Magical Places by Nikki Van De Car & Katie Vernon

Author:Nikki Van De Car & Katie Vernon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2019-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

NEW ORLEANS

CALLED THE MOST HAUNTED CITY IN AMERICA, NEW ORLEANS is teeming with ghosts and haunted houses, and there are more ghost tours than regular historical ones. The city’s past as the center of the slave trade makes its hauntings particularly grim, as do the natural disasters of the more recent past. Some of the eeriest places include abandoned hospitals and amusement parks, empty since Hurricane Katrina. Other haunted locations have been filled with actors and props, and in some cases a blood donation will serve as your entry fee.

The most famous, and one of the most horrifying, haunted houses in New Orleans is the LaLaurie Mansion. In 1833, Madame LaLaurie had been ordered to set her slaves free after a household slave died under suspicious circumstances—but, one by one, she brought them all back. And then, a year later, a fire in the house revealed seven slaves who had been kept chained. They had been starved and, rumor has it, tortured and experimented on. This so enraged the people of New Orleans that they set upon the house as a mob, ripping it down to the studs. Madame LaLaurie escaped unharmed. However, her spirit seems to have returned to the house, as reports of violence continued. In 1894, a tenant was found murdered; in the days and weeks before, he had been raving about a demon in the house that would not rest until he was dead. In the late 1800s the house also served as a boarding school for girls—and these girls would approach their teachers, sobbing, displaying deep gouges in their arms. “That woman did it,” they said. Since Madame LaLaurie, no one has retained ownership of the house for more than five years—financial troubles or creepy happenings always drive them out.

The cemeteries of New Orleans are all said to be haunted as well, but the oldest and most famous is St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. A tiny burial site spanning only one block, it is a warren holding 100,000 bodies and counting, as it is still active. Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, was laid to rest there. Marie’s father was a free black man, while her mother was a free woman of Native American, African, and French descent. Marie appears to have followed her mother’s tradition of fortune-telling and working with herbal remedies, but took it much further, incorporating Voodoo practices with Roman Catholic saints and prayers. Marie was at the height of her popularity in the 1830s, when she held rituals in Congo Square, the place where free and enslaved blacks could congregate freely. She also held annual ceremonies on St. John’s Eve at Lake Pontchartrain, which were attended by thousands of people—black and white. Her eerie knowledge of the goings on of New Orleans society made her the most sought-after (and the most feared) Voodoo practitioner in the city. Whether her vast knowledge came from her power as a brothel owner, her work as a hairdresser, her network within the slave community, or her occult practices remains a mystery.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.