Dreadful Places

by Aaron Mahnke

  One Voodoo queen who is still mentioned throughout New Orleans is Julie White. She practiced in the late 1800s, and legend says that her cabin was near the edge of Manchac Swamp. She was more reclusive than most Voodoo queens, but visitors still came for her blessing and predictions. What she preferred to dole out, though, weren’t kind words. Julie, they say, was cranky and threatened everyone.

  Her favorite thing to do was to predict the destruction of local communities. In the Mississippi Delta, you never have to wait long for a flood or a storm, and Julie seemed to have an uncanny knack for prophesying some of them. If ever there was a shining example of a warm, inviting person, Julie White was probably not it.

  The most famous Voodoo queen, though, hands down, lived a century before Julie White, and her name was Marie Laveau. She was born in the French Quarter sometime between 1795 and 1805 to Charles Laveau, the fifth mayor of New Orleans. She married in 1819, but her husband died just a year later. And with that, Marie was forced to find new ways to support herself. Local legend says that she worked for a time as a hairdresser, and there’s some documentation that points to work as a liquor importer. But sometime after that Marie set in motion a legendary career as a practitioner of Voodoo.

  Let’s put this in perspective. In 1874, she held a St. John’s Eve gathering on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Estimates place the total number of people in attendance at around twelve thousand. Maybe it was the power of Voodoo at the time, or Marie’s electric personality. It was probably a mixture of both. And people loved her for it.

  She followed the same pattern as most Voodoo queens: she held rites and ceremonies, and crafted gris-gris bags for sale. Legend says that Marie learned the practice from an earlier Voodoo king, Doctor John, and quickly became his cultural successor.

  She had the unique privilege of being able to host Voodoo rites inside the largest Catholic church in New Orleans, St. Louis Church, thanks to her friendship with the church’s rector, known locally as Père Antoine. Most people have forgotten that that friendship was built on a very noble pursuit: Marie and Antoine worked together for years to free slaves in the New Orleans area.

  Marie was also said to be quite well connected. Countless public figures came to her for advice, and it was rumored that she also employed a network of spies throughout the city. All of those connections earned her influence and power, things she wasn’t afraid to use.

  One story in particular about Marie Laveau stands out. According to local legend, the son of a wealthy businessman was arrested and charged with murder in the mid-1830s. The father, aware of the reputation Marie had for getting what she wanted, offered her a deal. If she could free his son, he would purchase her a house of her own.

  Marie accepted the offer. It’s said that she spent the weeks before the trial praying incessantly at St. Louis Church. And all the while, Marie held three hot Guinea peppers in her mouth. When the morning of the trial came, she used her influence to get access to the courtroom and placed the peppers beneath the judge’s chair. Filled with her prayers, they were a talisman, designed to influence his mind.

  In the end, the wealthy man’s son was acquitted of all charges, and Marie received her reward. Whether it was her Voodoo powers that made it possible or simply her political clout and connections, we’ll never really know. But in New Orleans, Voodoo always gets the vote.

  Voodoo isn’t the only cultural transplant in New Orleans, though. In a melting pot that includes Creole, Spanish, French, and Native American influences, it probably won’t come as a surprise to hear that there are even Turkish stories whispered in the city.

  What’s surprising, however, is just how bloody they are.

  STAIRWAY TO HELL

  The house that stands at the corner of Dauphine Street and Orleans Avenue was built by Jean Baptiste LePrete in 1836. LePrete was a plantation owner who wanted a city home, so he built the Greek Revival mansion as a retreat and as a symbol of his wealth.

  But that wealth experienced hard times in the wake of the Civil War. Financial troubles forced LePrete to move out of the mansion and find someone to rent it from him. I’m sure he expected another wealthy business owner, or a government official. Imagine his shock, then, when it was a Turkish prince who arrived at the door.

  The man told LePrete that he was Prince Suleyman, former sultan of an undisclosed country in the Middle East. Cash was exchanged, LePrete turned over the keys, and the sultan and his household moved in.

  According to the story, that household fit the stereotype one might expect from a film adaptation of the Arabian tale One Thousand and One Nights. The sultan had many wives, a large extended family, and a whole team of servants. He brought with him furniture and decorations—enormous rugs and tapestries, paintings, and other symbols of his wealth and power.

  After the sultan settled into the mansion, a pair of Turkish soldiers was assigned to stand guard outside the door, armed with scimitars. But the guards weren’t able to keep the rumors from spreading, and the stories grew more and more elaborate. It was said that the house would be quiet during the day, but after darkness fell, it would come alive.

  The mansion, locals said, had become a pleasure palace. Nights were filled with orgies and extravagant parties. Some whispered that young women, and even boys and girls, had gone missing in the neighborhood, and the blame was placed on the sultan’s appetite for carnal pleasures. There was no proof, of course, but neighbors love to talk. Neighbors always love to talk, and they always will, I suppose.

  Those who walked past the mansion would often comment on the smell of incense that drifted out of the windows. But that’s not all the locals noticed. One morning, a neighbor was out for a walk, and as he passed by the sultan’s mansion, he noticed something dark on the front steps. He stopped and took a second look, and then slowly backed away in horror.

