The zombie in this tradition is not dangerous in the Hollywood sense; it is more precisely a figure of tragedy and violation, a person stripped of their autonomy and will, living but not truly alive.

For an African American community in South Carolina in 1915, the concept of the zombie would have been part of the broader cultural and spiritual framework that included both African religious survivals and African American Christian traditions.

The fear that Essie Dunbar was a zombie was not superstition in the dismissive sense the word sometimes carries; it was the application of an existing cultural framework to an experience that seemed to demand supernatural explanation.

The experience itself — a woman who had been declared dead, placed in a coffin, buried in the ground, and then appeared alive and walking among the community — would have been genuinely inexplicable within the natural framework of experience that most people carried.