Zombies on the History Channel?

I found it kind of weird myself to find some of our favorite shambling monsters on none other than the History Channel a couple days ago. Let's face it, when we think of history, the only zombies we think of are the stereotypical old farts that might teach at Harvard until they're leaning on a cane... Either that or the students around finals time. Yet, zombies were front and center for a special called "Zombies: A Living History." And of course I couldn't pass up an opportunity like this, so I recorded it and watched it later.

The two hour special went over not just the likelihood of a zombie outbreak, the likely outcome if a zombie outbreak ever did occur, but also the history of zombies! Yeah, zombies have a history! How wild is that? Honestly, besides the old school stories about the Haitian zombies who were more like zoned out house-workers and the classic Night of the Living Dead by George A. Romero, I never even knew that zombies could be found in other cultures. For being undead, these creatures know how to get around. They make appearances in Scandinavia, Saudi Arabia, China, and even England. Honestly me favorites were the Draugr from Norse mythology and the Ghoul from Arabic culture.

What was even cooler, was that the guests on the show even went into the history of the precautions that people took to make sure the dead stayed dead and buried. And this might seem the weirdest part of the whole thing, but think about it, even today the coffins that we carefully select to place our loved ones six feet under lock from the outside, and there is no way to unlock it from the inside. A moment of perspective here: You're going to be placing a dead body under six feet of hard, compacted earth, enough to crush a steel coffin, and we still feel the need to lock the coffin from the outside... doesn't exactly make sense when you look at it too closely. And get this, in some of the oldest burial sites, archaeologists found stones (big ones) placed in the mouths of the dead. Not mention the tradition of binding mummified corpses in layers upon layers of linen in Ancient Egypt. All seems pretty weird, don't you think?

Anyway, if you see this thing, definitely check it out. It has a fun "How to Defend Against a Zombie" bit before each commercial break too!