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In mid-2017, an article published on the web site Women's News (WNews.world) gained notoriety among social media users, thanks to its outlandish claim that an Indonesian woman deceased for three years not only returned to life and walked among the living, but was actually photographed doing so: The text of the article makes reference to a special rite used by the locals to bring the corpse back to life: The premise struck us as both preposterous and familiar, so we dug deeper and found many other versions, including one that was posted to the snopes.com message board in September 2010: We found an even older version posted on an Indonesian blog in November 2009. It included the writer's personal reminiscences around witnessing a walking corpse in his or her youth (although the narrative suffers a bit due to machine translation): Common to every variant we've encountered are references to the Tana Toraja region of South Sulawesi, an island in Indonesia. (If you've ever tasted any of the earthy, subtly spicy coffees imported from Sulawesi, odds are the beans were grown and hand-harvested in Tana Toraja.) Nor is it a coincidence that virtually every travel guide offering information about the remote location spotlights certain peculiar, complex, and purportedly gruesome funerary practices found there (practices that are indeed so unusual and elaborate that entire books have been written about them and tourists flock to record them on their mobile devices). The more we learned about these traditions, the more we became convinced they were the inspiration for tales about Indonesia's so-called walking dead. It's unclear precisely how long the Toraja people, who descended from Austronesian speakers living in central Sulawesi well before Europeans arrived in the 1500s, have inhabited the island. During the 1700s, the Toraja population was driven into the southern mountains (where the majority of them are still concentrated) by another ethnic subgroup, the Buginese. Although most Toraja now identify as Christian or Muslim, many still honor beliefs and customs handed down from their ancestors — beliefs and customs in which death takes center stage. Anthropologist Kelli Swazey described the Torajans' intimate, intricate relationship with the dead in a 2013 TED Talk entitled Life that Doesn't End with Death: In Toraja society, Swazey explains, death is seen as a process -- and a lengthy process, at that -- rather than as a singular event: A National Geographic video shot in 2016 provides brief glimpses into Tana Toraja death and burial rites (warning: includes graphic scenes of animal sacrifice): Of particular interest with regard to the walking dead tales we're investigating is the ma'nene ceremony, in which the mummified corpses of dead family members are exhumed, washed, reclothed, and walked through the center of town, examples can be seen both in the latter half of the National Geographic video above and this tourist video uploaded to YouTube in 2016: Bringing our investigation full circle, Loyola University anthropology professor Kathleen Adams, who spent two years in Tana Toraja observing the lives and culture of its people, confirmed in an interview with Loyola Magazine that the walking dead stories represent a corrupted version of the truth: That's not to say that concept is entirely foreign to the culture. Torajans also tell stories about corpses that walk on their own to their final resting place, Kelli Swazey told us via e-mail: So, folklore and media sensationalism notwithstanding, do the deceased really rise from their graves and walk in Tana Toraja, Sulawesi? Yes, but no — not literally. They do so only with the help of surviving family members, who continue to demonstrate their love and devotion long after the physical bodies of their loved ones have gone quiet. The photograph does not show an actual zombie.
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