In 1997, U-Haul unveiled a new campaign, this one titled “Venture Across America,” and its theme changed from monuments and history to monsters and mystery. As the Web site explains, “These SuperGraphics deal with subject matter that is less well known nationally and internationally, yet plays a huge role in the local area where it is based. . . . By working through published reports and communicating directly with the leading scientists in each field, the U-Haul SuperGraphics Team cements together information about each subject in order to create the graphic, as well as a detailed educational examination of the subject matter itself.”

Thus the campaign subtly turned from an advertising and public relations endeavor into an educational program: “Education is the key element in the Venture Across America series. Teachers and students alike have been using our SuperGraphics for years to help them make geography lessons fun. . . .

U-Haul has heard from many students who used the Web site as an aid to help them complete school reports.”

By claiming to be an educational program, the U-Haul SuperGraphics holds itself to a standard above mere advertising (though it does plenty of that as well). If U-Haul is encouraging students and teachers to use their (commercial) Web site as a source of reliable scientific information, U-Haul obligates themselves to ensure accuracy.

U-Haul recognizes this, proclaiming that “Scientists are impressed by the lengths our team goes to in order to ensure that we are accurate in our depiction and in our Web presentation.”

“Evaluate for yourself,” the Web site claims, echoing a popular refrain from mystery-mongering television shows. Usually the readers or viewers are invited to decide for themselves after receiving information from a heavily pro-paranormal slant and short-shrifting the skeptical point of view. This is hardly an unbiased basis upon which to “decide for yourself.”

The SuperGraphics Topics

To be sure, most of the states’ topics are interesting, educational, and at least somewhat scientific (so far, anyway; as of October 2001, twenty-seven states have been completed, each state graphic emblazoned on 600 trucks). For example, Oklahoma features the Center for Weather Research, Forecasting, and Education, with information and links on meteorology and forecasting; the Colorado graphic shows the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, with information on astronomy and our solar system; and Pennsylvania details the Lewis and Clark expedition down the Ohio river.

Nonetheless, the “mysterious” and paranormal angles are undeniably hyped. The text for Florida reads, “What ghosts inhabit the Fakahatchee Strand?” (the answer turns out to be ghost orchids); Michigan’s text begins, “Something humongous dwells in the forests . . .” (beware the giant mushrooms!); and “Why do the rocks in a New Jersey mining district emit an eerie glow?” (you figure that one out). And then there are the “true” aliens and monsters: Champ, the monster lurking in Vermont’s Lake Champlain; the Roswell, New Mexico aliens; and Nevada’s mysterious UFO-related Area 51. Each has its own area on the U-Haul Web site, to correspond with the giant image on the sides of trucks.

Vermont: “Champ” Lake Champlain’s Mystery

Vermont’s Lake Champlain (near the New York border) has been the area of many monster sightings. Said to be similar to the Loch Ness monster, locals call the beast “Champ.” In a faux news story the "U-Haul news staff” begins by discussing the most famous 1977 photo of Champ, the Mansi photograph taken of an object in the water. They do briefly bring up the possibility that the photo may be a hoax or misidentification (quickly followed up with, “But even if the photo were proven not to be a photo of Champ, how about the hundreds of reported sightings through the years from eyewitnesses?”). But they omit some important details about the credibility of the photo, such as that the Mansis later could not recall where along the lake the photo was taken (which would help judge the size of the object in the water); the Mansis could not produce the negative of the film for inspection, claiming it was lost; and that the Mansis waited four years before offering it to Time magazine for $25,000 (Kurtz 1981).

No mention is made at all about the reliability of eyewitness testimony, nor that years of searching the lake with infrared cameras, scuba divers, side-scan sonar, and remotely operated cameras have turned up no convincing evidence of huge lake monsters. The possibility that some Champ sightings are due to a seiche-a standing wave moving back and forth between two shores, dredging up logs and vegetation from the bottom-is never even mentioned, despite the fact that Lake Champlain is known to have a huge internal seiche (Hunkins et al. 1998).

In a section titled, “Q and A with a Champ Expert,” the U-Haul staff interviewed Dennis Hall, founder of an organization called Champ Quest. Hall has pursued Champ for several years, driven on by nineteen personal sightings. He states unequivocally that between six and fifteen lake monsters inhabit Lake Champlain, most likely an ancient reptile called Tanystropheus that resembles a giant snapping turtle. The Web page has a link to Loch Ness researchers’ pages. There is little skepticism-and no skeptical experts-presented on that page, but under “Champ: The Lighter Side,” U-Haul admits that “most people in Vermont are more than a bit skeptical” about Champ. But for a supposedly neutral “educational” site, there is little evidence presented to, as they suggest, “evaluate for yourself.”

