There are lots of cases out there where the so-called "zombie" state is a perfectly valid one, and may for various reasons be preferable to representing that state externally (for example, with a null pointer). Such an object is simply a placeholder instance of the object that is ready to do work, but not yet actually doing anything. If necessary, it can check its internal state and throw exceptions when not-valid-while-uninitialized methods are called.

The examples that come immediately to mind are the Publiser, Subscriber, and Timer classes that are part of the ROS C++ API: http://docs.ros.org/api/roscpp/html/classros_1_1Publisher.ht...

I agree that there are caveats with it, but I get nervous when people toss around a phrase like "known antipattern" with such confidence.