gas before the body could be removed safely, which was far too long for Cornish, who needed immediate access to the body for his plan to have any chance of working. There was additionally the moral dilemma of what to do with the criminal if the whole bizarre experiment actually worked; after all, if the criminal was put to death and then revived, would that mean he had already served his sentence and was to be freed as a walking dead man? In the end, Cornish never got his chance to bring a person back from the dead. He would eventually give up on his experiments and move on to the rather baffling occupation of making and selling toothpaste until he died in 1963.

The 1940s and 50s were not a good time to be a dog in the Soviet Union either. The Soviets were already engaged in a wide variety of experiments to revive severed limbs and removed organs, so it seemed like a natural step that they would move on to full reanimation of the dead, and indeed some of the creepiest such efforts come from the Soviet Union. Perhaps the most infamous and indeed gag-inducing such experiments were carried out by Soviet scientist Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy, Voronezh, U.S.S.R. The scientist became heavily involved in the reanimation of dead animals, mostly dogs, through the use of various arcane, scary-looking machinery. In his most famous experiment, the decapitated head of a dog was hooked up to a sinister-looking heart-lung machine that was called the "autojector," after which the head apparently regained consciousness, moved its mouth, and blinked its eyes. In an effort to prove that the animal was indeed awake and cognizant, Bryukhonenko proceeded to torment the dog, rapping it on the head and even rubbing the inside of its nostril with acid, which the dog head then began to try and lick off. The dog reportedly remained awake and alive for quite some time, even eating and drinking things that were offered to it, which proceeded to move through the mouth and leak out of the severed esophagus. The machine was used to reanimate several dogs, as well as a wide variety of organs and severed limbs, although it is unclear how exactly it all worked. All we have are various archived videos of the experiments, and there have been those who suggest that the Soviets faked the videos.

Not to be outdone by his colleague in sheer depravity and cruelty, another Soviet scientist by the name of Vladimir Demikhov conducted a macabre experiment to create what can only really be truly described as a two-headed zombie dog. Demikhov was convinced that the key to reviving the dead was to graft the dead to the organs of the living. To prove his theory, he took a puppy and chopped it in half just below the forearms, after which he attached the half-body to the neck of a living fully fully-grown dog. Unbelievably, the dead portion of the dog came back to life looking around and lolling its tongue about in its mouth, like some ghastly moving tumor upon its host. Encouraged by this success, Demikhov would go on to create 20 such abominations, which sometimes lived for up to a month before tissue rejection caused them to die.

In the ensuing years, the United States would get in on experiments to reanimate the dead as well. One such series of experiments was carried out in 1967 at the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, in which dogs were brought back from death using a system of artificial circulation. These dogs were reported as being revived up to 19 min 30 sec. after death. The subjects of these experiments apparently fully recovered and led normal lives for years after, showing no physical abnormalities or differences in behavior from normal dogs, and even bearing litters of puppies. Another experiment was funded by the U.S. government in 1970 when scientist  Robert White chopped off the head of a monkey and successfully brought it back to life by grafting it onto the decapitated body of another monkey. The resuscitated money lived for a full day. White maintained that the monkey could see, hear, taste, and smell due to the fact that the nerves of the brain and head were fully intact. White would go on to seek two human subjects to try the experiment on and even found one in the form of a partially handicapped man named Craig Vetovitz, but after he was unable to find a second volunteer his work was discontinued.

Starting in the 1950s, a new form of resurrecting the dead made its appearance; the new field of cryobiology, or using extremely low temperatures to freeze subjects, after which they are brought back to life. One of the pioneers of this field was a scientist by the name of James Lovelock, who would make one of the first attempts to use cryobiology in a series of experiments carried out at Britain’s Mill Hill National Institute of Medical Research along with colleague Dr. Audrey Smith in the 1950s. In the experiments, hamsters were frozen by immersing them in a minus 5 degrees Celsius bath for 60 to 90 minutes, essentially freezing them solid and making them for all intents and purposes clinically dead. After checking to see that the animals were completely frozen, often by actually cutting into them with a knife, the heart was warmed by the application of a warm spoon as the body was gradually warmed as well. Such efforts were successful, and later the use of warm spoons to coax the heart back to life, which sometimes burned the animals, would be replaced by the more humane use of radio frequency transmitters to create microwaves.

