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Congo Square Business District Skyline A Striking Church Tower Welcome to St. Louis No. 1 The Sinking Cemetery Cemetery Aisle 1 Cemetery Aisle 2 Cemetery Aisle 3 Cemetery/City Skyline Mass of White Tombs Thinking Angel on Tomb Red Brick Mausoleum Death's Double-Decker Decrepit Tomb Slightly More Traditional A Fancy Mausoleum A Large, Round Tomb Religious Decoration Marie Laveau's Tomb Offerings at Laveau's Tomb Tomb Under Construction No Respect for the Dead Location, Location, Location |
The Cemetery Tour
The cemetery tour that Michele, Verjineh and I took would have to be described as the exact opposite of the vampire tour. We started the tour in the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum, which was pretty cool, but nowhere near as cool as the name makes it sound. Our tour guide, a rather-light-on-his-toes fellow, started his dialogue tying some of the voodoo history in with the city history and talking about the high death rate that gripped the city. He didn't talk at all about how vampires had anything to do with that, but rather how the uncleanliness of the city and the poor sanitation caused the short life spans of the city's denizens. He talked about how voodoo played a role in the gatherings of the slaves brought over here from Africa and how the different African tribes continued some of their rivalries even after being transported thousands of miles from their homelands. And then we were off, walking toward the St. Louis No. 1 cemetery on the edge of the French Quarter. During this hike he described how everything in the city is covered with a microscopic layer of feces and decayed human flesh and other nasty things and how he wouldn't walk the streets in open-toed shoes, which, mind you, probably half of the woman on the tour were wearing. After stopping at the church seen in "A Striking Church Tower" and the guide lighting up a cigarette in an alcove off to the side of it, which he described as "a sacred place where many people come to pray and give offerings in hopes of having their wishes fulfilled," we reached the cemetery. Here the tour devolved into what Michele termed the "Gay History Gossip Tour," and centered around things like how the aristocrats viewed death and how families would go and lunch together in the cemeteries to watch over the sculptures that they had placed on the family mausoleums. He did add in some very interesting information about what happens to the bodies when the people die of yellow fever (they explode once they get too hot), and how the crypts have to be sealed for one year and a day and then they are opened and the scant remains of the prior occupant are swept away or to the back to allow the next tenant to take up residence. Using this method, many of the mausoleums you see in the pictures have been reused countless times and whole families are "buried" together this way. You'll note that some of the gravestones list upwards of ten people or more. While the guide did offer a lot of interesting information, a lot of it was really beyond the scope of what Michele or I were interested in, and seemed to focus on a number of trivialities. It was way too long, and the day felt way too hot to be standing around a cemetery for two and a half hours. I did take a number of pictures that I think are really fascinating, so please enjoy them. I had to suffer a great deal to get these. A key stop in the cemetery, before the guide lost my interest completely, was at the tomb of Marie Laveau. She is known as the voodoo queen, although there were in actuality many, and people still flock to her grave. Hers is purported to be the second most visited tomb, next to Jim Morrison's, of The Doors. As you can see from the picture "Marie Laveau's Tomb" people leave offerings in exchange for having their wishes fulfilled. In the early years following her death, people would draw or scratch three X's on the tomb and then leave an offering after making their wish. However, that was changed due to all the markings on the tomb, to tapping three times lightly on the tomb, making the wish and then leaving the offering. These offerings ranged from alcohol to tobacco to money to candy and even beads. You can see some of these items in "Offerings at Laveau's Tomb". And the wishes are guaranteed to come true. The guide was careful to point out that the wishes, while they did indeed come true, did not always come true in the manner that you expected. For example, if you wished for a certain someone to be yours, they would eventually be yours, but that might not mean until after they had already gone through two unsuccessful marriages and were destitute and had an excessive amount of emotional baggage. |