ghosts, clowns, and other things that tap/scratch in the night

The setting for our screenplay is a big Louisiana mansion… isolated, creepy. You know the type. Initially I wanted to have the house be in a swampy area near New Orleans, but historically speaking, it just wouldn’t work for the dual time periods our story takes place in. So, after a week of working on arbitration stuff, I did a little southern plantation location scout.

First I drove west, through swamps and sugar cane fields, to New Iberia, Louisiana, which I think sounds kind of cool. Kind of a rural southern cool. The first plantation I went to was called The Shadows. Perfect creepy name. It’s called The Shadows because it sits in the shadows of big oaks around it.

The house now:


The house at the turn of the century (the first time period of our story):


The tour guide was 19, had this classic Louisiana accent, and knew all about the house. He was adorable, I wanted to put him in my pocket.


A little backyard cemetery at the Shadows. I'm sure you have one just like it:


I toured another house in New Iberia, called Joe Jefferson after the actor who built it in 1870. I got there about 4:05, five minutes after the last tour began, and the woman was totally not going to let me join. Finally after some pleading, she was like, well, I don’t know, I guess we can see how much you’ll disrupt the group. So I caught up with the tour… which had two people in it. After the tour, I watched a video on the house, and it was basically a “get married here” ad. I so wish I could show you the video, because it most dramatic wedding ad I have ever seen. The music was, like, from a war movie or something. There were these brides wandering around the gardens in soft focus, and I kept expecting a scary clown to jump out, or there to be a subtitle that said, “Kimberly’s body was discovered the next morning, but they never found her head.”

I drove home through a pretty sunset. Ah, clouds, how I miss you. Brie and I got pizza at Mona Lisa, I think, and fortified ourselves with Hand Grenades from Tropical Isle (which we didn’t even finish, we just wanted to get drinks “to go” at some point… New Orleans has really mastered the drinks that taste like kool-aid) so that we could stand to watch Skeleton Key. Not the greatest movie ever, but scary enough that we decided Brie should sleep in the bedroom with me that night. I had trouble sleeping because there was this intermittent scratching, tapping noise coming from somewhere in the room. I thought it was Brie messing with her phone. Until she said, “What’s that noise?” And I, in classic Scooby Doo fashion, answered, “I thought it was you.”

And then a scary clown jumped out. We never found Brie’s head.

Actually, we never figured out what the noise was. I like to think it was an army of giant roach ghosts. I especially liked hearing it after Brie left and I was in the apartment by myself.

The next day Paul and Brie went with me to tour plantations on the River Road. We took a tour at Laura Plantation, a Creole sugar plantation. The word Creole, I found, refers to several different people groups in Louisiana, but the oldest, most traditional definition, and the one that’s intended here, is a person descended from the French who settled in Louisiana before the Louisiana Purchase. There were a lot of interesting details on the tour because it’s based on the memoirs of Laura Locoul, whose family built the plantation, and who got annoyed when Gone With The Wind was published and wrote a book to show her family what plantation life in the 1800’s was really like.

Near Laura Plantation was the B&C Seafood Market and Cajun Restaurant, where we stopped to get lunch. Paul insisted that we get a Cajun sampler platter, which included many, many fried things. Including fried alligator, which we all tried. You could also get an alligator po’ boy, but none of us were up for that.

We drove further up the River Road and saw a few more plantations, but didn’t take any more tours.

Me in front of Oak Alley, which I plan to buy and use as a getaway from the harsh Los Angeles winters:


We also did some sleuth work and found Felicity Plantation, which was where Skeleton Key was shot. We were perhaps not technically allowed on the property, but I really wanted to see how it looked. It was actually a sugar cane plantation and is surrounded by fields, so they created swamps with a hose and some CG.


It’s a cool location, I can see why they picked it. It would be so fun to direct a movie in a great authentic building like that. Someday.

Through the pouring rain, Paul showed us an old house he broke into once with friends. It’s not inhabited, I think they were just being hoodlums. It actually wouldn’t be too bad for a movie, either.

After this house, Paul said we could take the bridge over the Mississippi and head back to New Orleans. But we kept driving… and driving… and no bridge. At some point it became clear that we just needed to turn around and go back the way we came, but it was one of those things where you would rather drive literally two hours out of your way rather than just admit you missed something and should just turn around already. And by you, I mean Paul. Personally, I was not voting for continuing to drive and drive and drive and drive until we hit Baton Rouge, but that’s what we did. We finally crossed the river at Baton Rouge and headed home on the interstate instead of taking the River Road on that side.

