The Zombie Book. Nick Redfern

1954, a writer named Jack Finney penned a story that became a classic in the field of science-fiction. It went by the title of The Body Snatchers and was published in serialized form in Collier’s—a magazine that began in the late 1800s and which closed down three years after Finney’s article appeared. It was, however, relaunched in 2012. Such was the success of the story, one year later—in 1955—it surfaced as a full-length book. And, in no time at all, Hollywood came knocking on Jack Finney’s door. Just twelve months after the book hit the stores, a big-bucks movie version of The Body Snatchers appeared in cinemas all across the world. Its famous reworked title was Invasion of the Body Snatchers and starred Kevin McCarthy as Dr. Miles Bennell, the first man to stumble upon the terrible truth of the alien invaders in our midst.

      The 1956 movie production of Finney’s story is the definitive one, filled with chills and thrills, and shot in moody black and white. The 1978 version, with Donald Sutherland taking the lead, is very good also. Body Snatchers, of 1993, is not a bad film. The Invasion, of 2007, which saw Nicole Kidman taking the primary role, is undeniably terrible and should be missed at all costs.

       Invasion of the Body Snatchers was released in 1958 and had a remake in 1978 (shown here, featuring Donald Sutherland). In both, space pods arrive on Earth and form replicants that replace human beings one by one.

      The story is as original as it is creepy. Most of us assume that if aliens are going to invade, then they will likely do it in Independence Day-style, with gigantic spacecraft, awesome weapons of frightening power, and armies of hostile aliens. Body Snatchers (and the movie versions) took a very different approach to a planetary takeover by extraterrestrials.

      There are no aliens to be seen, no gigantic flying saucers, no laser guns—in fact, there is nothing whatsoever to even suggest an alien invasion is in the cards. That is, until strange flowers start popping up here, there, and everywhere. They are flowers to be avoided at all costs. Why? Because they have the ability to duplicate and replace people with identical, lifelike equivalents, that’s why. Well, they are physically identical, but as far as their personalities are concerned, they are very much akin to the mind-controlled undead of the likes of such movies as I Walked with a Zombie, White Zombie, and King of the Zombies.

      This brings us to a big, important, and controversial question: was Jack Finney’s creation only fiction? Is it feasible that high-tech experimentation has been undertaken—and even perfected—to create cloned, lifelike equivalents of people, ones that look like their originals, but which are truly old-school zombie-like in their actions and manner? It couldn’t really happen, could it? Some say that it already has. In the latter part of the 1990s, a very strange story circulated amongst UFO researchers, newsletters, and magazines in the United Kingdom. It was a story that, incredibly and in hair-raising fashion, suggested Jack Finney was right on the money.

      Although the story didn’t surface until 1997, the events it told supposedly occurred in the early 1990s, possibly either 1991 or 1992. The location was a highly secure facility in the south of England called Porton Down, which is located in the county of Wiltshire. The county itself is typified by rolling green fields, enchanting old villages, and beautiful countryside. There is nothing beautiful or enchanting about Porton Down, however. It’s an installation where the British government undertakes its most secret research into such domains as lethal viruses, chemical weapons, and biological warfare. Should zombies ever walk the streets of Britain, the likelihood is that they will be shown to have had their origins in some fortified lab far below the secret facility.

      As for the story in question, it went like this: given that Porton Down’s staff are known to have undertaken controversial experimentation on animals, on one occasion—late at night, or in the early hours of the morning—a team of animal-rights activists broke into the base, with the specific intent of releasing into the countryside just about as many of those same animals as possible. While the team failed to find any such animals, they came across something else: a room that contained dozens of curious-looking containers, all around eight or nine feet in length, and all containing nothing less than duplicates of well-known British politicians of that particular era. Not surprisingly, the terrified activists fled.

      Today, the story is still told in those places where UFO fanatics hang out. It’s a story that remains as intriguing and amazing as it was when it was first told. But it remains something else, too: completely unverified. To date, the animal-rights activists have not been identified and officialdom is saying nothing, one way or the other. True or not, the story of Britain’s zombie-like politicians lives on. And a word of caution: should you, one day, find yourself in the vicinity of Porton Down and you stumble upon some strange looking, colorful flowers, whatever you do, don’t touch them or pick them: just run!

       Bourbon Street Devil Baby

      The most popular version of the Bourbon Street Devil Baby legend began in the early 1800s, when a young Creole woman married a plantation owner, a very wealthy man who wanted a male heir to continue the Louisiana family name he had established. He already had three daughters from his first wife, so the new wife was kept continually pregnant. After bearing six healthy female children, she was dismayed to find herself pregnant with her seventh child. She knew this child had better be a boy, or she would be likely to find herself abandoned and a new wife would be selected to bear a male heir. The anxious mother-to-be is said to have gone to a Voodoo-Hoodoo Queen and asked her to use her powers to help her deliver a boy child.

      Unbeknownst to the desperate mother-to-be, the Voodoo Queen hated the plantation owner because of his past actions against her, so under the guise of manifesting a healthy male heir for the woman to deliver to her husband, the Voodoo Queen cursed the unborn child, making certain that the woman would bear Satan’s son. The Voodoo Queen’s magic was strong, for the boy child was delivered from the womb with horns, red eyes, cloven hooves, claws, and a tail. The Devil Baby’s birthday was said to be on a Mardi Gras Day.

      The Devil Baby of Bourbon Street is said to look like a small, bald-headed child with hooves and a ratlike tail. (Art by Ricardo Pustanio).

      The horrific newborn proceeded to eat the neighbors’ children, bare its teeth at its terrified siblings, and was locked away in the attic garret room. It was here that his parents held him captive before he escaped to begin his reign of terror on New Orleans’ citizens.

      The legend of a Devil Baby invites a number of accounts of its origin. Rather than the desperate wife of a plantation owner insistent upon the birth of a male heir, certain versions of the lore have the monster born of a slave girl who was raped by a plantation owner. Still others state that the horrid abomination was born of a French aristocrat’s daughter who was addicted to absinthe. As the lurid story goes, she was drunk to the very hour that she gave birth, and that she abandoned the grotesque infant in Pirates Alley. His demonic cries are said to have disturbed the Ash Wednesday Mass.

      St. Anthony’s Garden, sometimes called the Devil Baby’s Playpen or simply the Devil’s Garden, is said by some to be the place where the Devil Baby hides at night to attack unsuspecting passersby. The garden is thought by some locals to be one of the very seven gates of Hell.

      Another old New Orleans oral tradition tells that the Devil Baby was born in that very garden. According to this version of the creature’s birth, its mother took refuge here in the late hours of her labor just before dawn on a Mardi Gras Day. As dawn approached and the long early morning hours turned to day, some churchgoers at early Mass later testified that they had seen a bloodied young woman staggering from the garden, just as a scream from Hell