By: Anon
The Saints won the Super Bowl for the first time in thirty years when they hired a Vodou Priestess or Mambo, Ava Kay Jones to perform a Vodou ceremony at the Superdome. The Saints went on to win six playoff games after the Priestess cleansed the Superdome from negative spirits with her bag of gris-gris and a bottle of gin, drummers and a custom-made Voodoo Doll. There were even dancers.
I think about that when I’m in the locker room. There’s a sense I get within the building that maybe a Mambo could cleanse this place because there sure seem to be some malignant spirits lingering out in these parts.
Within the precinct, that is.
Marie Lalaurie might even have relations in this place. Or maybe this precinct was built on the bones of her victims. Maybe there were other Lalauries, other serial killers who liked to torture their victims to death and this place was built upon the skeletal ruins of their former abodes. I wander the dingy hallways and think Lalaurie’s spirit is here, permeating these walls. The evil seems to rise up from the grounds of this entire place and clings to the air, contained within these four walls like a clusterfuck of a migraine. This place is cursed and so am I.
I hear the screams, desperate cries and anguished moans of people in pain from below, from the underbelly of the precinct.
Some might say they deserve to suffer. But I don’t know about all that.
I think about the time when Vodou was a way to assemble and empower the oppressed against the forces of evil and tyranny. In the pockets of this city are still places where cigar smoke, rum and the beat of the drum still linger or echo in rooms dark and unfiltered. Places where people fill the rooms, and blood is spilled in sacrifice. Where the Mambo chants and calls to the spirits, the Loa, seeking help and powerful guidance.
One day this place might be cleansed.
(This article is the opinion of the author and not that of the Hathian Editorial Board)
