Several years back, a woman checked herself into a hospital psychiatric unit.
She needed help, she told her doctors, because she was terrified of… zombies.
Her doctors did what good doctors do: They used cognitive behavior therapy to help the woman question her thoughts and fears. Within days, the woman was laughing at her folly, and she was discharged.
It’s possible that zombies do lurch about our world — just not in the ways depicted in popular movies or television shows.
For example, in the late 1990s, Roland Littlewood and Chavannes Douyon, of the University College of London, traveled to southern Haiti to study a woman who had reportedly been zombified.
Researchers referred to the woman as “FI,” who had died after suffering a fever.
Three years later, however, a friend spotted FI, seemingly alive, stumbling and swaying around the village. When FI’s parents dug up her grave, they found ...