  Blood was everywhere. It covered the top step and had run in small rivers down the dark stairs, and all of it seemed to have come from the narrow space beneath the door. The neighbor quickly went to the police, and they arrived a short time later. After attempts to unlock the front door failed, they forced their way in. What they found inside, though, was far worse than they’d imagined.

  Bodies lay all about the main hall. Some of them were complete, but most were torn apart. The floor was covered in blood, and it was easy to see how it could have managed to run all the way to the doorway and then down the stairs. Everywhere they looked, they saw death and gore.

  According to the story, the police continued on into the house, and soon came upon the courtyard garden near the rear of the mansion. At first everything seemed normal there, but then one of the officers pointed to a spot on the ground. There, protruding from the wet soil, was a human hand.

  It’s said that the sultan himself was spared the dismemberment that the rest of his household experienced. Instead, the killer had buried the prince alive in the garden after wrapping the man in three white sheets and binding him with rope. He had somehow managed to get one hand free before suffocating to death.

  To this day, no one knows who the killer was, but there are theories. One suggestion was, oddly enough, pirates. It’s not likely, and not a popular theory, but it suggests that perhaps the wealth and possessions inside the house were not really the sultan’s after all. Still, I have a hard time imagining pirates doing whatever it is they do on land, in the middle of a large city.

  The more popular theory is that the sultan was actually on the run from his homeland. People whispered that he wasn’t really a prince but the brother of one, and that he had somehow stolen a portion of his brother’s wealth and escaped to America. As a result, the false sultan was hunted down, and his entire household was killed for his crimes.

  Today, after decades of neglect, the mansion has been converted into luxury apartments. Tenants claim to have heard mysterious footsteps and the sounds o
f parties. Some have even heard the faint echo of unusual music, something that they say has a Middle Eastern flavor.

  Others, though, have seen things. Some have witnessed groups of ghostly people passing from room to room, or body parts that vanish a moment later. Most significant, though, is the lone figure of a man who’s been seen floating through the halls before mysteriously disappearing through locked doors.

  Perhaps, even after all these years, the sultan is still looking for a way out.

  EVERYTHING FLOATS

  New Orleans is a big city with a deep past, and I fully admit that its history and lore are larger than the picture I’ve painted here. And maybe that’s the power of it, the uniqueness of it, you know? There are very few places in America that can claim as much tragedy over so many centuries, and that legacy shows.

  And the attraction of that legacy has never faded. Celebrities and tourists alike still flock to the city. Anne Rice gave it new life through her vampire novels, and in 2010 Nicolas Cage purchased a plot in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. He plans to build a tomb shaped like a small pyramid because, well, why the heck not, right?

  I think we would be missing the point to think of New Orleans as simply the place where Mardi Gras happens every year, or as just a center for jazz and Cajun cuisine. It’s bigger than that, deeper than that. There’s a darkness, you see, that floats just beneath the surface, and we’d be mistaken to ignore it. And some say that darkness still holds power.

  Remember Julie White, the Voodoo queen who lived on the edge of Manchac Swamp? Like Marie Laveau, she was sought after by many in the community for her advice and oracle-like predictions. And because of that, she had quite a following. Still, her final prediction left people feeling unsettled. “One day I’m gonna die,” she said, “and I’m gonna take all of you with me.”

  Julie did die, of course, in late September 1915. She was feared, yes, but she was also deeply loved, and so the locals gathered in large numbers to throw her the funeral they felt she deserved. And on the day of that gathering, September 21, a category 4 hurricane made landfall, ripping through New Orleans and the surrounding area.

  Out of nowhere, 130-mile-per-hour winds and fifteen-foot waves ravaged the Delta region. Everyone at the funeral died—nearly two hundred of them, they say—and locals from the town of Frenier were left with the grim task of gathering their bodies and burying them in a mass grave in the swamp.

  Even today, more than a century later, locals say that bodies will occasionally float to the surface of the water. Perhaps it’s just a natural process for a swamp that’s filled with hundreds of corpses. Or maybe Julie White, the oracle of Manchac Swamp, just wants us to never forget that she was right.

  THEY NAMED THE village after the Latin word for “serpent,” coluber. Today though, so many centuries later, its name is rarely spoken by those who live in the Basilicata region of Italy. There’s something about it that gives local Italians a feeling of dread, and they’d rather not speak its name.

  Colobraro earned that reputation, though, if we’re to believe the stories. It’s said that in the early years of the twentieth century, the town was home to a very successful, but very disliked, lawyer named Biagio Virgilio. Virgilio was speaking in court one day, according to the story, when he pointed up toward the ceiling of the courthouse.

  “If what I say is false,” he shouted, “may this chandelier come down!”

  And it did. It dropped right into the middle of the room and shattered into a thousand pieces. And while no one was injured, the town’s reputation took on a dark hue. It was cursed, they said. Hexed. And later events only served to reinforce that belief. Landslides. Car accidents. There are even stories of babies born with two hearts or three lungs. And, of course, tales of witchcraft.

  Locations take on a flavor over time. Whether it’s our hometown or just an infamous spot in the area, we have a tendency to treat locations like people. They have a personality and a reputation. And some, if you listen to the locals, are even cursed.

