"The Bizarre Voodoo World Of New Orleans" is a video made by Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej, uploaded onto YouTube on June 9, 2017. It is the tenth episode of the second season of BuzzFeed Unsolved: Supernatural, and the twenty-ninth episode overall. You can watch it here.
Description[]
Can we really contact the spirit world?
Background[]
The origins of voodoo are unknown, but most agree it came from west Africa, particularly the region of Benin, where the word "voodoo" means spirit. It is believed voodoo derives from the tradition of ancestor worship and animism, the belief that nature and inanimate objects contain consciousness. Voodoo practitioners believe in one god and that there are many spirits who have power over humans and nature. They are referred to as Loa.
While voodoo has gotten a bad reputation over years of misinformation, it is actually a very positive practice and is often to used to call on spirits to help the sick and needy and guide one through life's struggles.
Voodoo would eventually make its way to America via the slave trade and New Orleans would eventually play home to perhaps the biggest figure in American voodoo history, Marie Laveau, also known as the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. It was here at Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans that Marie Laveau would hold voodoo gatherings on the shores. Journalists would spread stories of infamous orgies and sacrificial rituals that would occur at this lake on St. John's Eve.
The negative connotations of voodoo proliferated by the media liken voodoo to savagery and towards the end of the 19th century, voodoo had to go underground in New Orleans.