In Night of the Living Dead, The Walking Dead, and other fictional zombie worlds, the zombies are the monsters, intent of killing and devouring innocent human life. But in the original zombie folklore, the zombies themselves were the victims.

In Haitian folklore, a zombie is an animated corpse with lack of cognition or free will, whose soul is said to be imprisoned and possessed by magical means, and whose body is controlled by its master. The symbolism of slavery in this concept is impossible to ignore, shedding light on how European slave drivers, plantation owners and colonial powers used the fear of “zombification” amongst Haitian people; the fear of being trapped in their enslaved bodies forever, to discourage suicide amongst the workforce. Despite France being the first country to abolish slavery, French plantation-owners worked their African slaves so hard, the rate of death of slaves at Haiti’s Saint Domingue plantations was higher than anywhere else in the Western hemisphere. Fictional horror was born from real-life horror.

The concept of zombies was brought to the US in the 1920s through a book about Haiti, and Hollywood went to work turning the legend into a whitewashed movie monster. Read about the origin of zombies and see a documentary about them at Messy Messy Chic.

(Image credit: Jean-noël Lafargue)

Tattoos have been around for thousands of years, and the easier they become, the more people get them. In 1891, Samuel O'Reilly patented an electric tattoo machine, which led to a sharp rise in the popularity of tattoos. Soon they were flourishing on the bodies of London's upper crust. A 1907 article from The Washington Times featured an interview with a tattoo artist referred to only as South, who told tales of the kinds of tattoos he'd been doing in London. Some of his clients just wanted a nice body decoration, but others found practical uses for the ink.

Another woman, fearing the last will and testament of her husband, by which she was to inherit all his lands, tenements and other property, might be lost or destroyed by enemies, arranged with the decorative artist to reproduce the document on her back. The matter was placed in the hands of one of London’s foremost practitioners and the will was borrowed and loaned to the tattooist, in order that  he might copy the chyrography as well as the words of the testator. The document contained 500 words and several signatures and legal phrases showing it had been properly filed.

This was one of the most difficult tasks of the artist, and likewise the most painful ordeal through which any of his clients ever passed. It required a week for the document to be reproduced, and the woman was in great pain at the completion of the tattooist’s task, but now that the needle pricks have healed, the will can never be lost as long as the woman lives.

Parents tattooed their babies for identification, and old folks got inked to feel young again. Read more stories of London's tattoo craze at Strange Ago. -via Strange Company

You've probably enjoyed the animated musical stylings of Bongo Cat occasionally over the past couple of years. Now you can be Bongo Cat and make your own music with this web toy. Use your keyboard to hit the various rums, or you can switch to paint or marimbas when you like. Musical talent is not included, but you might find yourself spending enough time with this toy to attempt to develop some. -via Metafilter

You can see starfish in the ocean, but you've probably never studied a live one this closely. They have no brain, but they have five arms and a lot of "feet" on the underside of those arms. They use those feet to move around, using hydraulic engineering. Starfish also use their feet to smell. Yeah, they are weird. -via The Kid Should See This

Today, the term "caveman" really just means earlier versions of humans, but did they really live in caves? Humans arose in Africa, and eventually migrated to the rest of the world, which was colder and meant they needed shelter. A cave seems like the perfect place to hide from both predators and the elements. But there's a reason we know them as cave men- caves happen to be where we found evidence of early humans.

If caves were not quite as important as was portrayed by the caveman stereotype, why did we find so many traces of palaeolithic life in caves? The answer to that is two-fold: On the one hand, the already existing stereotype of the caveman and early finds in caves naturally oriented more research in caves. It is a selection bias. On the other hand, the conditions for the preservation of fossils in caves are extremely good. Caves not only shelter humans from rain and wind, but also all other kind of things that are left behind in them. Adding to the protection from the weather, many caves accumulate sediment steadily over time burying archaeological traces. They are ideal grounds to conserve a glimpse of the past.

The truth is that people lived in caves and a lot of other places, too, but those other places are not so easy to detect. Read about the many kinds of shelters early humans used and how we manage to find them at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: Jaroslav A. Polák)

The growth of cities in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries led to problems that all demanded new thinking to solve, such as sewage treatment, transportation, garbage collection, and overflowing cemeteries. The cemetery problem crept up gradually, as burial plots were centered around churches and were there presumably for eternity. When cemetery expansion became impossible and more people died, the earliest solutions were not the best.  

When all the plots in a graveyard were full—as was happening more and more by the end of the 17th century—sextons added another layer, digging graves two, rather than the customary six, feet under. The bodies of the poor, or plague victims, were dumped, en masse, into pits. Most corpses were clad in only a fabric shroud as coffins were considered a luxury.

All it took for the dead to rise was a heavy rainstorm, a pack of marauding dogs, or a sloppy drunk gravedigger (see: Hamlet). Some were withered down to the bone while others appeared ruddy and well-fed, more lifelike than when they were gasping on their hollow-cheeked death-beds. Medical science failed to explain these such post-mortem anomalies but folk tradition had a name for the undecayed, revenant, from the French verb revenir, ‘to come back’. The Slavic term was ‘Vampyr’ or ‘upyr’.

