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SentencedToLive
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Name: Ben
Location: New Jersey, United States
Birthday: 2/8/1987
Gender: Male
Interests: Researching blowguns on the internet, selling fireworks to innocent children, wiffleball
Expertise: Being a renegade, and having nightmares.
Occupation: Artist
Industry: Entertainment
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  BigBadBeno
Member Since:
1/5/2004
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| Ever since the accident I feel like there's a part of me missing. Well,
there is, but it's deeper than that. Everybody takes their fingers for
granted, nobody realizes how important they are to our everyday lives
and how crucial they are in going about everyday life. It's only once
they have been severed that we can truly understand their immeasurable
worth. With only seven usable fingers I feel like half the man I used
to be. My life has forever changed. I can only hope to make the best of
this terrible situation somehow, but I'm at a complete loss for ways
how.
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| Just as we love to tell ghost stories, people in Haiti love to tell zombie stories - the scarier the better. Over the years, as the stories get told over and over again, the tales get weirder and weirder until nobody is quite sure of the truth.
Read these stories of the undead. Then you decide. Are they truth? Or undead truth?
When author Alfred Metraux was in Haiti studying voodoo, he was told about a beautiful woman who was engaged to the man she loved. An evil boko was also in love with the young beauty. And he, too, asked her to marry him. Unwisely, the girl followed her heart and not her head. She turned down the boko and prepared for her wedding. Before she could marry her true love, the girl became ill and died.
When it came time to bury the dead maiden, the family bought a coffin in a nearby town. But when they returned home, they saw that the coffin was too small. Her family had to bend her neck to fit her body into the coffin. To make matters worse, during the wake, someone accidentally burned the corpse's foot with a cigarette.
A few months later, rumors spread through the village that the girl had been seen - with the boko. She was easily recognized because of her bent neck and the cigarette burn on her foot!
While visiting Haiti, author Zora Neale Hurston actually had the chance to photograph a zombie! The zombie was a woman named Felicia Felix-Mentor, and Zora found her in a Haitian hospital.
In her book, Sorrow's Kitchen, Zora describes Felicia as having "a blank face with dead eyes."
Of course, before Felicia became one of the undead, her eyes were very alive and vibrant. According to legend, in life she was a loving wife and mother, and she took pride in running a small grocery business with her husband. Then one day, while her son was still quite small, Felicia took ill and died. Her death was official - the government even gave her husband a death certificate.
Almost thirty years later, a woman was found wandering around a farm. She was totally confused. The owner of the farm identified the woman as his deceased daughter, Felicia Felix-Mentor!
Felicia's husband, who had since remarried, was also called to the farm. He, too, identified the woman as his dead wife.
Felicia's condition terrified her family - so much so that they had the zombie woman committed to an asylum. And that is where Zora Neale Hurston took her picture.
The third, and the most creepy story, is the one about Joseph's zombies. Joseph was a voodoo sorcerer who kept many zombies as slaves. But Joseph did not take care of his zombie slaves. He left that to his wife.
One afternoon, Joseph's wife treated the zombies to a snack of pralines and salted peanut crackers. That was a big mistake! She obviously didn't know what happens to zombies when they eat salt!
Well, as the story is told, these particular zombies immediately realized what had happened to them. Rather than turn on Joseph's wife, they ran to their graves and began digging fiercely at the dirt, trying to find their eternal peace. But as they dug, the zombies turned into decaying flesh.
These stories have been circulating around Haiti for a very long time. And perhaps we will never know for sure whether they are true. But one thing is for sure: There is one place you will always find a zombie - at your local video store! | | |
| Chapter 2: Meet the Undead!
Do you believe in zombies? Some people in Haiti do. Zombies are part of the legends of voodoo - an ancient and secret religion brought to Haiti on the slave ships from West Africa. In fact, voodoo comes from the West African word vodun. Vodun means sacred object. Most religious practices in voodoo involve one or many objects.
Zombies have always been a part or the voodoo culture. It is believed that voodoo magicians are able to raise only the bodies of the dead - and not their souls. Poor zombies! They are left being neither people nor corpses. Like real people, zombies can walk, and eat, and hear. but unlike people, zombies have no memories. They do not know their names, their birthdays, their families, or anything else about the lives they have left. They don't even remember being disturbed by the evil sorcerer, known as boko, who raised them from the quiet of their graves.
There are all sorts of superstitions about how people are raised from the dead. And there are just as many superstitions about what to do to keep people fromj being raised from the dead For example, some people believe a person can only be raised if he answers to his own name. That's why some Haitian families sew the corpse's mouth closed before burying it underground. Bokos seeking to wake these dead folks, are themselves in for a rude awakening!
Another way families keep the bokos away is to bury the dead person face down, with a dagger in his or her hand. That should do the trick - who'd want to wake up a dead person who's carrying a knife!
Still more families try to find other ways to distract the dead person, so that he or she will not respond when called. Some spread sesame seeds all over the coffin so that the dead person will spend eternity counting the seeds. Others are buried with an eyeless needle. It is the family's hope that the dead person will concentrate solely on trying to thread the needle.
Sounds pretty creepy, huh? Well, before you go diving under your bed, hiding from a member of the undead who has been given a little bit of salt and is searching for revenge, think about this: There have been very few actual sightings of zombies - and scientists have a pretty good explanation for the groups of people who fit the classic zombie description.
Scientists believe that the bokos in Haiti have access to a special drug that can make a person go into a deep, deep coma. So deep, in fact, that the person appears to be dead.
The "dead" person is buried for three days. After that he is dug up and fed a special paste from a plant that is locally known as the zombie cucumber. If being buried alive weren't enough to make the zombie crazy, this zombie cucumber paste sure is! It is guarenteed to make him totally confused and give him permanent amnesia. Suddenly this person has all of the characteristics of a real zombie - he has no memory, and walks around in a slow, sad state of total confusion.
There you go! What a relief! Once again, modern science has put your mind at ease! But don't get too relaxed. Like most supernatural beings, zombies cannot always be explained logically. There have still been some cases of zombie sightings that don't have any scientific explanations at all. Turn the page and you decide - are these zombies fact, or fiction? | | |
| I found a small instructional booklet on zombies in my room. Since it is so great and deserves to be savored, I will display it for you chapter by chapter.
Chapter One: How to Spot a Zombie
So you're wondering if maybe - just maybe - there's a zombie living in your town! But you can't really tell, because you're not really sure what a zombie looks like - or what a zombie is for that matter.
Well, never fear! Here's everything you need to know about how to spot one of the undead!
The legend of the zombies comes from Haiti, an island in the Caribbean Sea. According to Haitian voodoo legend, zombies are dead bodies that have been brought back from the grave by magic. Once they are brought back, they exist in a sort of half-life. The zombies then become slaves to the living.
It's easy to spot a zombie. First of all, check his eyes. Zombies always look downward - they usually will not look a living person in the eye! Also, many times, the area around a zombie's eyes will be so white that it is almost transparent.
Next, watch your potential zombie walk. Zombies walk very slowly - and very awkwardly, in an almost shuffling motion.
Finally, try to hold a conversation with your zombie. If he answers you, he's no zombie! Zombies never answer when spoken to. In fact, most zombies never speak at all. If a zombie does make a few sounds, they are complete and total gibberish. It's almost as if the zombie is speaking in a language that no living person can understand.
Of course, it can be dangerous to hang around with a zombie. If a zombie is given salt to eat or blood to drink, he will suddenly realize that he is one of the undead! Finding out something like that can make a person pretty mad. The zombie will kill anyone that he thinks may have been responsible for turning him into one of the living dead!
Zombies can work as hard as any human - but with no real voices or wills of their own, they can never fight to free themselves from their zombie slavery. Unless of course they are fed that tasty snack of blood or salt.
The best place to spot a zombie is - at the movies. Horror movie directors love to make gory, flesh-crawling flicks about zombies who come back and seek revenge on the living. In the movies, the zombies kill anyone in their paths. After all, they can never be quite sure who woke them from their peaceful graves. And movie zombies are merciless - some of them are even cannibals!
But you don't have to wrry about a zombie moving to your town. After all, everyone knows that in real life, there are absolutely no such things as zombies. Or are there...?
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