The other night, I had an opportunity to visit the Sazerac House Museum with a private event. The Sazerac House is one of the free museums in New Orleans, and it offers a cocktail tasting with your tour.
The exhibit goes through the history of cocktails in New Orleans, from treatments for disease in pharmacies through Prohibition, including a shrine to Antoine Peychaud. Louisiana was the first place to license pharmacists in the country. The laws were the result of both trying to regulate folk medicine and treat the rampant disease.
During Prohibition, around 5,000 defiant businesses continued serving alcohol, according to the museum. New Orleanians also tried to classify alcohol as a food to get around the regulations of the 18th Amendment. “Hidden shops and bars called speakeasies flourished. Rum-runners used the busy port to transport liquor from the Caribbean,” an exhibit in the museum.
Tourists commonly ask about speakeasies that still exist in New Orleans to this day. We don’t really hide the drinking anymore. In fact, New Orleanians take pride in the fact that we can legally drink on the street. However, there are a few speakeasy type bars around to satisfy the need for secrecy. Reach out for more.
I found the information about coffee houses or exchanges very interesting. According to the museum, by 1852, there were 859 coffee houses in New Orleans where businessmen drank and did business. Cafe du Monde claims an 1862 opening year, but we certainly had coffee shops in New Orleans well before that. (Once someone pointed out that the Battle ofNew Orleans during the Civil War occurred in 1862, I have firmly doubted this claim.)
The exhibit is very well done with multiple stories. If you’re interested in a less serious visit to a museum that still provides valuable knowledge (albeit under an obvious branded long form advertisement for the liquor company) and interactive experiences, the Sazerac House Museum is a great way to spend a rainy afternoon. In the meantime, check out my video about the Origin of the Cocktail below.
New Orleans Ghosts: The Beauty of Ancestor Worship
Many explanations of New Orleans Voodoo will start with ancestor worship. Ghosts and death and all the accoutrements surrounding ancestors are integral to the monotheistic religion that New Orleans is known for. The rituals around ancestor worship and interacting with ghosts work well with the rituals of Catholicism, like All Saints Day and All Souls Day, feasts celebrating all saints known and unknown and all the faithful departed. The overlapping rituals provide even deeper connections to the afterlife and a strong root in New Orleans.
The Daily Picayune, November 2, 1848, page 2All Saints Day in New Orleans — Decorating the Tombs in One of the City Cemeteries, a wood engraving drawn by John Durkin and published in Harper’s Weekly, November 1885. via Wikimedia.
The Night of the Pontalba, one of the ladies, a retired Catholic school teacher, told me about an experience she had with a psychic. We were waiting for one of the tour guests to finish a reading in Jackson Square. She asked if we were familiar with it. One of the guests said she does her own readings.
“Now, I am a devout Catholic. I believe. But one time, I had a reading done,” the teacher explained. “It was that lady from New York. My kids really believed in it, so we went to see her at a show. That lady told us things she couldn’t have known.”
Heidi chimed in reiterating the deep knowledge the psychic from New York inexplicably had.
“I asked my priest about it after, and he told me that we believe it’s the possession of the devil,” the teacher continued.
“Straight to confession!” I joked.
“I DID!” The teacher professed. “I went straight to confession before the end of that day, and I don’t mess with it anymore.”
This tracks with my experience with Catholicism also. I learned that Voodoo was devil worship or evil. Interacting with the spirits (that no one doubts exist) is certainly an invitation for demons and possession. However, I learned from people who practice the religion that there isn’t even a devil figure in the Voodoo tradition. The Catholic notion that it is devil worship is based on misconceptions. Ghosts, spirits, and ancestors are prominent in Voodoo, but the devil doesn’t exist.
The Ghosts of New Orleans
“You think you’ve never seen a ghost?” My teacher’s husband asked this one night in the Voodoo class that I took last summer. I’m a natural and trained skeptic, so I admitted that I never saw a ghost before. Although I do believe any weird sounds or moving objects in my home are definitely the ghost of my cat Salome, who died in 2021.
RIP Salome 2009-2021, but please don’t stop haunting me. She serves as my personal New Orleans ghost.
“You know those people you see in the Quarters walking by themselves and talking to themselves? Those are ghosts. They don’t all know they are dead,” he explained.
I thought he meant this figuratively. New Orleans can wring you out like Las Vegas, but it’s a different kind of vice. Finding yourself or losing yourself are equally likely in the Crescent City.
Shortly after that, I learned he meant it literally through experience. I saw such a man in the French Quarter one morning when I was also alone. I often go for a walk through the Old City alone in the early mornings for inspiration and because one of my favorite things in the whole world is the French Quarter in the morning.
Dressed in decorated rags and mumbling loudly to himself, I instinctively made sure there was no emergency and let him be. Then, I remembered the wisdom from class and turned to see the ghost again.
He was gone.
There wasn’t a block for him to have turned down. There wasn’t time to duck into a building. He was loudly talking to himself and then like the fog burned off by the morning sun — was he ever there?
Savvy marketers built the tourism industry in New Orleans on ghost stories, some with roots of truth, most entirely made up for marketing. Tour guides and servers and bartenders will tell you personal stories about ghosts that have visited them and then laugh behind your back at the gullible tourists. I’ve even seen other tourists get in on the act and provide life long memories for their comrades in New Orleans.
I don’t believe in gatekeeping information. I also can’t participate in spreading falsehoods that will certainly be warped and repeated without explaining that they aren’t true. However, I am still learning and understanding. Sometimes, I get things wrong.
There are earnest people living in New Orleans who believe the stories, but many are full of shit and know it. No matter how many times people admit to making up the ghost stories or people like me prove them wrong or the guests feel that twinge of disbelief, they still want to hear the ghost stories. And I’m sure some rush to confession after.
I still hold skepticism that my ghost disappeared in an entirely corporeal and logical way and not in a New Orleans or paranormal way. But I have no way to prove what I did or didn’t see. I wonder if I have ever been someone’s New Orleans ghosts on my early morning strolls.
Fewer and fewer people in New Orleans participate in All Saints Day on November 1, but newspaper archives share that this was a festive day with crowded cemeteries in the New Orleans of the past. “All the ceremonies passed off in the usual quiet manner, and we trust that many years will elapse before the interest now taken in its observance shall have died away,” 1848 article from The Daily Picayune. Sometimes the premonitions in the archives are calls to action.
Please tell me your brushes with the paranormal in the comments. Or, preferably, your rituals around ancestor worship. Most of my family’s tombs in New Orleans are regularly maintained, but there has never been a picnic in the cemetery during my lifetime…yet?
“It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh; and I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.” A letter from Samuel Clemens to his sister1.
Lea from the Deep celebrating Mardi Gras
He did not say the world has not seen America. He focused on the Americans whose American experience is not complete without Mardi Gras. Many visitors have shared with me on tours that they knew nothing about New Orleans beyond the Mardi Gras stereotypes before the tour.
When I lived in China, I kept a daily blog. It was to keep in touch with my friends and family back home, but some of my entries got public attention. One of my blogs continued getting comments for years until I finally unpublished it. I was tired dealing with the public judgment of the thoughts of 23-year-old Lea.
But that blog was entitled “Is America Culture-less?” And I think I struck some SEO magic with those young thoughts. It was my musing on how incomprehensible it was for me to hear Europeans calling America “culture-less” as a Louisianan. I was in extreme culture shock when I wrote that blog — a mixture of exhilaration and frustration at the new and unknown with a longing earned via a deeper understanding of that which I did know.
I’m learning with more experience that our culture is American culture. So much of the music, food, art, literature, slang…culture of our time springs forth from the mouth of the Mississippi, spread around the world just like so much of the country’s goods. (And don’t forget: everything you love about New Orleans is because of Black people.)
It’s been nearly 20 years since I had to travel around the world to learn how much I love my home. And how much I hate my home. And how much so many others love my home. And how much I have left to learn to understand. My home.
127 days until Mardi Gras 2025. Hopefully I get to meet you while you get to see America from the perspective of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