A notorious case of an unearthed vampire in what is now Serbia led Europeans to diagnose these better-preserved corpses as vampires. Read how that happened and what it led to at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Theodor Josef Hubert Hoffbauer)

Legends told about ghosts and hauntings often involve restless spirits who were treated terribly during their lives or have unresolved business to attend to, which is why they hang around, looking for vengeance, justice, or just simple recognition. So it stands to reason that a lot of these spirits would be women. One of the more notorious, at least in the US, is the Bell Witch of Tennessee.

The story says that the ghost responds to the name “Kate,” the name of a woman the patriarch of the family had cheated. According to various accounts, the Bell’s former neighbor, Kate Batts, was a strange woman who was mocked by her community. This positions Kate in the typical profile of the witch: an older woman who is an outcast existing on the margins of her society. Though historical evidence suggests that associations between the real person Kate Batts and the ghost don’t line up (she was still alive at the time of the hauntings!), the association has stuck and the story is rooted in the tradition of a woman wronged by a man and getting revenge in the afterlife. It’s worth considering why it is this story that resonates more than any other version of the tale.

Read about the Bell Witch and four other ghostly legends of women asserting themselves from beyond the grave at Folklore Thursday. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: M. V. Ingram)

I made a killer Zoom Meeting costume for my daughter. #Halloween2020 pic.twitter.com/bdKbgGZcA5

— Greg Dietzenbach (@GregDietzenbach) October 21, 2020

Greg Dietzenbach made a clever and timely Halloween costume for his 12-year-old daughter Ada. She's a Zoom meeting! Or, as the label says, a "Gloom meeting." He built a board showing a Zoom meeting with nine participants. Seven of them are photographs of Ada dressed as various monsters. The middle square is a hole, which Ada looks through while wearing the costume. The square at the center top (labeled "next victim") is an iPad that shows whoever is looking at her! Here's a video with more details.



This is another in a long line of creative Halloween costumes Dietzenbach has crafted for his family. See more of them at Mashable.

Dunkin’ Donuts has introduced the Spicy Ghost Pepper Donut. The donut is topped with strawberry frosting laced with ghost pepper, and it will only be available until December. Whether you look at it as a Halloween prank or a new nirvana in indulgent eating is up to you, but  Josh Gondelman  tried one out and reports his findings.

At the very least, it’s a fascinating experience. Even though it’s not complementary to the donut’s sweetness, the level of heat is, strangely, perfect. It falls halfway between a lie (“This isn’t even spicy!”) and a dare (“It’s free if you can finish the whole thing!”). My wife, after taking a bite, wondered how many spicy donuts one could eat before tapping out. And that’s it exactly: The Spicy Ghost Pepper Donut feels engineered to be consumed en masse as part of a donut-eating challenge between high school students, or a technically-not-abuse fraternity initiation ritual. That said, I have to imagine that the lingering warm sensation pairs terribly with hot coffee or even “the morning” in general. But other than that, eating one is pretty enjoyable.

He's got a lot more to say about the new pepper donut at The Ringer.

The ad for Kyrö Distillery features Mikko Koskinen, one of the company founders, naked in a sauna, explaining Finland and his company's products while things go on in the background that you'll want to pay attention to. Yeah, you might need to watch this more than once, as his English can be difficult at times, and you'll also see things you missed the first time around. This ad is one continuous take with no professional actors. Contains NSFW language. -via reddit

Movies go through a lot of changes from the original concept to the finished product. For those that become big hits or go on to become classics, those changes are mostly for the better. Only years afterward do we find out what could have been -and by then the early ideas seem just plain bad.

 
Let's just be glad these horror films turned out the way they did -mainly because we can't imagine them as anything else. See how your favorite horror movie could have been very different in a pictofacts list at Cracked.

If asked for a pop song from 1993, I would not be able to name one, as I was working in country music that year. However, once you hear the 60 songs in the latest mashup from The Hood Internet, you'll remember them well. It was a good year for pop! There are several folks in the comments at YouTube who took a stab at naming them all, in case you need some names and titles. -via Laughing Squid

An ATM user outside a Redwood City, California, bank noticed that there were things going on inside the closed lobby. Two young raccoons were trapped inside, apparently after climbing through the air ducts to get into the bank. Bank managers and staff from the Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA went inside and chased the critters around for ten minutes before driving them outside.

“It’s not every day an animal organisation gets called to deal with a bank break-in, but since the bank robbers were masked bandits of the wildlife kind, we were indeed the appropriate responders,” Peninsula Humane Society and SPCA communications manager, Buffy Martin Tarbox, told the ABC.

The raccoons left behind a path of destruction, but no funds were missing. Read the news report at The Guardian. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA)

Time flows forward the same way around the world, but the way people measure time and communicate it varies more than you might realize. When the day begins, how long an hour is, and what you call this time of day can be different depending on where you are. These timekeeping systems are only easy if you've done it all your life. -via Digg