Zombie

In Haitian folklore, a zombie (Haitian French: zombi, Haitian Creole: zonbi) is a dead body reanimated through various methods, most commonly magic. Modern depictions of the reanimation of the dead do not necessarily involve magic but often invoke science fictional methods such as carriers, radiation, mental diseases, vectors, pathogens, parasites, scientific accidents, etc. The English word “zombie” was first recorded in 1819, in a history of Brazil by the poet Robert Southey, in the form of “zombie”. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the word's origin as West African and compares it to the Kongo words nzambi (god) and zumbi (fetish). A Kimbundu-to-Portuguese dictionary from 1903 defines the related word nzumbi as soul, while a later Kimbundu–Portuguese dictionary defines it as being a “spirit that is supposed to wander the earth to torment the living”.

In reality, zombies are animated corpses that have no real will of their own. They can be animated through a number of means such as death magicks, like necromancy, or even less conventional ways, such as shadow slime. Regardless of how a zombie forms, they recall little or nothing from their previous lives and generally follow the will of the one that raised them. In some cases, the zombies are left to roam about freely where they will inevitably find living people and begin to propagate by turning those humans into more zombies. If no zombie hunters come to slay them, these groups can quickly become zombie hordes. The Night Stalkers, Arion and Ayana Bishop, are notable zombie hunters. Absinthe Van Gothen encountered Heloise Laveau’s zombies in Lone Fir Cemetery in Portland, Oregon.