The Strange Story Of Essie Dunbar, The Woman Who Was Allegedly Buried Alive In 1915

For the Blackville community, the interpretation of Essie Dunbar’s alleged return in terms of zombification was not a marker of ignorance or superstition in the dismissive sense.

It was the application of existing cultural frameworks to an experience that seemed to demand supernatural explanation.

A woman who had been buried came back.

Within the available frameworks of interpretation, zombification was a coherent explanation.

The trajectory from feared zombie to beloved local curiosity — the transformation in how the community related to Essie Dunbar over the years — is its own kind of social phenomenon.

The community’s gradual acceptance of her continued existence, their accommodation of the inexplicable into their ongoing social life, reflects the human capacity to normalize the extraordinary over time.