All language subtitles for Weird or What S01E02 1080p AMZN WEB-DL DD+2 0 x264-Absinth_track3_[eng]

- You know, I've been around for awhile,

met some interesting people,

done some crazy things.

So you just might think
that there's not much

that can take me by surprise.

You'd be wrong.

The world is full of stories,

science, and things that amaze

and confound me.

Every single day,

incredible mysteries that
keep me awake at night,

some I can answer,

others just defy logic.

Is there life after death?

In Connecticut,

a man visits a Civil War battlefield

where he is suddenly
overcome with emotion.

- To this day, I don't understand

what exactly happened.

- [William] Is he the reincarnation

of a dead general?

In Haiti, 18 years after his death,

a man returns from the grave.

- This individual had
clearly been pronounced dead

by the doctors.

- [William] Do zombies really exist?

And in a remarkable experiment,

scientists in England conduct a series

of groundbreaking seances.

Is it our first genuine proof

of the afterlife?

It's a weird world.

And I love it.

(dramatic music)

Death.

Not exactly pretty.

Especially when you consider

that one day, all of us

could end up looking like this.

But should we simply
accept this as our fate

or is there something else that awaits us?

Since the dawn of time,

humans have been obsessed with the idea

that there's something more than

this.

Well...

Is there?

Do our lives go on

even if we die?

Can we return and communicate
with our loved ones

here on earth?

Is there life after life?

And perhaps the most
important question of all,

can we prove it?

Well, just maybe we can.

(spooky organ music)

Jeffrey Keene is a retired firefighter.

In 1990, he decided to visit the site

of the famous Battle of Antietam,

one of the bloodiest encounters

of the Civil War.

And a place where thousands
died in just one day.

- I was traveling down
through Pennsylvania

with my wife, antique hunting,

and I asked my wife if it was okay

to take a little side trip

over to Antietam to see the battlefield.

- [William] But what
begins as a fun day out

will soon turn into a nightmare.

- My wife wasn't very much into history

so she remained in the car,

and I walked over to where the battle

had taken place at the sunken road.

I had gone about 50 feet

when it became very hard to breathe.

I started crying, I was very angry,

I was very sad.

If you take the saddest you've ever been,

and magnify that by
about a thousand times,

that gets close.

I was exhausted,

I couldn't tell exactly what was going on,

I thought I was maybe
having a heart attack,

but I didn't have any pain.

- [William] Overcome by a wave

of violent emotions,

Jeffrey then has a powerful urge

to visit the gift shop.

- I felt compelled to go there.

I threw a magazine on the counter,

and I said, I want this,

and it was a Civil War quarterly magazine

on Antietam.

To this day, I don't understand

what exactly happened.

- [William] For the next 18 months

Jeffrey's life returns to normal.

Until one night,

when he attends a Halloween party.

- It was a really nice party,

they had spent a lot of money

on the decorations,

they had hired a palm reader,

and I sat down in front of this woman,

and she took my hands,

and I told her the story of what happened

in Antietam.

- [William] As Jeff tells his story,

the palm reader suddenly becomes uneasy.

- She's sitting there shaking her head,

and she dropped my hands a few times.

- [William] And then
she drops a bombshell.

She believes Jeffrey was at Antietam

in a previous life.

- She said, "You died there,

"but you hung around for a long time."

I said, "Just let me ask you one question,

"are you sure he was dead."

She said he was full of holes.

That's one thing I'll never forget.

- [William] The bizarre
encounter will lead Jeffrey

on a journey in search of the truth.

- The next day, I took my wife to work,

and I remembered the magazine

that I had to have,

had it for a year and a half,

and hadn't read it.

I opened it up to the section on Antietam

where I had had the experience,

and my eyes skimmed down the page,

and I see a photograph of a general.

- [William] As Jeffrey
stares at the photo,

he is stunned by what he sees.

- I look over, and this picture says

General John B. Gordon,

and when I see the face,

I tell people I know the face very well,

I shaved it every morning.

Unless you're unfeeling, unthinking

completely drained of any type of emotion

it's going to have a
bit of an effect on you

even if it's just awe and wonder.

- [William] Remarkably,

Jeffrey is a double for John B. Gordon,

but as he reads on
things get even weirder.

