Ghost seekers agree that spirits often haunt the location where their physical bodies met an untimely demise. If this is true, few cities qualify as a city of spirits more than does New Orleans.
We all remember Katrina, 2005’s killer hurricane that inundated eighty percent of New Orleans after the failure of practically every levee in town. The City evacuated ninety percent of the population of the southern metropolis, and almost fifteen hundreds lives lost, along with untold property damage. As devastating as it was, Katrina wasn’t the worst disaster ever to beset the Big Easy.
Those of you that have read Anne Rice’s vampire novels are familiar with the City’s plague years when thousands died from yellow fever, cholera and malaria. During these terrible times, genteel whites often turned to practitioners of voodoo to protect them from the ravages of disease.
New Orleans has always been a mixing bowl of diverse humanity and beliefs. African religions have melded almost perfectly with European Catholicism and it is often difficult to know where one begins and where the other ends. One thing is sure. No City in the world has seen the almost continual pendulum swing from extreme excitement to soulful affliction.
If it is true that spirits remain near the location where their physical bodies met their untimely demise, then walk down Rue Bourbon sometime, stroll between the aboveground crypts in the St. Louis Cemetery #1, or go for a streetcar ride down St. Charles Avenue past the places where citizens once bought and sold slaves.
There will be spirits walking beside you on Bourbon, and in the cemetery, and riding on the streetcar as you traverse St. Charles. If you can’t feel their presence, then don’t worry about looking for them anywhere else because your own soul is interminably damaged.
We all remember Katrina, 2005’s killer hurricane that inundated eighty percent of New Orleans after the failure of practically every levee in town. The City evacuated ninety percent of the population of the southern metropolis, and almost fifteen hundreds lives lost, along with untold property damage. As devastating as it was, Katrina wasn’t the worst disaster ever to beset the Big Easy.
Those of you that have read Anne Rice’s vampire novels are familiar with the City’s plague years when thousands died from yellow fever, cholera and malaria. During these terrible times, genteel whites often turned to practitioners of voodoo to protect them from the ravages of disease.
New Orleans has always been a mixing bowl of diverse humanity and beliefs. African religions have melded almost perfectly with European Catholicism and it is often difficult to know where one begins and where the other ends. One thing is sure. No City in the world has seen the almost continual pendulum swing from extreme excitement to soulful affliction.
If it is true that spirits remain near the location where their physical bodies met their untimely demise, then walk down Rue Bourbon sometime, stroll between the aboveground crypts in the St. Louis Cemetery #1, or go for a streetcar ride down St. Charles Avenue past the places where citizens once bought and sold slaves.
There will be spirits walking beside you on Bourbon, and in the cemetery, and riding on the streetcar as you traverse St. Charles. If you can’t feel their presence, then don’t worry about looking for them anywhere else because your own soul is interminably damaged.
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