  When life doesn’t go the way we’d hoped, we look for reasons. Claiming that our town is cursed is an easy way to make sense of the accidental, the unexpected, and the unfortunate. But sometimes the evidence is dark and deep, and includes suffering, death, even utter destruction.

  FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

  There’s this notion that’s almost as old as time itself, that a city or nation that strays too far from its roots, or from its moral center, puts itself at risk of being cursed. Hebrew legend speaks of the Tower of Babel, which shows how the pride of one settlement brought about destruction and confusion.

  The ancient stories of Atlantis spoke of the island civilization as technologically and socially advanced, but it was their greed and immorality that led the gods to destroy them. According to the interpretation of the ancient writers, they were cursed by their behavior.

  Other ancient stories speak of a city that once stood in the southern sands of the Arabian Peninsula. It’s mentioned in the Quran, the Christian Bible, even the Arabian Nights tales. It was known as Ubar, Iram, Wabar, or the city of Ad. And after serving as a trade center for over five millennia, it vanished roughly two thousand years ago. Satellite scans in the 1980s finally provided us with an answer. The city, it turns out, was built on an enormous subterranean cavern, and sometime in AD 300, it all collapsed.

  There are so many other examples. Port Royal in the Caribbean. The ancient Greek city of Helike. Even Pompeii comes to mind. But these stories aren’t limited to dusty cities spoken of in ancient texts. Even here in the United States, in a country that’s relatively young compared to much of the world, we can find stories of cursed locations and horrible tragedy.

  On November 1, 1886, tragedy came to Lafayette, Oregon. That was the day that David Corker, a fifty-seven-year-old shopkeeper, was found dead in his general store by a customer. The shop had been broken into overnight, and Corker had been killed while defending his store.

  The suspect was a man named Richard Marple. He’d moved there with his wife, Julia, and mother, Anna, just the year before, and the rumor was that he’d chosen a life of crime over gainful employment. The man, they said, was a thief.

  Add to that a handful of eyewitness reports about how Marple openly mocked the shopkeeper, and it was hard to ignore him as a suspect. The sheriff visited his home and found a bloody shirt, a scrap of paper in his pocket with bloodstains on it, and a collection of tools used for breaking into locked buildings.

  Marple was convicted of murder on April 9, 1887. His wife and mother fought the charges. They provided a solid alibi, swearing as to his whereabouts that night. It didn’t work, though. Marple was hanged on November 11, just a little over a year after Corker had been found dead. Thirty locals gathered to watch as the man strangled to death at the end of the rope for nearly eighteen minutes.

  Marple’s mother wasn’t allowed to watch the execution, but she could be heard screaming from a distance. She cursed the town, they say, and predicted that three fires would burn Lafayette to the ground. It was easy to laugh it off, though. Predictions like that always are. So that’s what the inhabitants did.

  No one was suspicious when a blaze ripped through town in 1895. Towns—especially those built mostly out of wood—have a knack for catching fire. Six buildings were leveled by the flames. Two years later, another fire broke out, destroying four more. And then, in 1904, a fire destroyed sixteen buildings as it raged across town.

  A random series of accidents, or the product of the curse of a very angry mother? For some, that isn’t an easy question to answer.

  Another location that’s haunted by tales of a curse is the Dutch village of Saeftinghe. Well, it was, up until the late 1500s, that is. Let me explain what I mean.

  In the Middle Ages Saeftinghe was a hub for the harvesting of peat. The village was situated in what is known as the polders, the floodplains th
at were separated from the ocean by man-made dikes and dams. And because peat was a popular source of fuel at the time, Saeftinghe was an important community in the region.

  Peat was in such high demand that, according to some historians, the farmers of Saeftinghe were said to dress in fine silks. They even decorated their draft horses with gold and silver jewelry. Of course, this led to a reputation for greed and selfishness, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the townsfolk would chase newcomers away with weapons and dogs. Basically, they weren’t friendly people, and no one likes a jerk, right?

  As the story goes, a farmer was fishing outside Saeftinghe one day when he reeled in a real-life mermaid. Apparently she could speak Dutch, and she warned the farmer that unless the town straightened up and stopped being greedy, something horrible was going to happen.

  The farmer laughed at her, and decided that a pet mermaid would be nice to have, so he tied her up. Even when the mermaid’s husband surfaced and begged for her release, the farmer refused. So the merman uttered a curse. “The lands of Saeftinghe will fall,” he said. “Only its towers will continue to stand tall.”

  In 1570, a flood swept over the Dutch coast, inundating the land around the town. Fourteen years later, in 1584, the Dutch army was fighting the Eighty Years’ War and destroyed one of the dikes that held back the ocean. The town of Saeftinghe was overcome by an enormous wave, and was never seen again.

  Today the region is known as Verdronken Land, “Drowned Land.” But locals say that not all of Saeftinghe is gone. Somewhere beneath the marsh and water, if the stories are to be believed, the old church tower still stands tall.

  And on foggy days, they say, you can still hear the bell toll.

  THE IN-BETWEEN PLACE