- I read in the story he
had been wounded five times

that day, he was shot through the face

and I figured he had
probably been killed there.

- [William] John B. Gordon was a general

of the 6th Alabama regiment.

A hero who was shot in the
bloody battle of Antietam.

Could there be a link between Jeffrey

and a general who had died
nearly 200 years before him?

Suddenly, Jeffrey makes
another startling connection.

- It was on my 30th birthday,
at 12 midnight I got

such a horrendous pain in my jaw,

it radiated down into my neck.

I know what it feels like
to be shot through the face,

that's how bad it hurt.

- [William] Was Jeffrey's mysterious pain

somehow related to
General Gordon's injuries?

- Gordon was 30 years old when he was shot

through the face, same age.

That was 10, 15 years before
I ever heard Gordon's name.

It wasn't like this was worked backwards.

I heard about Gordon's wounding,

I went over to the
hospital made them fudge up

some documents that mimicked the wound

that Gordon had more
than 100 years before.

Kind of hard to do and
I have the documents

to prove the hospital visit.

- [William] Could all these
remarkable similarities

be explained by coincidence?

Jeffrey believes there's only one answer.

- I don't need any more proof
that there's reincarnation

because of all the things
that happened to me.

We never die, we're continuous.

We always have been, we always will be.

That's how Gordon found me at Antietam.

I always say it's the other way around

from what people think, I say Gordon

found me where our hearts
touched at Antietam.

- What an extraordinary story.

Did a Civil War general
who died over a century ago

reincarnate, jump into
Jeffrey Keene's body

and continue his life
through Jeffrey's eyes?

Are we all in a continuous cycle

of birth and rebirth,
simply interchanging bodies

as we go, and if so,

this raises yet another question.

Do we get to choose?

I mean who was I before I was

who I am now and who will I be next?

Could I be you?

Now that is definitely Weird or What?

Dr. Cynthia Meyersburg is
a Harvard psychologist.

She believes reincarnation
is simply a function

of how we deal with memories.

- Something odd happens
and people go looking,

as we all do, to make
sense of their lives.

If you have a rich imaginability,
it becomes very difficult

to distinguish between
something that's a record

of perception or a record of imagination.

Did I dream that or did it happen?

Did I hear about that, or did
I actually experience that?

It can be very difficult.

- [William] Cynthia believes
that one way we do this

is by creating false memories.

- False memories are what they sound like.

They're recollections for either events

that didn't take place
or didn't take place

in the way in which they're remembered.

- [William] Are people
like Jeffrey just making

these stories up?

If so, why?

- Memory, although it feels a lot of times

as though we're watching
a film in our mind's eye,

that's not what's really happening.

We're always reconstructing
it from little pieces

we have saved in a sense,
and we put it back together

and our brain fills in
for us the missing parts.

- [William] Researchers
have been able to study

this phenomenon.

- It's possible to induce false memories

in a matter of moments.

For instance, if someone
sees a doctored photograph

showing him or her as a
child in a hot air balloon,

people can very quickly
form memories for it.

The way we measure false memory propensity

in the lab is we use something called

the DRM, or the
Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm.

What the paradigm consists
of is we present people

with lists of words.

In our lab they listen to them.

Then they're asked to
write down without guessing

only those words they're
certain they've heard.

What makes the task tricky
is that each list of words,

there is a word that isn't
on the list but is related

to all the words on the list.

So the words might be sour, bitter,

sugar, honey, and so forth,

but the word sweet is never said.

In the lab, past life memory participants

were much more likely to
endorse having heard words

that they didn't actually hear.

However, they were no different in terms

of being able to correctly identify words

that they did hear.

So they were more likely
to have false memories

of words they didn't hear,
but their true memory

looked just like the control participants.

I interpret it to mean that although

there is no difference in ability
to form true recollections

and true memories, there's
an increased vulnerability

to form memories for events
that perhaps did not occur.

- [William] Can Jeffrey
Keene's claim of reincarnation

be dismissed as a series
of false memories?

Does it explain what struck him down?

- People come to believe
they have past lives

because something weird happens,

something that's outside of the norm

in some way for them that they need

an explanation for.

- [William] Is reincarnation real

or simply a product of our minds?

Do we all have past,
present, and future lives?

- We know so little about
the nature of reality

that I think it'd be very, very foolish

to say that this cannot happen.

- [William] An emotional
collapse at a Civil War

battleground leads a man to believe he is

the reincarnation of a dead general.

Is it possible we all have past lives?

Tariq Sattaur is a facilitator

at the Ontario Hypnosis Centre.

He not only believes reincarnation's real,

he can demonstrate it
using a process called

past life regression.

- Past life regression
is a series of steps

that you go through in
order to access memories

from previous lifetimes.

It is allowing the conscious
mind to be put aside

for a while, as you access
the subconscious mind.

Begin by just lightly
closing your eyes now.

- [William] Tariq is
preparing a patient, Karen,

to travel back not only
deep into her own past,

but to lives she may have lived before

and from where he can access her memories.

- Imagine if you will
above your head is a point

of absolutely pure white light.

It starts by first taking the client back

through age regression

and typically it's
about 14 or 15 years old

and then to three or four years old.

- I'm on my mom's lap and I'm getting

all of her attention.

- [William] Karen has now
gone back over 30 years.

The next step will take
her into what is known

as blue mist, a space in
between her current life

and the one she lived before.

- [Tariq] Take a deep breath now

and go beyond the blue
mist finding yourself

at a still earlier time.

- [William] Incredibly
it appears Karen has

now entered a former life.

- I am climbing rocks

and there's a forest nearby.

- [Tariq] Are you male or female?

- I'm male.

I think I'm hunting.

- Okay.

- [William] Tariq believes
what Karen is seeing is real.

- They're interacting, they're in the body

of that past life, they can
see out of that person's eyes.

It's very, very personal.

- [William] To complete
the session, Tariq must

reverse the process and bring Karen back

into her current life and present age.

- [Tariq] And one, eyes open, back.

- [William] Did Karen actually
visit her former life?

Is past life regression evidence
that reincarnation is real?

Dr. Stuart Hameroff is a scientist.

He believes the only
way to find real proof

of reincarnation is by using science.

- There's a lot of anecdotal evidence

for apparent reincarnation

but it's been dismissed
because it seems irrational.

Now we have a theory,
a possible explanation

so I think all this evidence
needs to be reevaluated

and considered seriously.

- [William] Hameroff's theory concerns one

of the greatest mysteries of
both religion and science,

the soul.

- I think the soul is our
consciousness, the sum total

of our memories and conscious awareness

and I think it can exist
outside the body after life,

and possibly in reincarnation.

- [William] But even more remarkable is

that Hameroff thinks the soul exists

as a series of information,

quantifiable by physics.

- I think a quantum
version of consciousness

can give rise to something
like a quantum soul

that can account for a lot
of these anecdotal stories

that we've been hearing for eons.

- [William] Many scientists
believe consciousness

exists with cells in the
brain, but Hameroff thinks

it exists on a subatomic
level in quantum particles

that can stay connected and survive death.

- When a patient has a cardiac arrest

and is resuscitated,
they often tell a story

of a white light, a
tunnel, and in many cases

floating above their body looking down

on what's going on.

This could be consciousness
as quantum information

dissipating, when the
patient's resuscitated

the quantum information goes back

and the patient wakes
up and reports having

had a near death experience and perhaps

even an out-of-body experience.

- [William] It's an incredible theory,

but if our souls do exist in quantum form,

how are they reincarnated?

- It's conceivable that
this quantum information,

the quantum soul if you
will, could reenter an embryo

which would be reincarnation.

- [William] Do our souls
consist of information

that can travel, even into an embryo?

Have we solved one of the greatest

mysteries in the universe?

- We know so little about
the nature of reality

that I think it'd be very, very foolish

to say that this cannot happen

and with the anecdotal evidence

from reincarnation and memories

and past life and so forth, it seems to me

that it may be more logical to assume

that it does occur.

- [William] Was Jeffrey
Keene the reincarnation

of a long-dead general?

Or did false memories
convince him it was true?

Does the soul exist
independent of our bodies?

Can we visit past lives, and
if we can, what will we find?

Weird or what?

Scientists in England conduct a series

of groundbreaking experiments.

Did they find the first
genuine proof of the afterlife?

Hello.

Hello?

I don't know about you,
but I've always been scared

of things that go bump in the night.

(glass breaks)

(cat meows)

Fred!