This groundbreaking procedure would go on to become almost commonplace by the 1960s, and it served the purpose of demonstrating that organisms could be brought to temperatures below freezing and be successfully revived. It would go on to become the basis of medical technology that is used to this day for the storage of organs destined to be used for transplants, low-temperature surgery, and some types of experimental cardiac resuscitation techniques, and would additionally lead to the discovery of the cryopreservative properties of glycerol, which lowers the freezing point of water and is used for such purposes to this day. It would also go on to form the basis of the field of cryonics, which entails freezing larger animals such as humans in vats for future revival. Another, somewhat more ghastly experiment involving cryobiology was performed by researcher Isamu Suda at Japan's Kobe University in the 1960s. Suda froze the brains of cats in glycerol mixtures and then reported that brainwave activity was detected after warming them up as long as two and a half years later.

Although a more rigid sense of ethics has taken hold in recent years, essentially putting the kibosh on many such animal experiments, there has been at least one notable case of such dramatic experiments as recently as 2002 at the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, headed by a Dr. Patrick Kochanek. In the somewhat unsettling experiments, dogs were completely drained of blood and their veins were then filled with an ice-cold saline solution which put the subjects in a state of extreme hypothermia and made them clinically dead, with no signs of heartbeat, breathing, or brain activity, while preserving the tissues in a state of frigid suspended animation. The animals were then successfully brought back to life up to 3 hours after death by gradually returning blood to the bodies while providing pure oxygen and stimulating the heart with electric shocks. The experiments had mixed results, with some of the dogs being none the worse for wear from their ordeal while others displayed severe brain damage and/or "behavioral problems." It is unclear if one of these might be shambling around attacking the living. 

Some of the most dramatic and fantastical stories of people returning from the dead have to do with those who seem to be none other than real-life zombies. Many such accounts come from the Caribbean nation of Haiti, where there has long been a belief in the reanimation of corpses through the magic of powerful witch doctors or sorcerers known as bokor. By far the most well-known case of such a zombie is that of a man named Clairvius Narcisse.

It began with his being declared dead on May 2, 1962, at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Deschapelle in southern Haiti, after suffering from an unknown affliction. He was subsequently given a funeral and burial and that would be the end of it until a full 18 years later, when Narcisse’s sister found him aimlessly wandering about at a marketplace, seemingly in a dazed state somewhere between life and death. The shocked and amazed sister confronted him and Narcisse had a strange tale to tell indeed.

He claimed that he had been put under the spell of a bokor and that it was this sinister, dark magic that had killed him and then later brought him back to life. According to him, after he had been buried the bokor had come to dig him up and then force him into slavery doing menial labor on a plantation, with alleged zombies being used as labor not particularly uncommon in Haiti. After 2 years of mindlessly toiling away on the plantation he managed to escape, after which he wandered aimlessly around the countryside as memories of his former life slowly crept back to him. He eventually found himself in the marketplace and had run into his sister by sheer chance. When asked why he had not come back sooner, he explained that he had been sure that his brother was the one responsible for hiring the bokor to zombify him and that he had been afraid to come home until his brother had passed away.

There are other such accounts from Haiti as well that seem to be remarkably similar to that of Narcisse. In 1996 a 30-year-old woman died from a serious illness and was buried in a family tomb next to her home. Three years later the “dead” woman was found by a family friend walking about in a trance-like daze near the village. The woman was mute and uncoordinated, reportedly unable to even feed herself, and did not seem to have any memory of who she was. When the tomb was opened, it was found to contain a pile of stones where the woman’s body had once been. The family suspected that her husband had had her turned into a zombie after suspecting her of being unfaithful, and she was left in the care of a psychiatric hospital in Port-au-Prince. It is unclear what happened to her after that.

Another strange case is that of a 26-year-old man known only as WD. The son of a policeman, at the age of 18 he came down with a mysterious sickness that gave him a fever, turned his eyes yellow, caused intense swelling of the body, and made him “smell like death.” No one could figure out what the strange sickness was, and the family began to suspect he was the target of black magic spun by a bokor. They sought the advice of a witch doctor to help them fight the curse, but WD died a few days later of his affliction and was buried. WD’s father would then recognize his son 19 months later at a cock fight. It is unclear what he had been up to during those 19 months in his zombified state, and it was highly suspected that the young man’s uncle was the one responsible for having him turned into a zombie.

Also from Haiti is the case of an 18-year-old girl who also fell ill from an unknown disease that caused a high fever, intense diarrhea, and swelling, and which killed her within a mere few days. Her family also suspected dark sorcery as the cause. The girl would turn up wandering the countryside 13 years later, and she claimed that she had been reanimated and taken as the slave of a bokor in a village 100 miles to the north, only finally managing to escape when the dark sorcerer had died. She claimed that she had then slogged through the rugged wilderness on foot to make her way home. These sorts of zombie stories have been theorized to have their basis in anything from cases of severe amnesia or drug-induced hallucination, to the use of potent neurotoxins to give the illusion of death, to mental illness, brain damage, or even simple cases of mistaken identity, but no one is really sure.

Similar to the tales of Haitian zombies is a strange ritual carried out by the Toraja, who are an ethnic group of people indigenous to the mountains of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. The Toraja people are renowned for their wood carvings and their peculiar traditional, ancestral houses with huge, peaked roofs that sweep up like a boat, which are known as tongkonan, but they are even more well known for their elaborate and bizarre funeral rites and burial sites. This macabre fascination with death can be seen everywhere in Toraja villages, from the elaborate burial sites carved directly into craggy cliffs to the traditional tongokonan houses that are immaculately decorated with the horns of buffalos, a symbol of wealth, and used almost exclusively as resting places for the corpses of recently deceased relatives. However, it is in their funeral rites that truly showcase the Toraja culture of death.

The Toraja have a strong belief in the afterlife, and the process from death to burial is a long one. When a person dies, the corpse is typically washed and kept in the tongokonan while it awaits its funeral and subsequent burial. In poorer families, the body may simply be kept in another room of their own home. Since the Toraja funeral ceremony is typically an extravagant affair requiring all relatives to be present no matter how far away they may be, and bodies are usually entombed within coffins placed within burial caves painstakingly carved into limestone cliffs, weeks or even months can pass between death and burial. This time is required for all arrangements to be made, relatives to be gathered, and for money to be saved in order to pay for the expensive funeral and burial. This is not unusual, nor is it particularly unpleasant for villagers. In Toraja society it is believed that the process of death is a long one, as the soul gradually makes its way to the afterlife, known as Puya; the Land of the Souls.

During this waiting period, the corpse is still treated somewhat as if they are still alive, as the soul is believed to linger nearby awaiting its journey to Puya. The body is dressed, groomed and cleaned regularly, and even offered meals every day, just as if it were still a living member of the family. It is not even unusual for guests to thank the corpse for being a gracious host. When all arrangements have been made and all are present, the funeral ceremony begins.

Depending on the level of wealth the deceased had enjoyed in life, these can be incredibly extravagant, including massive feasts and lasting for days. During the ceremony, hundreds of relatives and extended family gather at ceremonial sites called rante, and express their grief with singing, the playing of music and chanting. A common feature at these events, especially for the wealthy, is the offering of water buffalo and pigs for sacrifice. These buffalo and pigs are thought to be required for the spirit of the deceased when they pass over to the afterlife, and the more animals that are sacrificed, the faster the journey is said to be. To this end, depending on the wealth of the family, up to tens of buffalo and hundreds of pigs are slaughtered, with the event drawing the fanfare of revelers who dance or attempt to catch the flying blood with bamboo straws. After the animals have been killed, the heads of the buffalo are often lined up on a field to await their dead owner. The spilling of blood upon the earth is thought to be an important component of the soul’s transition to Puya, and in some cases, special cockfights known as bulangan londong are held for this purpose, as if the blood of all of those buffalo and pigs was not enough.

When the funeral festivities have ended, the body is ready for burial. Typically the corpse will be placed within a wooden box, after which it will be interred not in the ground but rather in either a specially carved burial cave just for this purpose, a naturally formed cave that fits the requirements, or in the case of babies or small children it will be hung from a cliff with thick ropes until the ropes rot and the coffin falls to the ground, after which it will be reattached. The reason for placing the dead so high up is that the Toraja believe that they must be placed between Heaven and Earth in order for the spirit to find its way to the afterlife. Within the burial caves are placed all of the tools and equipment the person’s spirit may need in the afterlife, including money (hey, you never know) and oddly piles of cigarettes (hey, it's a hard habit to break), as well as rows of life-sized wooden effigies of the deceased which are meant to watch over them and are referred to as Tau Tau. Burial caves may have only one coffin and be elaborate mausoleums decked out in elaborate decorations for the rich, or may be packed with the numerous coffins of a whole family. Some of these graves are over 1,000 years old, with the coffins completely rotted away and nothing but bones and skulls remaining.

