Ding! Keee-rect!
Salt (and/ or meat, by some sources) reminds the zombie that he is dead and makes him aware of his undead state. He will immediately turn around and do his level best to get back into his grave as quick as possible.
From W.B. Seabrook's "...Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields":
"...and as the zombies tasted the salt, they knew they were dead and made a dreadful outcry and arose and turned their faces toward the mountain.
No one dare stop them, for they were corpses walking in the sunlight, and they themselves and all the people knew that were corpses. And they disappeared toward the mountain.
When later they drew near their own village on the slopes of Morne-au-Diable, these dead men and women walking single file in the twilight, with no soul leading them or daring to follow, the people of their village, who were also holding
bamboche in the marketplace, saw them drawing closer, recognized among them the fathers, brothers, wives and daughters, whom they had buried months before.
Most of them knew at once the truth, that these were zombies who had been dragged from their graves, but others hoped that a blessed miracle had taken place on this Fete Dieu, and rushed forward to take them in their arms and welcome them.
But the zombies shuffled through the marketplace, recognizing neither father nor wife nor mother, and as they turned leftward up the path leading to the graveyard, a woman whose daughter was in the procession of the dead threw herself screaming before the girl's shuffling feet and begged her to stay; but the grave-cold feet of the daughter and the feet of the other dead shuffled over her and onward; and as they approached the graveyard, they began to shuffle faster and rushed among the grave, and each before his own empty grave began clawing at the stone and earth to enter it again; and as their cold hands touched the earth of their own graves, they fell and lay there, rotting carrion."
And on that note -- Isabella, the floor is yours
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