Show Us Your Badass Pipes

“It is generally known that Marie LaVeau [sic] welcomed whites to this particular saturnalia, and it is often remarked that it was the decoy, the real worship of the Voodoo taking place at other times in remote regions of the swamp,” the reporter wrote.



Laveau, a hairdresser born of a Creole mother and white father, was “the most famous and purportedly the most powerful of the city’s Voodoo practitioners” in the nineteenth century, writes Atlas Obscura. “She sold charms and pouches of gris gris (some combination of herbs, oils, stones, bones, hair, nails and grave dirt), told fortunes and gave advice to New Orleans residents of every strata.”