(cat meows)

Most of them we can explain,
but what about those we can't?

Are we surrounded by spiritual entities,

the remains of those that have passed

from this life?

Are they what we call

ghosts?

And if they are there,

are they friendly?

and

can we

communicate with them?

(glass breaks)

(cat meows)

Fred!

Phew!

In 1993, a team of researchers

in the town of Scole, United Kingdom

set out to find indisputable evidence

of life after death.

Conducting a series of
extraordinary seances

they witnessed paranormal events

that would mystify science.

They called it the Scole Experiment.

- What we didn't know
was that it was going

to become very, very special and work

in a pioneering way and to provide proof

of life after death.

- [William] Robin Foy lead the seances.

He believes the experiment was unique

because of their attempts to make sure

it was credible.

- It was important for us to show

to the outside world that we'd taken

every security precaution that we could

to ensure the work was fraud proof.

- [William] To conquer
the skeptics, the seances

were held in the supposedly
impenetrable cellar

of a suburban house.

- The whole place was brick.

There were no trap doors.

The only door into the
cellar was locked internally.

Each one of us would
wear luminous armbands

so that everybody who
was present could see

that no one moved.

We were using a table which
was actually fraud proof

so nobody could get under
it and do anything at all.

We were seeking to
actually get viable proof

that we live on after we die.

- [William] The Scole Experiment began

in November 1993.

As Robin Foy and his team
assembled in their cellar

they had no idea what might happen.

But it didn't take long to find out.

- After a short while,
the spirit lights come,

little lights about the size
of a pea or slightly larger,

very bright and they would
sort of perform aerobatics.

Later on there were spirit
voices speaking from midair.

We were able to hear on a one to one basis

all of the spirit people.

Everybody in that room
would be regularly touched

by spirit hands.

- [William] As the experiment continues,

the team is amazed as
the paranormal activity

becomes more intense.

- All sorts of different
things would materialize

in midair and then fall
down onto the table.

We would hear the bangers hit the table,

we may actually have
solid spirit personalities

moving around in the room, we were pushing

the bounds of psychic
research further forward

than anyone had been able to produce

or witness anywhere in the past.

- [William] Encouraged by the success,

Foy decided to try
something extraordinary.

Something that would prove they had made

contact with the afterlife.

- We were doing an experiment with a film

that was still in its plastic container

and we would have this
locked into a security box

to ensure that nothing was ever done by us

to that film.

It was a remarkable and ambitious idea.

The team hoped a spirit might somehow

implant an image on the
film inside the box.

If so, it could be the
proof they were looking for.

When they finally checked
the film, they couldn't

believe their eyes.

- That was quite amazing.

We had hundreds of
photographs that were produced

to show us various aspects
of the spirit world itself.

Some of them were so
fantastic they really would

knock your socks off.

- [William] But there was one photograph

that was different from the rest.

A haunting image of what seemed to be

a woman's face.

- You can actually see on this one

areas of this person's face.

- [William] Who is the woman?

And how did her image appear on the film?

Foy believes this chilling incident makes

the Scole experiment the
definitive exploration

into the presence of the afterlife.

- The Scole Experiment, I
think, was very, very important

because it went further than
anybody had ever been able

to go before in proving the real existence

of life after death.

- [William] Despite his
claims, many skeptics

doubted the results.

Did Robin Foy and his
team of researchers make

contact with the other side?

Is the Scole Experiment proof

that there's life after death?

Or could it have been an elaborate fake?

One way to find out is
to try it for ourselves.

(people scream)

A UK research team experiences
a remarkable series

of paranormal events
during a series of seances.

Did they find proof of life after death?

Brian Dunning is a scientific journalist.

He believes the events of
Scole were nothing more

than an illusion.

- Here's the problem with seances is that

seances have existed as a magic trick

for 200 years.

They are an illusionist
giving the impression

that spirits are in the room.

They are a magic trick.

It's almost impossible
to envision a seance

being done seriously by people.

They're always performances.

So that's why, yeah, it's hard
to take a seance seriously.

- What we are trying to
recreate are the famous

Scole Experiments.

- [William] Was the Scole
Experiment a magic trick?

To test Dunning's theory,
we've set up a fake seance

using a professional illusionist.

To create the conditions at Scole,

the participants are
sitting in pitch darkness.

Using night vision
cameras, we can see them,

but they can see nothing at all.

- The session begins with
everyone holding hands.

Give me your hand here and your hand here.

Please do not break the
psychic circle at any time

during the seance.

Spirits,

are you with us tonight?

- [William] The Scole Experiment claimed

that spirit voices seemed
to come from midair.

The illusionist will
attempt to recreate them

with an assistant using a cardboard tube

as a megaphone.

- Speak to us.

- [William] Faking disembodied
voices seems simple.

- Charles, the name Charles.

- [William] But can they
convince these participants

they are being physically
touched by spirits

as claimed by the people at Scole?

- My spirit guide I'm going
to ask my spirit guide,

Francene will you give us

a physical manifestation?

I want Francene to come towards the center

of the table.

- Whoa.

- Whoa what?

What happened?

(people scream)

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

- [William] The final trick centers around

the claim that objects
materialized out of thin air.

Is this so easy to disprove?

- Leave us now!

Leave us!

(people scream)

- [William] The experiment is over.

Even though his seance was badly faked

the participants are left visibly shaken.

- Nobody's laughing.

Everybody's took that
completely seriously.

It was a very powerful
experience for these people.

- [William] Although the
participants were fooled,

Brian believes this proves
the Scole Experiment

was a hoax.

- We saw a few of the things today

that were reported from
the Scole Experiments.

We've seen that those can be easily faked.

Do we know that they faked them at Scole?

No, of course not, because
no controls were applied.

We don't know what actually happened.

But when we see how easy it is to fake it,

how can we know that these
could have been real?

- Could the greatest
experiment into the existence

of the afterlife be just
an illusionist's game?

No doubt, magic tricks are easy to perform

and many of the claims made at Scole have

been dismissed out of hand.

But the biggest mystery of
all still remains unanswered.

Who is this woman?

And how did her image
appear on a roll of film

that was locked inside a box?

Even Houdini would have
trouble with that one.

Peter Sramek is a photography expert.

We asked him to examine images

from the Scole Experiment and try

to unlock one of its biggest mysteries.

- As I understand it,
the film was put into

this box and locked away and the exposure,

the effect on the film was supposed

to have happened while the
film was locked up in this box.

My first reaction was this is
an interesting manipulation.

I assumed it was something
that would have been

done in the darkroom.

It looks very similar to
the kinds of distortions,

collages, manipulations
that people have done

in the darkroom because it's fun to do.

- [William] But there's
no darkroom at Scole.

Was this photograph created
by the spirit of a woman?

Peter believes the answer
to the mystery lies

in the type of film they used.

- With Polaroid you have
the direct development

so there's no darkroom involved.

When you process it, you actually put it

into a container that is
full of a gelatinous chemical

that gets spread onto the film evenly

and that is the chemical
that develops the film,

contains the dyes that causes the color

and so on, and so you have
this jelly like substance

that's being spread over
the film to develop it.

You're cranking that through by hand

or sometimes by motor.

And depending on how you crank it

you can get different kinds
of distortions and effects

simply for chemical reasons and that,

in my mind, is what happened
in these photographs.

All you're seeing is the chemicals the way

that they've affected the
film as it's gone through.

What is harder to explain
are the actual faces

in the images, they're not light effects,

they're not chemical
effects, they actually

are images of faces.

- [William] So how is this
haunting image created?

- My explanation for that would be

that the film has been tampered with

and the film has been
put through the camera

and these faces have been exposed into it

prior to the supposed experiment.

Then when it's processed these show up

but they show up in this distorted fashion

because of the chemical
processing distortion.

And that actually is quite easy.

You can take a roll of film.

I can take this sort of

brand new roll of film,

no one's ever done anything with it,

I can take it,

I can put this film in the camera,

I can shoot the roll of film,

I can wind it back

and as I wind it back

I can leave the leader sticking out

like this and no one knows

whether this film is exposed or not.

- [William] Peter believes
he has solved the mystery.

But what if the Scole researchers
were telling the truth?

- I don't think while
the film was in the box

that any of the effects that we're seeing

could have been created

unless one believes in some sort

of supernatural explanation.

- [William] Is a woman
from the spirit world?

Did Robin Foy and his
research team find proof

of life after death at Scole?

Or was it an ingenious hoax?

