Marie Laveau is the most renowned Voodoo figure in the history of North America. For several decades she held New Orleans spellbound, as her occult powers became legendary. The crypt where she is believed to be buried, New Orleans’ Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1, is often described as one of the most haunted cemeteries in America, and her tomb remains an object of adoration and the site of Voodoo offerings. Visitors have long claimed to see the ghost of the Voodoo Queen herself, walking among the tombs in her trademark turban, and to receive favors after making wishes at her tomb, sometimes returning to inscribe three X marks in gratitude.
Marie Catherine Laveau was born in New Orleans, probably on September 10, 1801, as a free woman of color, though some sources still give 1794 as her birth year. The details of her early life are elusive and contradictory. She is commonly described as the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Creole, Charles Laveaux (or Laveau), and his mistress Marguerite, who was reportedly of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry, and many historians believe her mother and grandmother were themselves involved in African-derived spiritual practices.
On August 4, 1819, Laveau married Jacques (or Jacque) Santiago Paris, a free Black man from Saint-Domingue/Haiti. The couple were married at St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square, in a service performed by Father Antonio de Sedella, also known as Père Antoine. Her married life was short. Some accounts suggest she had children who died young, and Jacques Paris himself disappeared from the records within a few years, leading later writers to speculate that he died under mysterious circumstances. By her twenties she was known throughout the city as the Widow Paris.
The Widow Paris is said to have learned aspects of her craft from a Voodoo practitioner known variously as Doctor John, John Bayou, and other appellations. The Voodoo tradition in New Orleans grew from West and Central African religions brought by enslaved Africans, and it evolved further as free and enslaved Black people arrived from Saint-Domingue during and after the Haitian Revolution. By about 1830 Laveau had become one of several New Orleans Voodoo queens, but she was soon regarded as the most powerful, and came to dominate public rituals at Congo Square.
Laveau worked as a hairdresser out of her house on St. Ann Street, with a clientele drawn largely from wealthy Creole and white women. This position gave her intimate access to the gossip, secrets, and anxieties of the city’s elite, as well as to their servants, who increasingly believed her to be a powerful Voodoo priestess. At the same time, she was a devout Catholic who regularly attended mass and encouraged others to do the same. Over time she cultivated a network of informants. As Robert Tallant, author of Voodoo in New Orleans (1946), famously wrote, “No event in any household in New Orleans was a secret from Marie Laveau.” To outsiders, her ability to know intimate details of her clients’ lives appeared magical, and she quickly gained a reputation for “special powers” as a mystic. Enslaved servants, free people of color, and white New Orleanians alike came to her for help. She told fortunes, gave advice on love and legal matters, and prepared gris-gris—bundles of roots, herbs, and other items—for cures, charms, and hexes.
About a year after Jacques Paris disappeared from the record, Laveau entered into a long-term relationship with Louis Christophe Dominick Duminy de Glapion, a veteran who had fought against the British in the defense of New Orleans. They lived together in a common-law union for decades. Various accounts claim that Laveau bore many children—sometimes as many as fifteen—but parish records clearly document several, and most appear to have died in childhood. Her best-known surviving child was another Marie, often called Marie Laveau II, who would later be remembered as her look-alike successor.
Folklore and later newspaper accounts confirm that Marie Laveau was widely regarded as the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans for at least forty years, from the 1820s through the 1860s. “New Orleans Voodoo as a social phenomenon came into its heyday during the 1800s. Under Marie Laveau’s guidance Voodoo thrived as a business, served as a form of political influence, provided a source of spectacle and entertainment, and was a means of altruism.” Laveau injected herself into many aspects of New Orleans life and was approached by members of every social class. She was known far and wide for her prowess in magic and healing, and she presided over ceremonies in which participants were said to become possessed by loas (Voodoo spirits), dance to drums, and circle bonfires. In 1874, according to contemporary reports, she officiated St. John’s Eve rites on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain that drew a crowd of roughly 12,000 people, both Black and white.
