The Glapion family tomb. Inside — probably — is the most powerful woman in 19th-century New Orleans: Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen.
The X marks are completely fabricated. Preservationists traced the tradition to a tour guide rumor. It has no basis in any Voodoo practice. In 2013, someone painted the tomb Pepto-Bismol pink. Twice. The Archdiocese shut the cemetery to unguided visitors in 2015.
Laveau was born in 1801, a free woman of color. Her husband Jacques Paris vanished around 1822. In 2019, an LSU student solved the 200-year cold case by checking Baton Rouge records.
Her common-law husband Christophe Glapion was a white nobleman who voluntarily passed as a person of color for 30 years. Reverse passing, for love.
Her real power was hair. She ran a salon for wealthy white women who told her everything. She paid enslaved house servants for additional intelligence. She appeared clairvoyant because she already knew every answer.
Every famous portrait of Laveau is of someone else.
That painting sold for $984,000 in 2022.
— From the tour: Ghosts, Graves & the Voodoo Queen