(people scream)

Whatever the truth is,
this is Weird or Withhat?

In Haiti a man dies after a sudden

and mysterious illness.

18 years later, he returns from the grave.

Could this prove that zombies exist?

When it comes to the
mysteries of the afterlife

perhaps there's nothing
weirder than zombies.

The dictionary describes
a zombie like this,

the body of a dead person
given the semblance of life,

but made mute and willess
by a supernatural force

usually for some evil purpose.

Sounds like my bank manager.

But, could it be true?

Could mindless, shuffling
cannibals actually exist

outside of Hollywood?

The tiny nation of Haiti
is home to many mysteries,

but none weirder than
the tale of a man named

Clairvius Narcisse.

Wade Davis is an explorer and author.

He investigated the case which began

in 1962 when Narcisse
suddenly became violently ill.

- I mean they're kind of a
constellation of symptoms

that reported were so strange
that you initially thought

this had to be coming from
the realm of science fiction.

- [William] Although
doctors worked feverishly,

it's too late to save
the stricken Narcisse.

- The death was witnessed
by both the physicians

and nurses and his own family members,

and his sister had actually
affixed her thumb print

to the death certificate verifying that

this was her brother,
her brother had died.

- [William] Devastated, family members

say their final goodbyes and Clairvius

is finally laid to rest.

- You could go to his
grave site where the slab

of cement had been placed upon his grave

shortly after his demise.

- [William] It should have been the last

anyone heard of Clairvius Narcisse,

but 18 years later something incredible

will happen that ensures no one

forgets his name.

In 1980, Clairvius' sister
is going about daily chores

in her family village.

Suddenly she sees something
beyond comprehension.

Standing before her is
her deceased brother,

Clairvius Narcisse has
risen from the dead.

- He claimed that he was buried,

he claimed that he was
magically resuscitated

by a sorcerer and then
led off to the north

of the country where he had been working

as a sort of zombie slave for 18 years.

Now, clearly there's no incentive,

economic incentive to create an indentured

force of labor in a country where costs

of labor are trivial.

I think the idea of slavery
ties into a deeper concept

which is that the essence of a zombie

is someone who has lost their soul.

But in addition to
being cast in perpetuity

into this state of kind of limbo,

you're also said to be made a slave

and of course given the colonial history,

that combines to create a kind of

phenomenon that's almost worse than death

because you lose your personal willpower

and your physical freedom,

and together, that
combines to make the plight

of a zombie the worst possible
fate of the individual.

Which is precisely why
in Haiti the fear is not

of zombies, as the movies
imply, the bad movies,

but of becoming a zombie.

Did Clairvius Narcisse
return from the dead

a zombie?

- There's no question that this individual

had clearly been pronounced dead

by the doctors and then
the question became

why, how, what happened to him?

- [William] This incredible story

attracts the attention
of a team of scientists

who are keen to examine the
case and uncover the truth.

- They investigated all
these lines of evidence,

analysis of the fingerprints
by forensic experts,

the testimony of the family members

and the doctors.

- [William] After months of searching

the investigators come to
a remarkable conclusion.

- Really led to very reputable scientists

who go public with saying they had found

the first provable instance of a zombie.

- [William] What did the scientists find?

Did Clairvius Narcisse rise from the dead?

Do zombies exist?

Steven Schlozman is a
Harvard psychiatrist.

Incredibly, he believes
the answer could be

yes.

- When I started thinking
about how I would explain

zombies medically it was kind of a lark

and then it ended up
getting a little creepy.

The typical zombie in my view is slow

shambling, can't figure even the simplest

of dilemmas out, wants to eat human flesh.

There is ways you could
medically explain the behavior.

- [William] Remarkably, Schlozman believes

just a few changes in the human brain

could turn one of us into one of them.

It starts with the cerebellum.

- This is a sheep brain,
but imagine this is

a human brain, which looks
an awful lot like this,

just bigger.

The function of the cerebellum is

to help us maintain balance.

In zombies we've got to
think that there's something

not right with their
cerebellum because zombies

are really not balanced well.

They hold their hands out so
they can maintain balance.

They've got that wide-based gait,

they've got truncal ataxia, which is when

the trunk of the body moves back and forth

and up and down, that's
all cerebellar disease.

