Os zombies no Haiti - mito ou alguma realidade?

When Zora Neale Hurston Studied Zombies in Haiti, por Charles King (Zora.Medium):

Religion depended on categories, Hurston was coming to realize: the sacred and the profane, the ethereal and the earth-bound, the miraculous and the commonplace. In Manhattan and Eatonville, there were only two boxes, the living and the dead. But Haitians had added a third, a way of being neither one nor the other, or perhaps both at the same time: zonbi, or as Seabrook spelled it in The Magic Island: zombie. (...)

At one point during her stay, Hurston visited a Haitian hospital. In the yard near the fence, she found a woman who had just been served dinner. Huddled in a defensive position, the woman had barely touched her food. Seeing Hurston approach, she pulled a branch from a nearby shrub and began to sweep the ground. She kept her head covered with a cloth, wary and fearful, as if expecting to be hit. A doctor pulled the cloth from her face, but she flung her arms up, bending them around her head like a turtle retreating into its shell.

Her name, Hurston learned, was Felicia Felix-Mentor. She had grown up in Ennery, a village on the road between Gonaïves and Cap-Haïtien, where she and her husband had managed a small grocery store. The stunning thing about this woman was that medical records showed that she had died in 1907. Hurston snapped several pictures of Felix-Mentor, one of which she later published in Life magazine. It remains the first known photograph of a person whom her Haitian neighbors knew as a zombie.

What had happened to Felix-Mentor? Twenty-nine years earlier, her funeral had taken place. She had been mourned, but her family quickly moved on with life. Her husband took a new wife. Her son grew into a man. But then, the autumn before Hurston visited, gendarmes had encountered a woman walking naked along a country road.