There are several possible etymologies of the word zombie. One possible origin is jumbie, the West Indian term for "ghost".[http://science.howstuffworks.com/zombie.htm Howstuffworks "How Zombies Work" ] Another is nzambi, the Kongo word meaning "spirit of a dead person." According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the etymology is from the Louisiana Creole or Haitian Creole zonbi, of Bantu origin.[http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/zombie zombie - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary ] A zonbi is a person who is believed to have died and been brought back to life without speech or free will. It is akin to the Kimbundu nzúmbe ghost. These words are approximately from 1871.

Voodoo

According to the tenets of Vodou, a dead person can be revived by a bokor or Voodoo sorcerer. Zombies remain under the control of the bokor since they have no will of their own. "Zombi" is also another name of the Vodou snake god Damballah Wedo, of Niger-Congo origin; it is akin to the Kongo word nzambi, which means "god". There also exists within the voudon tradition the zombi astral which is a human soul that is captured by a bokor and used to enhance the bokor's power.

In 1937, while researching folklore in Haiti, Zora Neale Hurston encountered the case of a woman that appeared in a village, and a family claimed she was Felicia Felix-Mentor, a relative who had died and been buried in 1907 at the age of 29. Hurston pursued rumors that the affected persons were given powerful drugs, but she was unable to locate individuals willing to offer much information. She wrote:

cquote: medical]] secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than gestures of ceremony.''

Several decades later, Wade Davis, a Harvard ethnobotanist, presented a pharmacological case for zombies in two books, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) and Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (1988). Davis traveled to Haiti in 1982 and, as a result of his investigations, claimed that a living person can be turned into a zombie by two special powders being entered into the blood stream (usually via a wound). The first, coup de poudre (French: 'powder strike'), includes tetrodotoxin (TTX), the poison found in fugu. The second powder is composed of dissociatives such as datura. Together, these powders were said to induce a death-like state in which the victim's will would be entirely subject to that of the bokor. Davis also popularized the story of Clairvius Narcisse, who was claimed to have succumbed to this practice. There is wide belief among the Haitian people of the existence of the "zombie drug".Fact: date=July 2008