And it's easy to sort of
think that whatever causes

the zombie plague, must take
a wack at the cerebellum.

There are number of diseases

that could affect the cerebellum.

In those cases you have
exactly the shambling gait

that you see in the zombie movies.

- [William] The shuffling is one thing,

but what explains a
zombie's mindless violence?

- The amygdala is the most primitive part

of the brain, it's the region of the brain

that has very base emotions.

- [William] Our amygdala is the source

of all anger and rage,

but it is kept in check
by our frontal lobes,

the most advanced part of our brain.

- So we might have an impulse

when somebody cuts us off in the road,

to yell at them, to tailgate them,

to do something not nice.

The frontal lobe jumps in and
stops you from doing that.

When we watch zombie movies we can guess

that zombie frontal lobes
are pretty much gone,

they can't hold back their impulses.

- [William] Could a unique
combination of brain injuries

somehow create a zombie?

There's just one problem.

- The zombie, by definition, has to die

and be reanimated.

There is no medical basis for something

coming back from the dead so far.

- [William] But how does Schlozman explain

that Clairvius Narcisse
was certified dead,

buried, then returned from the grave?

- Maybe he's not telling the truth,

maybe he's undergone some
kind of neurologic insult

that prevents him from remembering

what's just happened, but if we're talking

about really rising from the dead,

that doesn't happen.

- [William] A haitian man dies
from a mysterious illness,

then returns from the
grave 18 years later.

Is he proof that zombies exist?

Wade Davis has investigated the case

and has an incredible theory.

He thinks Clairvius
Narcisse didn't die at all.

That something made him
just seem to be dead,

but who or what could
have fooled the doctors?

- There are lots of drugs that can kill,

but to find a drug that
brings you to the doorway

of death, and then brings
you back into the realm

of the living would be remarkable indeed.

- [William] In 1982,
Davis made a breakthrough.

He discovered that Haitian voodoo priests

were rumored to be using a special poison

to turn people into zombies.

Was this the drug he was looking for?

He decided to visit Haiti
and see for himself.

- Through a series of
negotiations I was able to get

a local priest to make this poison for me.

I collected all the raw ingredients,

which ranged from, you know, dried toads

to dried fish, dried snakes, plants,

human remains, I collected
all the raw ingredients

so I could identify them taxonomically

all the different stages
of the elaboration,

because fundamentally the ingredients

are roasted on a grill,
pounded in the mortar

and pestle, shifted

to create this sort of powder,

and I brought them all
back through US Customs

and it was kind of amusing because I

came through the first
day on Easter Sunday 1982,

Kennedy Airport and I
had no permits whatsoever

and I had this suitcase
made of surplus 7-Up cans

that had been printed in Saudi Arabia

because you could see the arabic script

and it was filled to the gunnels
with all these ingredients,

including human remains, a human skull,

I had a live bufo marinus
toad, the biggest toad,

you know, this big, in my backpack

and no permits whatsoever.

And I open this up and the Customs guy

in New York just slammed it shut

and he said, and I quote, "Look,
it's Easter (bleep) Sunday,

"I don't know who the (bleep)
you are, I didn't even

"want to have to work
today, just get the (bleep)

"out of here."

- [William] Back in the
US Davis takes the poison

to be tested in a lab.

He finds something extraordinary.

It contains a chemical
more deadly than cyanide.

Tetrodotoxin acts by
physically blocking nerves

but it brings on a state of apparent death

so profound that it has, many times,

fooled physicians.

- [William] Had the
Haitian priests discovered

a drug that could replicate death?

If so, where did they get it?

- In Haiti there's this
sort of famous pufferfish

which inflates like a big porcupine.

Without doubt, the Haitian sorcerers

had identified a natural product

that contained a toxin that could make

someone appear to be dead.

- [William] Could this
powerful drug produce

the symptoms Narcisse experienced?

- He said he was paralyzed, he could hear

himself pronounced dead, he could sense

the sheet pulled over his eyes,

he heard his sister begin to wail,

but he could not respond.

- [William] Was an innocent
man turned into a zombie?

The evidence seems undeniable,

except for one thing.

- No one knows if Narcisse
was administered the poison.

What we do know is that
he was pronounced dead

when he turned back into
the realm of the living,

so presumably if any of this accurate,

somehow he received the poison.