That night Brie and I walked down to Preservation Hall to hear jazz. We got there during the second set, and had to sit in the hall, where we could hear but not see. During the break, some people cleared out, and we were able to move into the main room and snag a bench. It isn’t air conditioned and it was kind of ridiculously hot, but so fun. I didn’t think I liked jazz. It always seems kind of rambly and pointless. But I loved the jazz we heard. Maybe it was Jazz for Dummies. Requests cost two bucks, five for standards, ten for “The Saints,” which they ended up getting two twenties for. Two I can remember were “Do You Know What It Means” and “St. James Infirmary.”

Paul had mentioned a plantation called The Myrtles that is creepy and supposedly haunted, so the next day, after eating praline bacon (pork candy) at Elizabeth’s in the Bywater and attending mass at St. Augustine’s, Brie and I decided to drive up to St. Francisville to see it.

Here’s the story told at the plantation:

The house was built in 1794 by General David Bradford, whose daughter, Sarah Matilda, married a judge named Clark Woodruff. Over the years, Woodruff began having an affair with one of the slaves, named Chloe, who he brought into the house to watch the children. But Chloe had a habit of eavesdropping on her lover and his wife, so, as a punishment, he cut off her ear and sent her back to the fields. She wore a green turban to cover her missing ear and began scheming to get back into the house.

She decided to poison the children by putting oleander in the birthday cake they were served. She just wanted them to get sick enough that she would be called back in from the fields to care for them, and when she was able to make them better, she would be back in the good graces of the family. So she carried out her plan, but ended up killing both children and Sarah Matilda. The other slaves, afraid of being blamed for the deaths, killed Chloe and threw her body in the river. Ever since, the house has been haunted by an apparition wearing a green turban. And this apparition likes to pose for photos:

Apparently, says the guide, this photo was taken when the house was completely empty, and a super special “shadow density” filter was put on the photograph, which then showed the outlines of two children playing on the roof. Ghost children like to play on the roof, you see, because it doesn’t matter if they fall.

It was a custom, the guide told us in a serious voice, for mirrors to be covered after a death, because it was believed that if they were not, the soul could escape the body and be pulled into the mirror, where it would remain trapped. Forever! And on the death day of Sarah Matilda, the two children, and Chloe, the house must have been in too much of an uproar to cover all the mirrors, and so their souls were pulled into this mirror. You can see their ghostly handprints, where they tried to get out!

It’s a good story. Too bad Sarah Mathilde and the children all died of yellow fever. The one murder that did actually occur at the house - William Winter was killed on the porch in a horseride-by shooting in 1874 - was not even mentioned on the tour. I think they were saving it for the Friday Night Mystery Ghost Tour.

The grounds were really nice. There was a little swamp island that I could barely tear Brie away from, and a lamppost in the lawn.

Brie, as Gene Kelly:

Brie, as Tumnus:

On the way back I had a huge craving for a snoball, so we drove around Baton Rouge until we found a stand. While waiting for my delicious watermelon-strawberry snoball to be prepared, I took some pictures of the little crop of tractors growing behind the stand:

And the sign for the restaurant next door, Fricken Chicken:


We drove the long way home from Baton Rouge so that we could take the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, which at 24 miles is the longest bridge in the world. We drove across at sunset, and the sky was filled with Mexican freetail bats! My little buddies from Carlsbad! I thought it was pretty great. So great that I nearly drove into the side of the bridge.


Unfortunately, more creepy crawlies were in store for us, as Giacomo was hiding out in my hairband on the mantle when we got home. Brie found him and screamed. These pictures… they just don’t do him justice, but maybe you can get some sense of the vast roachiness of him.

Ah, Giacamo, you put up a good fight. Too bad I had to destroy you. Thanks for sending all of your kin to avenge your death.

To reward ourselves after the Battle of the Mantle, we tried Sazeracs at the Carousel Bar. Sazeracs were America’s first cocktail, invented in the French Quarter in the 1830s by a Creole pharmacist named Antoine Peychaud, when alcohol was hard to get and often poor quality, and needed mixers in order to be drunk. At the time a Sazerac was made of brandy, bitters, and absinthe. I liked mine. Brie not so much.

