William Buehler Seabrook (February 22, 1884 – September 20, 1945) was an American occultist, explorer, world traveler, journalist and author, born in Westminster, Maryland.

Seabrook's 1929 book The Magic Island, which documents his experiences with Haitian Vodou, is considered the first popular English-language work to describe the concept of zombies.

Seabrook was later awarded the Croix de Guerre and published an account of his war service (Diary of Section VIII) in 1917.

[5] Besides his books, Seabrook published articles in popular magazines including Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest, and Vanity Fair.

When his claim of having participating in ritualistic cannibalism turned out wrong (and he hadn't yet dared reveal the Sorbonne story), he was much mocked for it.

According to his autobiography, the wealthy socialite Daisy Fellowes invited him to one of her garden parties, stating "I think you deserve to know what human flesh really tastes like".

During the party, which was attended by about a dozen guests (some of them well-known), a piece of supposedly human flesh was grilled and eaten with much pomp.

[10][11] Seabrook had a lifelong fascination with the occult, which he witnessed and described firsthand, as documented in The Magic Island (1929),[citation needed] and Jungle Ways (1930).

[citation needed] He later concluded that he had seen nothing that did not have a rational scientific explanation, a theory which he detailed in Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today (1940).

[citation needed] In Air Adventure he describes a trip on board a Farman with captain René Wauthier, a famed pilot,[12] and Marjorie Muir Worthington, from Paris to Timbuktu, where he collected a mass of documents from Father Yacouba, a defrocked monk who had an extensive collection of rare documents about the obscure city at that time administered by the French as part of French Sudan.

In December 1933, Seabrook was committed at his own request and with the help of some of his friends to Bloomingdale, a mental institution in Westchester County, near New York City, for treatment for acute alcoholism.