This entry posits long nineteenth-century literary and cultural incarnations of the revenant child as proto-zombie figures. While undeniably predating the anglicized term “zombie,” and most certainly separate from the Haitian zombi, there are rare examples that feature demonstrable influences on the more obvious child-zombie figures of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century film, graphic comics, and other media. The possibility (more so than the actuality) of the reanimated corpse of the child from centuries of Western and Colonial folklore, carried through into nineteenth-century Anglophone narratives, and emerging in more tangible forms, signifies a particular tension between negative traditions around child death and its afterlife and the new mainstream desire to glorify the dead child as innocent and beautiful. Short stories by Henry Glassford Bell, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and W.W. Jacobs will be considered alongside contemporaneous records of older folklore, consolation literatures and child elegies, and other cultural narratives to illustrate how the fear around the imagined return of the dead child pervaded various forms and how the perversion of ideologies around the idyllic child were carried through to the versions recognizable today as child-zombies.