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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