William Buehler Seabrook 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.

The Magic Island is a book by American explorer and traveler William Seabrook. First published in 1929 by Harcourt, Brace & Company, The Magic Island is an account of Seabrook's experiences with Haitian Vodou in Haiti, and is considered the first popular English-language work to describe the concept of a zombie, defined by Seabrook as "a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life—it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive."