New Orleans Cities of the Dead

We were on the streets at 6:30 one morning. I love being out in the quiet. Bird song our only accompaniment down Royal Street.



After coffee at the Royal Blend coffee shop we looped around the hushed Quarter, strolled along the muscular river, turned up Canal Street and hopped a streetcar to Basin Street where we disembarked for St Louis #1, New Orleans' oldest cemetery. It began consuming residents in 1789.









You've seen these cemetery's on TV and movies. All the tombs are above ground because the water table is 5 inches below ground and anything you put under it rots and floats off. At 220 years old the cemetery is a model of derelict beauty. Well kept memorials and vaults watched over by blanche contrapposto angels are only highlighted accents in a wash of crumbling decrepitude.





















































































In the morning you don't get the dark shadows that elicit mind games and conjured phantasms but I gotta tell you entering this ghostly realm was still freaky. I was very hesitant to go too deep. One reason was the supernatural, the other was the Iberville Housing Project next door. We could either be pulled into oblivion by the ghosts of New Orleans or be mugged and killed by some desperate crack head. We slowly entered anyway pulled by the decrepit beauty of the tombs and the same curiosity that killed the cat. Plus I figured that by 6:00 AM the criminal element was tired out from their night's endeavors and went to bed.

Here's some video from our hesitant ramble through the cadaver condos.




Offerings of beads, candles, pages of books, feathers....and what does XXX mean scrawled on the face of certain tombs? People still believe in Marie Laveau's Voodoo Queen power and to conjure Marie's powers you need to mark her tomb with XXX in chalk or brick, rub the ground three times with your foot, knock three times (to wake the dead) and make a wish. Yikes.


These above ground cemetery's are known as the Cities of the Dead. St Louis #1 cemetery spans just one square block, but is the resting place of over 100,000 dead. That's a city sized amount of dead people.

In a city that seems to disregard the concept of linear time and wears all it's histories at once, these cemetery's are cool to visit. From their beehive oven tombs I'm sure these densely packed denizens still hold court over their beloved New Orleans.























I aint afraid a no ghosts!
Who you gonna call?