Pat Robertson Voodoo Doll, Anyone?

My sister’s family spent Halloween 2008 in St. Augustine for a couple of reasons: she had tickets to the Neil Diamond concert in Jacksonville, and her husband went to the Georgia-Florida game. My sister is a Neil Diamond-head, something her husband simply cannot understand; and he’d prefer to have a wad of tobacco in his mouth rather than a Milk Dud, something I cannot comprehend.

Early on Halloween day, my parents walked the beach with the twins. They came upon a dead pufferfish, and my mother called the girls over to see it. She told them that the fish is deadly poisonous but that it can be eaten if prepared properly. In fact, chefs in Japan train for years to learn how to cut the poisonous parts of the fish out so the fish can be safely eaten.
Then, in a nod to Halloween, she kicked at the dead fish and said something like, “Some voodoo doctors use the poison in these fish to make zombies. Do you know what zombies are?”

As the children stood around her wide-eyed, she continued, “Zombies are people whose brains are dead but their bodies are still alive. Bad people give them the poison so they can make them do anything they tell them to.”

Nothing else was said about zombies or pufferfish for the rest of the day. After dinner, the kids put on their costumes, and Mom donned a witch’s hat and wig, along with the requisite green-putty mole on her chin. We spent a couple of hours cruising the neighborhood in the golf cart collecting buckets of candy.

Mom was a little exhausted from all the excitement that night, and she had the beginnings of a rash on her face that would later turn into what looked like angry welts. She took herself to bed, leaving the wig, hat, and green mole on the coffee table (one of the kids later mistook the putty mole for a green Skittle). By contrast, the children, hyped up on six pounds of processed sugar each, were extremely difficult to put to bed. Especially Faith, who absolutely refused to fall asleep.

The next morning, Mom felt worse. In fact, she was unable to get out of bed.

Several years before, she had been given a bone density test, and it revealed that she, a pale-faced tiny woman of northern European descent, had osteoporosis and was, indeed, experiencing bone loss. Her doctor prescribed Actonel. After taking it for several months, she began suffering from debilitating arthritis. She stopped taking the Actonel and went on a detox diet, but it still took her almost three years to feel better.

To this day, if she doesn’t eat exactly right, or if she’s under stress, her joints begin to ache. And it’s terribly unfair, but a few days with four young children constitutes stress, and so when my sister and her family visit, Mom often spends a day or so recovering after they leave. This time, a couple of bite-size Snickers combined with an evening of watching Neil Diamond in his stretch satin followed by one watching little Joe in stretch-Spiderman, and, well, you get the picture.

Mom stayed in bed while my sister, my father, and I took the four children to Disney the next day. After a full day in the park, the kids should have been exhausted (the adults certainly were). But again that night, Faith fought sleep.

The next morning, Mom wasn’t better. In fact, she was unable to get out of bed to even kiss the kids goodbye.

My sister and her husband piled the kids, their bags, their bicycles, and their buckets of candy into the minivan and drove home. My sister called me that evening to report that, for the third night in a row, she couldn’t get Faith to sleep. She said Faith had been unusually quiet the entire day and was still refusing to go to bed. When she asked Faith what was wrong, the child burst into tears. Grace had to tell her mother what was wrong with her sister.

Grace hesitantly explained about the dead pufferfish and how Grammy had told them it was so poisonous it could kill people and that bad people used it to turn others into zombies. Then the girls said, “Grammy touched the fish, and she started to turn into a zombie. We’re afraid it will happen to us.”

My sister said, “What do I tell them? They’re afraid to go to sleep.”

I said, “Tell them it was Halloween and Grammy just made up that story because you’re supposed to scare little kids on Halloween.”

So that’s what she told the twins, and it backfired. They were furious with their Grammy for lying to them. And then my Mom was upset that the girls thought she’d lied to them. Everything she’d told them was true, she insisted.

I looked it all up – blowfish, pufferfish, and zombies. Of course, it’s true that pufferfish, also known as blowfish or fugu, contain lethal amounts of a poison called tetrodotoxin in their internal organs, especially the liver. Apprentice chefs in Japan train for two to three years in fugu preparation before taking a test that includes a written examination followed by a test of preparing the fish and actually eating it themselves. Only thirty percent of the applicants actually pass the test.

Pufferfish poison apparently causes paralysis, and the victims are usually completely conscious until they die from asphyxiation. Some fully-conscious victims have been presumed dead and have awakened just before being cremated, so now, in parts of Japan, fugu victims aren’t buried for three days in order to give the body time to begin decomposing. If there is no decomposition, the victim is still alive – sort of a “zombie.”

The Wikipedia article on pufferfish goes on to say, “The pufferfish is also reported to be one of the main ingredients used in voodoo to turn people into zombies.”

Wade Davis, a Harvard ethnobotanist, wrote two books during the 1980s that asserted zombies could be created by introducing two toxins into the bloodstream. Based on his investigations of voodoo practices in Haiti, Wade claimed that tetrodotoxin, the poison found in pufferfish, when mixed with a dissociative drug, could induce a death-like state during which the victim could be controlled by the voodoo sorcerer, also known as a bokor.

Mom got her information from a television documentary that further explained how the bokors controlled their victims. According to the show, after the victims ingested the voodoo concoction, they would be so completely paralyzed as to appear dead. They would be buried, but the bokor would go back to the grave later and dig them up. The poison would wear off so that they could move again, but the lack of oxygen during the time they were buried would have caused sufficient brain damage to render them mentally incompetent. Grateful to the person who dug them out of the earth, they wouldn’t know better but to obey their voodoo sorcerer’s commands.

I wonder how long before the people of Haiti hear what Pat Robertson said about the earthquake being God's judgment on them and begin making Pat Robertson voodoo dolls. They could sell those suckers on E-bay and raise enough money to rebuild Port-au-Prince.