In Haitian Voodoo, a person who has been brought back from the dead as a robotic automaton to do the bidding of the Voodoo practitioner responsible for the resurrection. For many decades considered a myth or someone entranced, in 1982 ethnobotanist Wade Davis investigated and discovered that there is a type of poison that can give the appearance of death and harms the mind such that a person, for a time, acts like the prototypical zombie. He wrote about this in the groundbreaking book, The Serpent and the Rainbow.