Episode 87: Patient Zero

Written By Karl White

Boundless stories of the horrors that haunted the Island of the Dead slowly spread across the South Pacific. Yet few knew of its actual location. The world was still vast enough to conceal such places, especially when the danger far outweighed their worth.

For those who knew of the island, it was forbidden ground. Cartographers left it absent from their charts by design, and the warning marks carved into nearby archipelagos were reason enough to avoid its waters entirely. But the distances between shores, and the countless uncharted isles scattered across the Pacific, made the cursed land impossible to avoid forever.

Pirate, Gaston Basset - © 2026 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

In 1705, a French vessel known as La Légère, commanded by the ruthless pirate Gaston Basset, limped through the Pacific after a violent engagement with a British warship. The battle left her hull damaged, and rigging in tatters. With the ship barely seaworthy, Basset and his crew searched desperately for refuge. What they found appeared to be salvation.

It was a small, uncharted island, quiet, lush, and untouched. A sheltered inlet offered calm waters, and the beaches lay still beneath the setting sun. To Basset, it seemed the perfect place to repair and resupply. The crew dropped anchor just offshore and set to work beneath the pale glow of the night, hauling timber, patching the hull, and stripping sections of the ship down to its frame.

Not long after midnight, as the men labored on the shore, a figure emerged from the tree line. He staggered into the firelight, his skin cracked from sun and salt, his lips split from thirst. The crew nearly cut him down, mistaking him for some island madman. But before they could act, the man collapsed into the sand, forcing out broken words. His name was Raphael Santiago.

He spoke of another ship, the Esmeralda, a Spanish raider that had made landfall weeks earlier on a nearby island. They’d gone ashore seeking gold, believing the native inhabitants were hiding wealth meant for Dutch traders. Instead, they found themselves outnumbered and overwhelmed. Those who survived the initial assault weren’t killed, but taken captive.

According to Santiago, the natives didn’t worship gold...they honored something far older. The prisoners were bound and ferried across open water to that very island, left as offerings for a terrible walking death inhabiting it. He warned the pirates to leave at once, begging them to take him with them. 

Santiago’s wild tale - © 2026 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

At first, Basset and his men laughed at the story. They’d heard countless tales of cursed lands and sea spirits. As sailors often spoke of ghosts whenever they ran out of rum. To them, Santiago’s warning seemed the delirium of sun fever. Without hesitation, the pirate captain ordered Santiago’s execution.

He was dragged to the fire, his protests swallowed by the crash of waves, and his body was cast into the flames without ceremony. The crew returned to their work as though nothing had occurred.

But as the night deepened, the island began to change. The jungle, once still, seemed to breathe. Strange sounds carried through the trees, low, uneven movements...branches shifting where no wind touched them. Some of Basset’s men claimed to see shapes deeper in the foliage, just beyond the reach of the firelight. Others spoke of a smell, a faint, sickly rot drifting from the jungle...Still, the work continued.

It wasn’t until the first gray light of dawn that the truth was revealed. Drawn by the scent of Santiago’s burning flesh...they came. Dozens at first. Then more. The dead, long preserved in the island’s heat and humidity, emerging in a slow, relentless tide. Their bodies bore the marks that seemed of centuries, tattered skin, sun-bleached bone, remnants of old garments from countless eras. Some still wore fragments of tribal adornments. Others dragged rusted chains. Others still, wore rotted cloth from ships long since forgotten. 

Zombie horde emerges - © 2026 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

Basset and his crew fought desperately along the shoreline, cutting down the first wave as they staggered into the surf. But for every corpse that fell, more followed. The pirates were hardened killers, but this wasn’t a battle they understood. There was no fear in their enemy, no retreat, and no end. The tide of zombies only grew.

Within hours, the beach had become a slaughter ground. None of Basset’s men ever made it back to the ship. La Légère herself was later sighted adrift, before finally vanishing somewhere in the open Pacific. 

As the reputation of the island spread across seas, certain circles began to understand exactly what horrors stalked its jungles...and how they might be exploited. For most sailors, it remained a cursed place, to be avoided at any cost. But to others, it became an opportunity.

Slave masters were known to leave defiant captives overnight on the island as a form of punishment, knowing few would return unchanged. Raiders and traffickers occasionally ventured ashore with a far more deliberate purpose, to capture the reanimated themselves, dragging them back to waiting ships, kept in reinforced holds...and from there, the plague would travel, to be sold and bartered across distant lands.

Anne Hyde, 1890 - © 2026 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

Still, not all who landed there understood what they’d found. In 1890, a young Australian girl named Anne Hyde and her father, John, were cast adrift after the passenger ship they were traveling aboard began to take on water in the open Pacific. After days without land in sight, they believed themselves saved when the outline of an island rose along the horizon. But that salvation was an illusion.

Not long after making landfall, they discovered the island’s only inhabitants were the walking dead. John fought desperately to protect his daughter as zombies emerged from the jungle, but he was quickly overwhelmed...consumed to the bone, before her very eyes.

Anne fled into the trees, climbing into the dense canopy where the dead could not reach her. For a time, she survived. But thirst is a force as relentless as death. Believing the shoreline had cleared, she descended in search of water and food. She never returned to the safety of the branches.

Weeks later, far from the island itself, her story took a darker turn. In a small coastal village in New Guinea, a fisherman had hauled in his nets one morning to find something caught within, the body of a young girl, long dead...or so he believed. When he tried to free the corpse, she attacked.

The villagers attempted to kill her, firing muskets into her chest, but nothing stopped her. Unable to kill her, they locked her away for the night, intending to decide her fate in the morning. By dawn...she was gone.

Zombie Anne had been taken by men from a neighboring village, not to be destroyed, but to be displayed. She was kept in captivity, chained and confined, while curious onlookers were charged admission to witness the horror. 

Zombie Anne - © 2026 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

In port, passing through, an Irish sailor named Brady O’Bannon encountered the oddity and saw opportunity.

Purchasing Anne, he transported her across the sea to Ireland, where he presented her to his brother, Sean, a showman with a traveling carnival. There, she was given a new name -- “The Living Dead Girl”.

Night after night, before stunned audiences, she was paraded across the stage...and made to devour live chickens as entertainment.

Neither Anne, in life, nor the O’Bannons, could have imagined how far her story would travel...or what she would become.

TO BE CONTINUED…