Good job hanging in to the end of the post. Here’s to you, Blog Reader. Here’s to you.

what you need is love potion number nine

On Heidi's last morning, I wanted to go on a "Voodoo and Cemeteries" tour. I was interested in seeing the old St. Louis cemeteries, and one of the characters in the screenplay I'm writing with Tim- the one I was supposed to be writing in New Orleans instead of doing arbitrations - is a voodoo practitioner, so I thought it would be interesting. Brie wisely decided to stay home in the a/c and work, but I got Heidi to come along, wearing an appropriate long black sundress with skulls all over it.

Part of the tour went to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, built in 1826 as a burial chapel for yellow fever victims. Yellow fever (called Yellow Jack, the Black Vomit, or the American Plague by the people who suffered from the summer epidemics in the 18th and 19th centuries) is also part of our story, so maybe we'll... set a scene here or something. I don't know.

Then the tour went to St. Louis Cemetery #1, on the edge of the quarter in Treme. (This was the cemetery that I passed on my way to the pound.) I was interested in seeing because it's the oldest cemetery in New Orleans, with graves dating back to the 1700s, but I had been told by three different people that you can get mugged in that cemetery. Paul told me not to go in alone if I didn't want a bat to the back of my head.

New Orleans is known for its Cities of the Dead. Because of the high water table, you hit water digging only a few feet into the ground, especially before the city was drained in the early 20th century. Early settlers tried placing stone on top of the graves, but after rainstorms, the rising water table could pop the airtight coffins out of the ground. So the French colonists co-opted the Spanish vault style. Poor families are buried in wall vaults, or oven vaults, seen on the right side of this picture. Wealthier families are buried in a mausoleum, where coffins are stacked one on top of another. When the vault is full, and a new coffin needs to be added, the coffin on the bottom of a stack is opened, and the contents (ashes by that time... the vaults get so hot that there is a natural cremation process) are moved into a bag and placed at the back of the vault. Then that coffin is burned and room is made at the top for a new coffin. But the coffin has to lie undisturbed for a year and a day, and during epidemic years, sometimes the vaults would completely fill up within a year. In those cases, families would lease space from another family's vault until the year and a day is up. We saw one huge mausoleum, shared by forty families, that contained the remains of thousands of people. Even above-ground, though, the vaults slowly sink into the earth. This is a picture of the top of a marker in a wall vault, now at ground level.

I was really interested in the cemetery, but by the time we actually got in there and were standing between the whitewashed tombs, it was about a thousand degrees outside and I thought I might have actually died myself. And that I didn't go to Heaven. The guide kept talking and talking, and I was about to pass out so it kind of sounded like "tomb of Marie Laveau.... blahgerg mishnear flep... marngy prawl... voodoo priestess... grog nuffle." There were x's drawn all over her tomb (markings to bring luck) but according to the guide, this is "just Hollywood superstition." I've noticed in other parts of the country, "Hollywood" is sometimes used as a synonym for "ridiculous."

The tour ended at the Voodoo Spiritual Temple, where we sat in the courtyard and were given what seemed to be a sermon by Priestess Miriam, formerly of Chicago. I'm guessing it was a sermon because about 80% of the time I had no idea what she was saying. She kept laughing at her own comments and said stuff like, "You do the e-harmony, and then you wonder why your kids are doing the internet dating, and you say, 'what? what are they doing?' but it was you who did the e-harmony." And that was the part that I could understand most of the words for.

Then we went inside, to the altar room, which was full of tapestries and various statues and figurines, many with tightly rolled bills stuck in their mouths and ears and hands. A couple of the people in the group clearly did not want to enter the room, and tried to linger in the hallway outside, but Priestess Miriam insisted they come in and form a circle. Then she talked more. Some of this I got on Heidi's camera. I just opened it up at waist-level and hit record because I wasn't sure she would be ok with me taping her. After watching this a few times, I can follow what she's saying, and I have to say, I really think she was making more sense here than she was earlier, and I wish I had gotten part of her speech in the courtyard on video.