However, this is not the last anyone will see of the bodies, for it is after the actual burial that the Toraja enact perhaps their most unusual ritual concerning the dead. Once a year, in August, villagers return to the burial caves in order to remove the bodies and change their clothes, groom them, and bathe them, as well as repair as much as possible any damage the coffins may have incurred. This ritual is known as Ma'nene, or "The Ceremony of Cleaning Corpses," and is performed on the deceased no matter how long they have been dead or what age they may have been. Some of the corpses have been in the caves so long that they have been mummified. After the corpses are freshened up, villagers will hold them upright and “walk” them from the village to their place of death and back again, after which the body is placed back in its coffin and returned to its cave until the following year, when the whole morbid process will be repeated.

Although this all may seem rather macabre and bizarre, some remote areas still allegedly practice an even older, even weirder ceremony in which the dead are said to literally walk on their own. One thing common to all of the funeral ceremonies and rites of the Toraja is that in order for the spirit to be able to pass into the afterlife certain conditions must be met. First, all of the relatives and extended family of the deceased must be present for the funeral. Second, the deceased must be interred in the village of their birth. If these conditions are not met, it is said that the soul will forever linger around its body in a state of limbo, and unable to journey to Puya until they are, a belief that in the old days of stark remoteness dissuaded most from traveling too far from their village lest they be trapped and tethered to their dead body in some faraway place. This all posed some challenges in the past, as before the 20th century and subsequent colonization by the Dutch, the Toraja lived in remote, autonomous villages that were completely isolated from each other and the outside world, with no roads connecting them. When a villager died far from his birthplace, it was difficult for the family to retrieve the body and carry it back through rugged, mountainous terrain to its place of origin. The solution to this problem was unique, to say the least.

To make sure the corpse was able to be returned to their village of birth and spare the family the hardship of carrying it themselves, special shamans were sought out who allegedly had the power to temporarily bring the dead back to life. The particular brand of black magic used by the shamans only brought the dead back to life in the most rudimentary sense. These walking corpses were said to be largely unaware of their surroundings and nonresponsive, expressionless, and uncoordinated, only able to perform the most basic tasks such as walking. Upon being brought back to life, the walking corpse was said to shamble stiffly and robotically towards its village of birth, often guided by the shaman or a procession of family members, but sometimes on its own. Special runners would move out ahead of the group to warn others that a walking corpse was passing through. The walk back to the village was meant to be a completely silent, somber affair, and it is said that if anyone addressed the corpse directly by name it would immediately collapse and lose whatever power animates it. It is not clear whether a bullet to the head would accomplish the same effect, but I must assume it would.

Now before anyone reading this panics and starts preparing for an inevitable zombie outbreak, it is important to note that the process is only temporary, and the effects only last until the corpse reaches its birthplace, although depending on the distances involved this can take days or even weeks. No word on what happens if a villager dies overseas. Throughout this time, the “zombie” is not a snarling creature that attacks the living but rather is totally passive, showing no interest in or recognition of those around it. Once the walking dead reaches its home village, it reverts back to being a mere corpse to await its funeral in the normal manner of being bathed, offered meals, and redressed every day. In some traditions, the body will be reanimated once more in order to make its way to the coffin in which it will be buried.

Shamans who could raise the dead did not restrict their dark practices to only human beings. It is said that at some funeral ceremonies, magic would be cast upon the carcasses of the animals slaughtered for sacrifice, and there are stories of the shamans bringing the bodies of headless buffaloes to life in order to walk about, or to make the decapitated heads move, look around, grimace, or cry out. The same thing was sometimes said to be done to slaughtered pigs and chickens too. Often the purpose of this gruesome display was so that the shaman could demonstrate his powers in a public display before being called upon to raise a human being.