According to what he said,
the poison was rubbed

into the skin, and this important

because the folkloric idea that you read

in the literature is
that the poison is placed

on a cross in the ground,
the victim walks over

and suddenly all things unravel.

Well that's a magical idea, no doubt,

because obviously, physiologically

no poison is going to go through

the callous feet of a peasant.

But again, this is where
you have to separate out

what might be called the view from within

from the view from without.

According to Narcisse,
he had the poison rubbed

into his skin and this would be important

because the effective way for this powder

to be administered would be through blood.

- All right, let's think
about this for a second.

We know that a certain
set of brain alterations,

diseases or injuries could cause

the zombie-like symptoms
you see in the movies,

that a mysterious poison

has the power to mimic death,

but is there any real
proof that we can return

from the dead?

Well let me tell ya
something, the living dead

are living among us,
and they are in Detroit.

At a warehouse in Detroit

something remarkable is happening.

Inside these containers
103 people are waiting

to return from the dead.

This is a cryonic center.

The people entombed here have made

an incredible choice.

To have their bodies frozen after death

with the hope that science will one day

bring them back to life.

Ben Best is the president
of the Cryonics Institute.

He believes not only can we survive death,

but that the people here
haven't actually died.

- We do call them
patients because we don't

regard them as being dead
in an ultimate sense.

I think in practice we
regard it as a hospital

because I think that's what we're doing.

We're holding this metabolically
challenged patients.

- [William] But can cryogenics work?

It's a remarkable and
controversial process.

- Behind me are our cryostats.

They hold liquid nitrogen which is

at minus 196 degrees Celsius.

Each of these cylindrical
units holds six patients.

- [William] Best believes
cryogenics has changed

our definition of death.

Only a few decades ago,
if your heart stopped

that was it.

- But it's just not the
way we see things anymore.

- [William] How do you keep
somebody who is dead alive?

It begins by pumping oxygen
rich blood throughout the body.

This keeps cells alive
and avoids damage caused

by rigamortis, then the
body must be cooled.

- Well we don't just drop the
patient into liquid nitrogen.

That kind of rapid cooling
would be very damaging.

So we try to cool in a controlled manner.

If you cool too quickly then you get,

you get too much cracking.

We can't prevent cracking entirely,

but certainly if you just
drop the patient directly

into the liquid nitrogen there'd be a lot

of cracking and shattering.

What we want to do is we want to cool

as quickly as possible
while the cryoprotectant,

the medical grade antifreeze
is still in a liquidy state.

And then when it
solidifies, we want to cool

very slowly because while
it's in liquid state

the idea, you want it,
the colder the better,

but when it becomes a solid
if you cool too quickly

you create thermal stress.

- [William] The body
temperature is slowly lowered,

first by an ice bath,

and then in a cooling
chamber where it will reach

minus 196 degrees.

Best believes this will
preserve these bodies

for hundreds or perhaps
thousands of years.

But why?

- It seems to me if you're preserving

all the material there,
some future technology

is going to be able to
figure out a way to get

that all fixed and going again.

It's reasonable to think that nanomachines

can restore a person to
their original condition.

- [William] Nanomachines already exist.

Tiny machines smaller than a single cell.

Scientists believe they
could soon flow through

our blood stream targeting viruses,

repairing organs and destroying disease.

Can cryogenics give us life after death?

Could it even conquer death itself?

Best believes it is our greatest
hope for eternal living.

- It doesn't seem so
much more unreasonable

than to speculate that people will someday

live on Mars.

- [William] Can we die and
wake up a thousand years

later and resume our lives?

And if we can, would we really want to?

Or do we return as zombies,

doomed to a mindless existence?

Is life after death really life at all?

Weird or What?

So there we have it.

Stories of life after death
from all over the world.

In Connecticut a man is
overcome with emotion

at a Civil War battlefield.

Is he the reincarnation of a dead general?

In England, scientists
conduct a remarkable

paranormal experiment.

Did they find the first
proof of the afterlife?

And in Haiti, a man returns from the grave

18 years after his death.

Are the living dead walking amongst us?

Do zombies exist?

Are these stories evidence
of life after death?

Can we dismiss those
who claim they are true?

You decide.

Join me again next time for more stories

that will undoubtedly be Weird or

What?

(spooky music)