The streets of New Orleans carry stories like river water—slow, heavy, and charged with memory. We follow those currents into the life of Marie Laveau, a free woman of color who became the city’s most enduring symbol of power, faith, and fear. Between jazz funerals and above-ground tombs, we explore how a healer and hairdresser rose to be called the Voodoo Queen, and why her shadow still stretches across the Gulf Coast.

We set the stage in the early 1800s, when French, Spanish, African, and Creole traditions converged under a sky of wealth, epidemics, and floods. That pressure-cooker forged both resilience and superstition. Marie Laveau moved through it all with herbs and rosaries, gathering influence in salons, sickrooms, and prisons. Some saw her as a guardian who blended voodoo and Catholic devotion to protect families and guide the desperate. Others told darker stories—poison smuggled to the condemned, political strings pulled, and a death conjure that ended a powerful bloodline. The infamous Fatal Sisters tale becomes a lens on justice, rumor, and the ways communities police harm when courts fail.

We also trace her lasting footprint: the rituals at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, the rise of cemetery tourism, the vandalism that forced guided access, and the many retellings that cast her as feminist icon, folk saint, or sorceress. Along the way, we cut through sensational tropes to parse what records show versus what legend insists. The result is a portrait of a city and a woman who made belief tangible—gris-gris in the pocket, prayers at the bedside, stories passed like torches in the dark.

Press play to step into the French Quarter’s twilight, weigh fact against folklore, and decide what kind of power you believe in. If this journey moved you, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find these Southern histories and hauntings.

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Night settles on the porch, the river hums in the distance, and we follow that sound to a Vicksburg mansion that refuses to grow quiet. McRaven House isn’t just “the most haunted home in Mississippi”—it’s a three-part time machine where an outlaw’s bedroom, a grieving mother’s lullaby, and a war-torn hospital all occupy the same breath. We walk the Great River Road, trace the Natchez Trace, and pull at the threads linking moving water, old brick, and stories that won’t lie flat.

We start with Andrew Glass’s two-room hideout, its buttermilk-blue walls and pulled-up ladder designed to stop ambush—until a razor did the job from inside. The story shifts to Sheriff Stephen Howard and Mary Elizabeth, who add grace and light before childbirth steals her future, leaving a soft song many still hear at night. Then the circle widens: the Devil Reverend John Murrell rides the Trace, sermons as disguise, theft as vocation, a conspiracy that boils over in Vicksburg. Names and dates stay anchored even as the uncanny slips through: lynchings, exile, and a city bracing for more violence than law can hold.

McRaven’s architecture becomes evidence. Empire style bridges pioneer bone to Greek Revival polish under John H. Bob, who opens his home as a Civil War field hospital and pays with his life during Reconstruction—dragged to Stout’s Bayou after a garden confrontation, shot in the back and face. The balcony keeps his presence, cigar smoke and orders no one else hears. Union officers take over, and Captain McPherson’s absence ends with a flooded apparition describing a murder and the Mississippi swallowing the proof. Decades later, the Murray sisters choose isolation over modernization, burning furniture for heat as vines erase the house from view. Restoration brings fresh bruises and broken bones, as if the walls have opinions about change.

What remains is a layered account of Southern folklore and American history sharing a single address: haunted Mississippi, Vicksburg siege, Natchez Trace outlaws, Reconstruction violence, and a river that remembers everything. If you love ghost stories anchored by documented lives and places—where the timeline aligns and the impossible refuses to leave—press play, then tell a friend. Subscribe, rate, and share your take: skeptic, believer, or somewhere in between?

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Lurking in the shadows of Appalachia's misty mountains is a tale that defies rational explanation. When a group of gravediggers in Clendenin, West Virginia reported seeing a massive winged figure soaring overhead in November 1966, no one could have predicted how this sighting would become entwined with one of America's greatest tragedies.

The creature they glimpsed—soon to be known as the Mothman—stood seven to eight feet tall with a wingspan of ten feet and hypnotic red eyes that paralyzed those who gazed into them. Within days, two young couples in Point Pleasant had their own terrifying encounter, reporting the creature chased their car at speeds reaching 100 miles per hour. As dozens more sightings flooded in, a pattern emerged: this wasn't just any monster tale. The Mothman appeared primarily around an abandoned WWII munitions facility locals called the "TNT area," a contaminated landscape dotted with underground bunkers where deadly secrets lay buried.

Strange phenomena accompanied the Mothman's appearances—electrical disturbances, screeching phones, cars dying on empty roads, and visits from oddly-behaving men in ill-fitting black suits who spoke in sing-song voices. All these events culminated on December 15, 1967, when witnesses spotted the creature circling the Silver Bridge moments before its catastrophic collapse killed 46 people. Was the Mothman trying to warn the townspeople, or did it somehow cause the disaster? Or perhaps the tragedy connects to something even older—the curse a dying Shawnee chief placed on the land nearly two centuries earlier when he was murdered by white soldiers: "May the curse of the Great Spirit rest upon this land."

Whether you view the Mothman as a harbinger of doom, an environmental aberration, or the manifestation of an ancient Native American curse, its story continues to haunt our collective imagination. Join me on this journey through folklore, tragedy, and mystery as we examine what happened when something otherworldly cast its shadow over Point Pleasant. Listen carefully—and maybe think twice before looking too deeply into glowing red eyes in the darkness.

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