William Buehler Seabrook (February 22, 1884 – September 20, 1945) was an American occultist, explorer, traveler, journalist and writer, born in Westminster, Maryland. He began his career as a reporter and City Editor of the Augusta Chronicle in Georgia, worked at the New York Times, and later became a partner in an advertising agency in Atlanta. He is well-known for his writing on, and engaging in, cannibalism.
Seabrook's 1929 book The Magic Island, which documents his experiences with Haitian Vodou in Haiti, is considered the first popular English-language work to describe the concept of zombies.
Seabrook graduated from Mercersburg Academy. He then attended Roanoke College, received a master's degree from Newberry College, and studied philosophy at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.
In 1915, he joined the American Field Service of the French Army and served in World War I. He was gassed at Verdun in 1916 and was later awarded the Croix de Guerre. The following year, he became a reporter for the New York Times and soon became an itinerant.
Besides his books, Seabrook published articles in popular magazines including Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest, and Vanity Fair.
In 1912, Seabrook married his first wife, Katherine Pauline Edmondson. They divorced in 1934. Soon after, he married Marjorie Worthington in 1935. The marriage ended in 1941. This was followed up by his marriage to Constance Kuhr, which began in 1942 and ended with his death in 1945.
In the 1920s, Seabrook traveled to western Africa and came across a tribe who partook in the eating of human meat. Seabrook wrote about his experience of cannibalism in his travel book Jungle Ways; however, he later admitted that the tribe had not allowed him to join in on the ritualistic cannibalism. Instead, he had obtained samples of human flesh from a hospital and cooked it himself. He reported,
It was like good, developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted.