You are about to hear what sounds like the end of the story.

The final reveal.

The moment where everything clicks.

Except it’s not the end.

There is a whole other layer to this story if you just stick around.

And it is completely insane.

On the afternoon of May 2nd, 1962, a middle-aged woman named Angelina Narcissus walked into a hospital room inside the Albert Schweitzer Hospital, a medical center in central Haiti.

Inside, Angelina saw one of her brothers.

Forty-year-old Clairvus Narcissus was propped up in the hospital bed.

An IV stuck out of one arm.

An oxygen mask was strapped over his face.

His eyes were closed.

When Angelina touched his hand and said hello, he did not react.

She had just been briefed by the doctors.

Two days earlier, her brother had come to the hospital coughing up blood.

 

 

He was also running a dangerously high fever.

The doctors had managed to get his fever down.

But they determined his blood pressure was alarmingly high.

He also had fluid accumulating in his lungs.

They did not know why any of this was happening.

They did not know how to control it or stop it.

Now, less than forty-eight hours after Clairvus’s symptoms began, he was barely conscious.

For Angelina, it was terrifying to see her brother so sick.

But it was also confusing.

She knew one of her other brothers had seen Clairvus just a few hours before he showed up at the hospital.

At that time, Clairvus had seemed completely fine.

The illness had come out of nowhere.

As Angelina looked around the hospital room, she also felt annoyed.

She had four other siblings.

Two more brothers and two sisters.

None of them were here.

She knew she should not be surprised.

Ever since their parents died, there had been non-stop drama between all the siblings.

Most of the drama centered around Clairvus himself.

When their parents passed away, Clairvus inherited their money and land.

These days, he lived like a king.

He lived in one of the nicest places in their village.

He constantly flaunted his wealth.

Meanwhile, Angelina and her other siblings struggled financially.

Anytime they asked Clairvus for help, he refused.

It had caused a huge rift in the family.

So now, Angelina was the only one who had shown up to visit him.

Despite his condition being so dire.

She sat down on a plastic chair inside the room.

For a few minutes, she just watched Clairvus breathe.

His breathing seemed normal.

Rhythmic.

Slow, but normal.

Then suddenly, his breath caught in his chest.

He began making a wheezing, gurgling sound.

He was half conscious.

It was like his body was reacting to not being able to breathe.

Angelina stood up instinctively.

She grabbed her brother’s hand and began to squeeze it.

As she did, his eyelids fluttered open for a second.

Then they closed again.

Underneath his eyelids, she could see his eyes darting around.

At the same time, the wheezing sound turned into choking.

Angelina let go of her brother’s hand.

She ran into the hallway and found a doctor.

By the time she explained what was happening and returned with the doctor, Clairvus was no longer making any noise.

He was totally still.

The doctor rushed over and checked for a pulse.

He could not find one.

He turned to Angelina.

“I’m sorry, but your brother is dead.”

The following morning, May 3rd, Angelina arrived at the small cemetery near their village for her brother’s funeral.

She was glad her four remaining siblings had finally decided to show up.

But she was also in shock.

She could not believe what had happened.

The doctors told her that Clairvus had died from something called malignant hypertension.

Basically, blood pressure so high it causes organ damage.

It also causes pulmonary edema, which is fluid in the lungs.

That fluid can make it impossible to breathe.

That was likely the choking sound her brother made before he died.

But the doctors told Angelina something else.

Despite knowing what actually happened to Clairvus, they did not know why it happened.

It was totally unclear how he got these symptoms in the first place.

It would just be a mystery.

As Angelina walked up to Clairvus’s gravesite, she looked down and saw her brother lying inside his open casket.

She reached out and touched his hand one last time.

It was so cold she pulled away immediately.

Then she began to cry.

The ceremony was a blur.

The whole thing felt surreal.

Eventually, it wrapped up.

Angelina and her other siblings walked up to the casket to say their final goodbyes.

After they did, they stepped back.

They watched as cemetery employees closed Clairvus’s casket and lowered it into the ground.

Here is where the story does not end.

That same night, a little after midnight, two men conspicuously entered the small cemetery.

They carried shovels.

As they walked, they kept looking around to make sure nobody was watching.

They went up to Clairvus’s very fresh grave.

With their shovels, they dug and dug until they revealed his casket.

They pulled the casket out of the ground.

They pried the nails off the top.

They flipped it open.

There was Clairvus’s body.

They pulled his body out and laid it on the ground next to the hole.

