Writing as a government psychiatrist, Mars sets out what Haitian peasants mean by the word and then tests the belief against a case he examined himself. He separates worship of the vodu spirits from the distinct idea of the zombi, which villagers apply both to a soul that cannot enter heaven and to the invisible labourers a prosperous farmer is supposed to command. In October 1936 a ragged, half-blind woman appeared in the streets of Ennery and a local family identified her as a relative long dead, chiefly because she limped as their sister had. Mars examined her in hospital, found her speech irrelevant and her sense of time gone, and X-rayed both legs. No old fracture appeared; the limp came from undernourishment and vanished once she was fed. He reads the episode as schizophrenia amplified by mass hysteria, faults Zora Neale Hurston for repeating the village version unchecked, and proposes social psychiatry for such beliefs anywhere.