Writing as a government psychiatrist rather than a folklorist, Mars separates what Haitian peasants actually believe about the zombi from what visitors arrive expecting to see. In the countryside the word carries several senses — a soul barred from heaven, the unseen labor thought to explain a farmer's prosperity — within a religious world where spirits mediate between God and the living.

He then turns to the case that made the term famous. In 1936 a ragged, disoriented woman appeared in the streets of Ennery and was identified by a local family as their long-dead relative Félicia Félix-Mentor. Examined in hospital, she could give no account of herself. X-rays found no trace of the fracture that had left the dead woman lame, and the limp resolved once she was fed properly. Mars diagnoses schizophrenia compounded by village hysteria, and faults Zora Neale Hurston for repeating the story as evidence.