Adventures with the other side

On a recent trip to New Orleans I went on multiple “haunted tours”, all were fun and interesting but one made me want to do more research on my own. On an evening vampire tour, our tour guide was a young man from Transylvania (how perfect if that); he started our tour by telling us everything we had previously learned about Vampires is wrong J . Now I know that these tours are put together to entertain and that stories are embellished, but by the time we were done I had gone from a non-believer of vampires to being on the fence, perhaps there was some truth to the stories. I have not become a believer in night creatures who turn into bats, cannot stand in the sunlight or sparkle, but I wanted to learn more about these legends so I have spent almost a year researching the stories he told us.   I was particularly interested in two instances, that of Jacques de St. Germain and that of the Carter brothers. Comte de St. Germain Comte de St. Germain is believed to ha...

As someone who has a fascination with old historic cemeteries, New Orleans was a phenomenal place to visit. I could have spent days just wandering the dozens of old cemeteries in the area. As it was I enjoyed two of them and learned a bit about the history of above ground tombs.   The first cemetery in New Orleans Saint Peters was established in 1721 in the French Quarter, it began with above ground graves. However it did not take long to discover that the high water table, heavy rains, and flooding lead to caskets making their way to the surface. Numerous tricks were tried to keep the caskets underground, to include drilling holes and placing heavy rocks but none kept  all of the dead buried. In the 1780’s the Spanish government decided it was time to start another burial ground and the cities   first above ground cemetery St. Louis   Cemetery 1 was created, bearing a strong resemblance to Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris France . By this time...