Then, as fast as they could, they closed the casket back up.

Now, Clairvus’s body was outside of it on the ground nearby.

They re-buried the casket.

They put all the dirt back.

They put all the grass back.

They made it look like nobody had touched it.

Then they walked over to Clairvus’s body.

They tied his wrists and ankles together with rope.

They wrapped his body in a large black cloth.

Together, they hoisted his body up and placed him on their respective shoulders.

Together, they carried him out of the cemetery and off into the wilderness on the outskirts of the village.

When the sun began to rise, they stopped.

They found a good spot to hide along with Clairvus’s body in the trees.

When the sun went back down again, the two men were up and on the move again with the body.

They did this for days.

They finally reached a massive fenced-in plot of land in northern Haiti.

When they got there, it was just starting to get light outside.

With the light, they could see dozens and dozens of people moving through a vast field in front of them.

All these people were moving in a jerky, unnatural way.

All of them were holding machetes.

But the two men who had lugged Clairvus’s body here were not afraid.

They unlocked the fence.

They carried Clairvus’s body right up a pathway through the middle of this field.

They passed all these machete-wielding people.

The people did not even seem to notice the men or the body.

It was like this was totally normal.

Eventually, the men reached the middle of the field.

There was a building there.

The men went inside.

The interior was basically one large room.

A table sat in the center.

Shelves lined the walls.

The shelves were stacked with glass containers.

The containers held things like dried plants, taxidermied smaller animals, and what appeared to be human bones.

Standing in the middle of this room was the two men’s boss.

He was a very old man.

He had a very expectant look on his face.

Without saying a word, the two men placed Clairvus’s body on the table.

They unwrapped the black cloth around him.

The boss looked very carefully at Clairvus’s face.

Then he smiled.

He handed each of the men a stack of money.

Eighteen years later.

February 1980.

Angelina walked through an outdoor market in her small village in central Haiti.

Almost two decades had passed since Clairvus had died.

She did not really think about him that much anymore.

But on this particular day, an old man approached her.

He was very thin.

His face was sunken.

He had a long, deep scar on his cheek that went from the side of his mouth to his ear.

His eyes were bloodshot and kind of wide, like he was wild.

In a gravelly voice, he told her his name was Clairvus.

He said he was her brother.

Angelina did not think this was her brother.

She thought this man was obviously out of his mind.

Or lying.

Or both.

This was clearly not her brother.

He was dead.

On top of that, the man did not remotely look like her brother.

He looked completely different.

That big scar on his face was certainly not on Clairvus’s face when he died.

Angelina told the man, “No. You are not my brother. You need to leave me alone.”

The man freaked out.

He grabbed Angelina’s shoulders and started violently shaking her.

He insisted, “No! I really am Clairvus!”

Angelina screamed.

A crowd of confused but worried onlookers surrounded her.

Then a police officer walked over, grabbed the man, and dragged him away.

Later that same day, a police officer sat in an interview room at the police station.

Across from him sat the older man who kept insisting he was Clairvus.

The story this man told the officer was absolutely insane.

He claimed that eighteen years earlier, when he died, he remembered that moment.

He heard the doctor literally pronounce him dead.

He heard his siblings start to cry.

Then he remembered the cold when the hospital staff moved him to the refrigerated morgue.

He remembered the sound of them nailing his coffin shut.

He remembered what it felt like when one of those nails punctured through and cut his cheek.

That is how he got the scar on his face.

A nail from his own coffin.

He was not dead.

He was totally mentally conscious of everything happening to him.

He just physically could not move or react in any way.

He did not know why.

But everybody thought he was dead.

And he was not.

Then he said later that same night, as he was literally in a coffin underground, basically waiting to suffocate to death, he became aware of two men suddenly unearthing him.

They removed him from his coffin.

They tied him up.

They wrapped him in cloth.

Then they carried him into the wilderness for days.

Finally, they entered that building in the middle of the field.

They set him down on that table.

He heard a third man thank the men who had carried him.

Then the third man poured something into Clairvus’s mouth.

The man just started chanting over and over again.

A few minutes later, Clairvus found his body beginning to work again.

He could open his eyes.

He could sort of move his limbs.

But things felt different.

His vision was strange and hazy.

His body movements were jerky and uncoordinated.

It almost felt like his mind was moving slower than it was supposed to.

Like it was dumbed down.

That was when Clairvus realized what was actually going on.

The old man who poured whatever in his mouth was a bokor.

A voodoo priest in Haiti.

The bokor had used a potion to turn Clairvus into a zombie.

Clairvus told the police officer he had been absolutely terrified.

He wanted to fight back.

But his body felt like Jell-O.

He could barely form a coherent thought.

There was no way he could actually do anything.

The bokor untied him.

He made him stand up.

He marched him outside of the building.

Everything looked blurry.

But despite his vision, he could tell he was in the middle of a huge sugarcane field.

He saw at least a dozen other people moving in the same awkward, jerky way he knew he was.

They were harvesting sugarcane with machetes.

The bokor handed Clairvus a machete.

“Get out there and join them. Get to work.”

Something deep in Clairvus’s mind told him to use the machete to attack the bokor.

To escape.

But he did not.

Instead, he walked out into the field.

He started working.

He kept working day in and day out in that bizarre zombie-like state for two full years.

Then one day, another one of those zombies finally attacked and killed the bokor.

Suddenly, all the zombies were free.

But the man saying he was Clairvus did not go straight home.

He could not.

He knew this bokor had not randomly targeted him.

The bokor had been hired.

Someone paid to turn Clairvus into a zombie.

In the mind of this man, there was only one person who would have done that.

That person was still alive back home in his village.

If he returned, they would very likely just kill him.

So he spent sixteen years wandering around northern Haiti.

He worked random odd jobs.

He barely survived.

But he kept up with news from his village.

When he saw that the person he believed had hired the bokor had died, he felt safe enough to finally go back home.

The police officer did not immediately think this was legitimate.

He thought it sounded completely insane.

But just in case, he went to Clairvus’s siblings.

He asked them to give him a list of questions that only the real Clairvus could answer.

Super specific information from their childhood.

Things like that.

The officer came back with the list.

He began asking the man the questions.

The man claiming to be Clairvus answered all of them correctly.

Every single one.

This really was Clairvus Narcissus.

The news of Clairvus’s return from the dead spread across the globe.

But for the most part, when people outside of Haiti read or heard about it, they assumed the story was just folklore.

Or some kind of hoax.

In 1982, twenty years after Clairvus supposedly died and two years after he supposedly came back to life, a Harvard University researcher named Wade Davis traveled to Haiti to investigate the story.

What he found was that Clairvus was definitely telling the truth.

Here is what scientists and Clairvus’s family believe really happened.

On the morning of April 30th, 1962, Clairvus woke up feeling perfectly fine.

He was completely healthy, just like his sister Angelina had thought.

But according to Clairvus himself, that same afternoon, one of his brothers came over.

The brother said he just wanted to put the family drama about the inheritance behind them.

He gave Clairvus a hug.

What Clairvus did not know was that during that hug, his brother intentionally rubbed a fine powder onto his skin.

The powder did make Clairvus incredibly sick.

But it was not designed to kill him.

It completely paralyzed him.

He could not move his arms, his legs, his eyes, nothing.

It lowered his heart rate so low that doctors thought Clairvus was dead.

That was exactly what Clairvus’s brother and the bokor he conspired with had planned.

They knew he would be declared dead.

He would be buried quickly.

Right after he was buried, the bokor sent those two men to dig Clairvus up while he was still paralyzed.

They carried him off to that sugarcane plantation.

He became a slave.

He was given drugs every day and forced to work non-stop.

For the brother, the reason he did this was to punish Clairvus for being so selfish with the money he inherited from their parents.

This was the plan.

To turn him into a zombie slave.

The active ingredient in the paralyzing powder that the brother rubbed on Clairvus was tetrodotoxin.

A poison found in puffer fish.

The active ingredient in the liquid that the bokor gave Clairvus when he arrived, and then continued to give him on a near-daily basis to keep him in line, was called the zombie cucumber.

A hallucinogenic plant native to Haiti.

After returning to his village and telling his story to the world, Clairvus actually went on to live a relatively normal life.

He lived with his siblings.

He died in 1994 at the age of seventy-two.

He was able to clearly articulate who did this to him.

His brother and the bokor.

Both of them were dead by the time he returned and told his story.

Nobody was ever held to account for any of this.

That scar on his face.

The nail from his own coffin.

He carried that mark for thirty-two more years.

And when he touched his sister’s hand at that market, his hand was warm.

Not cold like the last time she touched him.

That is how she finally believed.

Not because of the questions.

Not because of the police.

Because his hand was warm.

And she pulled away again.

But this time, she pulled him into a hug.