The yellow flyers she's holding in her hands had a prayer printed on them. I kept mine but can't find it now. It said something like "We ask the Father to grant us compassion. We ask the Son to grant us strength. We ask the Spirit to grant us love." Voodoo originates in Africa as a form of ancestor worship. When the African people were brought to Louisiana and enslaved, they were also forcibly baptized Catholic. Modern Voodoo reflects strong Catholic influence.

Since the priestess got through both of her talks without really telling us about Voodoo, when she asked if anyone had any questions (at which point the couple who tried to stay in the hallway shot for the exit) I asked her if she could tell us about the objects in the room. She looked annoyed and said, "I already told you everything." (About e-harmony.) But she told a story about how they got one of the statues in the room from a man who lived upstairs. A story that still had nothing to do with Voodoo. Then she said she wasn't "consecrated to talk about physical Voodoo." And that was it.

I was a bit disappointed. I did do some other research later, though mostly I didn't find much I didn't already know. Last Monday Paul and I tried to go to a hoodoo shop across the river in Algiers called House of the Seven Sisters, but it was closed. Shocker. Paul kept saying, "She went to a hoo-doo shop in Al-geeahs and ne-vuh came back" in an exaggerated Brooklyn-Southern New Orleans accent. Hoodoo is a local version of Voodoo... it's folk magic, superstition, conjuration. The spells without the spirituality.

To find the lucky numbers for gambling, take the Bible. Now, I want you to read the ninth chapter of Psalms - reads it over three times before going to bed. When you read it over three times before going to bed, open the Bible and sleep with it - sleep with that Bible right under your pillow and you'll dream of that lucky number. When you get up the next morning, you can tell a person exactly about that number. And if you throw that number then they'll catch it.

~ from "Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Rootwork: Beliefs Accepted By Many Negroes and White Persons, These Being Orally Recorded Among Blacks and Whites, Volume Three"
by Harry Middleton Hyatt (1973)

Various Voodoo remedies used to be sold in pharmacies in New Orleans in the 19th century. Potions were labeled by number so that customers could ask for "Number Six" without asking for "Love Success," for example. There's a pharmacy museum on Chartres Street in the Quarter that had some old voodoo stuff that was pretty interesting.


Voodoo was mentioned a couple other times on my trip, in sort of interesting ways. On Brie's last Sunday, we went to Mass at St. Augustine Church in Faubourg Treme. They sometimes have "Jazz Mass" there but I think we were there for a regular service. I had never been to Mass before, so I have nothing to compare it to, but Brie tells me that it's unusual to sing "When the Saints Go Marching In" and "This Little Light of Mine" at Mass.

At one point in the sermon, the priest said, "God is not magic. God is not gris-gris." Gris-gris (pronounced "gree gree") is a Voodoo talisman, a small cloth bag full of herbs, oils, bones, nails, hair, grave dirt, etc. that one wears to ward off evil or bring good luck. I noticed his comment especially because he didn't have to explain what gris-gris is... the congregation would have obviously known... but I didn't really think more about it, until two days later, when I was driving Brie to the airport. We were listening to a recording of Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, speaking at our church retreat this year (which I didn't attend,) and he said, "What happens in our religion, what happens in our faith, is that we want God to help us get the things (we want.) ...It depersonalizes our relationship with God. God is no longer a Father who we trust, who is guiding us to live a better story by shaping our character. What is He? He's a genie in a lamp. And if we do this religious thing, He will grant our wishes. You know what that is? It's Voodoo. The closest thing we have to Evangelical culture in America is Voodoo."

Sometimes I think when I'm supposed to really hear something, God will tell me several times. And here was a sermon from a Catholic priest in New Orleans and a podcast by a post-modern thirtysomething writer saying the exact same thing: God is not Voodoo. And I wonder if I've been trying to do things, things that are not literally magical but are like little head games that I play with myself, to make my life turn out the way that I think it should be. Rather than listening for God's voice and trying to follow it. And maybe God wants me to quit worrying about the future and just do the best that I can with what I have.

It's also possible He just didn't want me to get a tarot card reading in Jackson Square, which I wanted to do because I've always thought tarot cards were cool and creepy, and I could use it as research. So I didn't. Just in case.

I told her that I was a flop with chicks
I'd been this way since 1956
She looked at my palm and she made a magic sign
She said, What you need is
Love Potion Number Nine

~"Love Potion Number Nine"
Lyrics by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller