We got into a discussion about zombies. Here in the US, we laugh about those things, but in Haiti, it's not a laughing matter. Ed, the missionary I was with, would not discuss them and warned me strongly against talking with Mark about them. Mark believed that the zombies were actually the corpses of dead people who had been reanimated. Ed finally agreed to talk about them. The voodoo method of making a zombie was not at issue. The witch doctor would have someone kidnapped and make them drink some kind of liquid. I have no idea what kind of liquid or what properties it had. The victim was then put in a box and buried for two days. I think both the burial and the digging up were done at night, but don't recall for sure. After digging the victim up, he was forced to swear an oath of allegiance, and if he broke the oath, he was buried again and left there.
Ed believed that the zombies were people who had gone insane from the properties of the liquid and being buried, while Mark believed they had actually died and no longer had any will. However, whichever is true, both agreed that this was the practice, and that zombies were real. Ed was a missionary in Port au Prince for seventeen years, and Mark, who was about twenty, had been born and raised there.
Here is an account from True Crime Library of the murder of University of Texas student Mark Kilroy. It's pretty bizarre reading, and the story doesn't emphasize it, but "palo mayombe," the magic the group practiced, was African voodoo.