Laveau was also renowned as a nurse and healer. Stories circulated of her tireless work at the sickbed, especially during yellow fever and cholera epidemics. She mixed herbal remedies with prayer and ritual, and her skill and dedication earned her the friendship and admiration of those who saw her as a gifted healer and philanthropist. Others, fearful or hostile to African-derived religion, attributed her success to “unnatural” means and held her in dread, condemning her as a witch even as some neighbors quietly revered her as a saint.
Legend holds that the Voodoo Queen had the power to put a person into or out of City Hall, that she could sway juries and governors, and that she was responsible—through Voodoo—for the deaths of both a lieutenant governor and a governor. She was also credited with saving several condemned men from the gallows. One of the most famous tales recounts how she secured the pardon of a Frenchman sentenced to hang. In some versions she invokes a great storm that causes the noose to slip; in others she so powerfully influences a magistrate—whether by magic, information, or both—that he overturns the sentence at the last moment.
While many of these tall tales were undoubtedly embellished or invented, Laveau herself was adept at managing her public image. She did not shy away from stories of her supernatural powers and was known to embrace and amplify them. One persistent belief was that she had discovered a way to restore her youth. Firsthand accounts circulated of a young Marie Laveau striding through New Orleans streets only weeks after visitors had found her elderly and bedridden, a confusion likely fed by the presence of her daughter and namesake.
From the 1860s, Marie Laveau appears less frequently in accounts of public Voodoo rites, and many historians believe she gradually withdrew from large public ceremonies, leaving much of that work to Marie Laveau II and other priestesses. Around 1875 she was described as frail and increasingly confined to her home on Rue St. Ann, where she spent her remaining years in semi-retirement with her family. She died there on June 15, 1881, with most sources giving her age as 79, although popular tradition sometimes claims she lived into her nineties.
On June 17, 1881, the Daily Picayune published a long obituary noting that those who passed the old house on St. Ann Street, between Rampart and Burgundy, had lately missed the “decrepit old lady with snow white hair, and a smile of peace and contentment lighting up her golden features” who used to sit in the open gateway. The paper described her as dying peacefully with her daughter and grandchildren around her bed, and reported that she was buried later that afternoon in the family tomb at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, her funeral attended by great crowds.
Yet after her death, the legend of Marie Laveau only grew. “It was then,” Robert Tallant writes, “that the strangest part of the entire Laveau mystery became most noticeable. For Marie Laveau still walked the streets of New Orleans, a new Marie Laveau, who also lived in the St. Ann Street cottage.” Laveau’s look-alike daughter, Marie Laveau II, followed in her footsteps and was remembered for “wild rituals in the swamps around New Orleans” and for leading dramatic St. John’s Eve ceremonies at Lake Pontchartrain. Stories differ about her death: some say she drowned crossing the lake, while others insist she died of a heart attack at a ball in 1897 and was buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, in the same tomb as her mother.
The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits reports one popular legend that Marie Laveau never died at all, but transformed herself into a huge black crow that still circles the cemetery. Both Maries are said to haunt New Orleans in various human and animal forms, their spirits lingering wherever Voodoo is practiced, songs are sung in their honor, and petitions are made at their tomb.
One alleged ghost sighting stands out. Tallant recounts the story of an African American man named Elmore Lee Banks, who had an experience near St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in the mid-1930s. As Banks remembered it, an old woman entered the drugstore where he was a customer. The proprietor, terrified, ran into the back of the store. Laughing, the woman asked Banks, “Don’t you know me?” When he replied, “No, ma’am,” she slapped him. Then, Banks said, “she jumped up in the air and went whizzing out the door and over the top of the telephone wires.” She passed over the graveyard wall and vanished. When Banks came to, with whiskey being poured down his throat, the proprietor told him, “That was Marie Laveau.”
Sources:
http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/secrets_of_the_voodoo_tomb/
https://roadtrippers.com/stories/mistress-marie-laveau-the-voodoo-queen-of-new-orleans?lat=40.80972&lng=-96.67528&z=5
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=1503
http://www.strangehistory.org/cms/index.php/archive21/55-marie-catherine-laveau-voodoo-queen-of-new-orleans-september-10-1801-june-15-1881
http://www.travelnola.com/halloweenneworleans/marielaveautomb/