Nowadays, with plenty of roads and ample access to transportation, the purported walking dead ritual is largely seen as unnecessary and so in modern times, the practice of bringing the dead to life to walk has declined and is rare to find in Toraja society.  Indeed, many of the younger generation do not believe in such stories at all. However, some remote villages still allegedly practice it. One isolated village by the name of Mamasa is particularly known for its practice of this macabre rite, and there are occasional reports of people sighting these zombies ambling through the wilderness or amongst a procession of family members. In recent years, photos of these alleged zombies have sometimes made the rounds and stirred up debate and controversy. Although the corpses in these photos certainly look real, they are often dismissed as nothing more than a hoax or are perhaps people suffering from some disfiguring disease such as leprosy, that merely gives the illusion of death.

Is any of this real or is it all mere folklore and trickery? Do the Toraja really have the power to temporarily raise the dead and make them walk? Whatever the case may be, there is certainly a strong tradition of doing so in South Sulawesi, and some of the villagers here certainly seem to think it is very real. At any rate, it is undoubtedly a creepy tradition in this fascinating society that has taken death and funerals to a whole new level.

There is a frightening number of cases of people who have woken up after being declared dead, being buried, while in their coffins, at their own funerals, or even as they are having an autopsy done on them. In one strange case, a 2-year-old boy in Brazil died in 2012 of complications from bronchial pneumonia at Aberlardo Santos Hospital, in the northern Brazilian city of Belem. The toddler ceased breathing, lost his pulse, and was declared dead, after which the body was placed within an airtight body bag for 3 hours while funeral arrangements were being made. Later that day, an open casket wake was held for the boy and it was at this time that the body was observed to move. A few moments later the entire procession was overcome with shock as the dead boy suddenly sat up in his coffin and calmly asked his father for a glass of water. The entire family rejoiced at what was seen as a miracle, but their joy was short-lived as the boy took a drink, laid back in his coffin, and died again. The body was rushed back to the hospital where the boy was declared dead a second time. However, so certain was the family that he might revive again that they waited an hour before commencing with the funeral, but he never did wake up again. The boy’s father, Antonio Santos, said of the moment when his son had risen from the grave:

Everybody started to scream, we couldn't believe our eyes. Then we thought a miracle had taken place and our boy had come back to life. Then Kelvin just laid back down, the way he was. We couldn't wake him. He was dead again.

A strikingly similar case occurred in the Philippines in 2014 when a 3-year-old girl tragically died after suffering an intense fever for several days. The girl was pronounced clinically dead and her body was placed in a coffin for her funeral at a church in Aurora, Zamboanga del Sur, in the Philippines. During the proceedings, a family friend lifted the lid of the coffin to arrange the corpse and noticed the girl’s head move slightly, after which she sat up and looked around. The girl was given a glass of water and taken to the hospital to be tended to before making a full recovery and going back to her home with her parents.

In 1915 there was a 30-year-old woman by the name of Essie Dunbar, who died after a major epileptic seizure and was put in a coffin for her funeral. The funeral was delayed for several days while her sister, who lived far away, made arrangements to attend, and the whole time Essie’s corpse remained very dead and motionless in its coffin. On the day of the funeral, the sister arrived late, during the proceedings. The coffin had already been closed but the sister demanded that it be opened so that she could see her dead sibling one last time. When the lid was opened, the still corpse purportedly suddenly sat upright and Essie Dunbar smiled at her stupefied sister. All of the funeral attendees of the funeral were reportedly so upset and scared by what happened that many of them fled in a panic, and Essie had to walk back to town on her own, where many regarded her as a zombie. Essie Dunbar would go on to live a long life, finally dying permanently in 1962 at the age of 77.

In another case, a man woke from the “dead” after he had been placed in a metal box at the morgue. In 1993, Sipho William Mdletshe, of Johannesburg, South Africa, was involved in a car crash while driving with his fiancee that inflicted such grievous injuries that he was declared dead shortly after. His body was put into a metal case at a mortuary while funeral arrangements were being made and he stayed there for 2 days before he suddenly woke up to find himself ensconced in the darkness. Not surprisingly, waking up in a metal box was a rather terrifying affair, and he promptly began screaming, which alerted workers to his presence. After being released from his horrifying ordeal, he returned to his fiancee, but she was apparently so convinced that he was a zombie that she would have nothing to do with him.

In 2012, an elderly 95-year-old woman named Li Xiufeng fell and hit her head at her home in Beiliu, Guangxi Province, China. Family members who found her were unable to revive her and reported that she had stopped breathing and could not be woken up no matter what anyone did. The woman was considered dead and her body was placed in a coffin, where it would remain for 6 days while awaiting a funeral. On the day before the funeral, family and friends were shocked when they entered the kitchen to find the dead woman calmly at work cooking dinner. She later said: “After waking up, I felt so hungry, and wanted to cook something to eat.” Unfortunately for her, she had been considered dead long enough that all of her belongings had been given away or disposed of.

Perhaps even more horrifying than waking from the dead at one’s funeral or within a coffin is coming back to life after being buried. In 1937 a 19-year-old young man named Angelo Hayes was in a horrible motorcycle crash in in the village of St. Quentin de Chalais, France, during which he flew head-first into a brick wall and was pronounced dead at the scene. He was subsequently buried, but when insurance inspectors exhumed the body a full 3 days later, Hayes was found to be still breathing, although in a come-like state. The young man was eventually brought back to health and became quite the celebrity in France due to his amazing ordeal. Hayes did not come out of the whole incident completely unscathed, as he was reportedly incredibly disturbed by the whole thing, to the point where he eventually designed a coffin equipped with a chemical toilet, radio transmitter, and food locker so that no one would ever have to go through the same horrible experience.

If coming back to life in the ground is bad enough, how about during your own autopsy? In 2007, a 33-year-old Venezuelan man named Carlos Camejo was pronounced dead after being in a terrible highway accident. He woke up sometime later in excruciating pain as doctors cut into his face with a scalpel to begin an autopsy. When Camejos jerked awake, doctors quickly went about stitching up the wound, and probably going off to get clean pairs of shorts not long after.

One man who just narrowly avoided a similar fate was 77-year-old Walter Williams, of Lexington, Mississippi. In 2014, Williams was declared dead by a coroner after no pulse or heartbeat was detected. His body was zipped up into a body bag and was being prepared for embalmment when his feet suddenly began kicking and he was taken to the hospital. The coroner had no explanation for it and Holmes County Sheriff Willie March said: “I asked the coroner what happened, and the only thing he could say is that it’s a miracle.” The manager of the funeral home himself said of the baffling incident: “I’ve never experienced anything like it." Another person who came back to life just in time, this time to avoid cremation, was a man in Liberia who died of Ebola. After being pronounced dead, the body was loaded up and brought to a crematorium to prevent the spread of the disease, where the man began to regain consciousness right as they were preparing to burn him down to ash.

While some of these cases can probably be attributed to simply making a mistake when pronouncing a person dead, there is at least one strange case when the person in question was unequivocally dead before waking again. In 2008, 59-year-old Val Thomas, of Charleston, West Virginia, in the United States, suffered a major heart attack and was taken to the hospital where she was hooked to a ventilator and a machine that induces hypothermia, but considering that she had at this time already been without a heartbeat or pulse for around 20 minutes she was not expected to survive. Indeed, although a heartbeat was detected once again, the woman experienced two more heart attacks before going quiet. Nevertheless, Thomas was kept on the ventilator just in case, but she could not be revived. The woman would remain this way, with no sign of detectable brain activity and even rigor mortis setting in, before the plug was pulled. The family was actually in talks to begin the removal of her organs for donation 10 minutes later when Thomas suddenly sat up and started talking as if nothing had happened. Her amazing recovery cannot be explained by doctors and is considered by her family to be a miracle.

The thought of being able to bring the dead back to life is a seductive one. It is perhaps no wonder why humankind has gone to such great lengths to pursue such things; after all who wouldn't want to buy a little more time and have one more chance at living again after shuffling out of this mortal coil? The thought of living once again is almost intoxicating, but is it really physically possible to truly beat death? After all, death comes for us all in the end, and we can only dodge it for so long as it relentlessly approaches, ever drawing closer, sometimes slowly shambling forward and sometimes running at us full bore. However, our physical death might not always be as final as it may seem. It seems that in some cases there are people who manage to dodge its clammy lunge at them when it finally catches up. Of course, death never stops, and even in these remarkable cases it will no doubt gather itself up to start plodding along after them once again. Can death be cheated, and is there a return from this inevitable fate, whether that be from science, a fluke, or black magic? Or does it always somehow manage to win in the end? After all, death is a stalker, and although it seems to be cheated from time to time, it never really forgets.