New Mexico: The Roswell Incident

Composed of several different sections, “Eyewitness Accounts,” “Officially Speaking,” “Public Opinion,” etc., the Roswell Incident starts with a SuperGraphic of a spacecraft crashing in the desert behind a glowing green alien with the typical huge eyes staring off into the night. It begins with a brief synopsis of the incident, complete with fake “blacked out” words in an obvious attempt to lend mystery and an ominous tone. Dave Thomas, CSICOP Fellow and president of New Mexicans for Science and Reason, had this to say about the Web page:

The main failing is the repetition of elements of the detailed Roswell Mythology as fact. The introductory page, subtitled “Just the facts,” begins with the sentence “The evening of July 4, 1947 was dark and stormy in the high desert near Roswell, N.M. Several Roswell residents reported seeing a bright, fiery object crash in the Capitan Mountains, fifty miles west of Roswell that night.” There is just one little problem with this “fact.” The alleged storm of July 4th, 1947 never took place. It is part and parcel of the Roswell mythology, and is repeated in so many places that many, including the U-Haul writers, now accept it as fact.

Charles B. Moore, the physicist who launched the Project Mogul experiment now accepted by skeptics as the actual source of the Roswell “debris” (see Skeptical Inquirer July/August 1995, ”The Roswell Incident and Project Mogul”), obtained weather data showing that the only storm in the entire region was in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 2. That is two days too early and ninety miles too far away. (See Karl Pflock’s new book, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe, Prometheus Books, 2001, pages 54 and 65 for all the details.)

Thomas (2001) also pointed out that U-Haul repeats the myth that rancher Mac Brazel was taken into custody by Military Police Officers and a radio station interview confiscated. In reality Brazel was kept overnight by an overzealous radio station owner eager to scoop his competitors on the story. Again, U-Haul’s version of events is skewed toward the paranormal.

The “Related Resources” section provides further information, the majority of it pro-UFO. There are a few skeptical books thrown in the mix, though, with Philip J. Klass’s The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Cover-up and two books by Karl Pflock. Judging from the message boards, the SuperGraphics have at least some people thinking that the subjects are real. This is especially true for the Roswell alien. One poster, Sam, writes, "I never believe this sort of stuff, but there is too much evidence for me to ignore. . . .” Another writer seems to take U-Haul to task for its alien depiction, almost hinting at a conspiracy: “This one seems to have the shape of the greys but have not yet seen them green except for those with the down-turned mouths which are green. I believe that this may be purposely misleading to give them grey shape with green flesh.”

Other Mysteries

The giant squid is featured on Newfoundland’s signature graphic for Venture Across Canada, though unlike the Lake Champlain monster and the Roswell aliens, good evidence actually exists for the giant squid. It will be interesting to see if a Bigfoot (or Sasquatch, in Canada) appears for areas touting many Bigfoot sightings. When asked if a Bigfoot graphic was planned, U-Haul representative Jennifer Flachman was tight-lipped, saying that she couldn’t reveal upcoming designs. The Ohio page touts the mysterious Serpent Mound, an ancient quarter-mile earth mound in the shape of a snake. The information steers clear of paranormal explanations and offers a fairly good analysis. And though the Area 51 information for Nevada isn’t explicitly about UFOs, the graphic does show a spaceship-looking aircraft, and the caption beneath it refers to the “E.T. Highway.”

Many of the graphics are available on the Web site as computer wallpaper and print-out coloring book pages. The marketing continues, with the Web site offering T-shirts for some of the graphics (T-shirts are currently offered for only nine states, though curiously those most closely related to the paranormal happen to be among those nine-Area 51, Roswell alien, and the Lake Champlain monster). Posters, decals, and enamel pins may be added soon.

On the whole (and so far), the U-Haul program and Web site are fairly responsible in their presentations. But the fact that a company that rents trucks is capitalizing on the paranormal shows the pervasiveness of the thirst for the supernatural and mysterious.

References

• Hunkins, Kenneth, et al. 1998. Numerical studies of the 4-day oscillation of Lake Champlain. Journal of Geophysical Research 103 (18): 425.
• Kurtz, Paul. 1981. The Lake Champlain Monster surfaces. Skeptical Inquirer 6(1): 7-8.
• Thomas, Dave. 2001. Personal communication, October 25.

Dossey refers to a survey by Daniel J. Benor, M.D., published in the journal Complementary Healing Research, of experiments dealing with healing effects of prayer on enzymes, cells, yeasts, bacteria, plants, animals, and human beings.2 According to Dossey’s summary of Benor’s results, researchers have performed 131 controlled trials. Of these, fifty-six show “statistically significant results at a probability level of <0.01 or better (that is, the likelihood that the results were due to chance was less than 1 in 100).” another twenty-one studies “demonstrate results at a probability level of 0.02 to 0.05 or better (that is, the likelihood that the results were due to chance was between 2 and 5 chances in 100).”

Dossey is incorrect in his interpretation of the statistical significance of these experimental results, making a common mistake one finds in many papers and books. The “probability level” quoted in most scientific papers is usually what statisticians call the “p-value.” For example, suppose an effect is reported with a p-value of five percent. This means that in a long sequence of identical experiments we would expect to observe an effect as great or greater produced by statistical fluctuations in five percent of the cases. This not the same as “the likelihood [or probability] that the results were due to chance.” In fact, it is always possible to get any observed effect by chance. You simply have to repeat the experiment enough times.

In any case, Dossey informs us that “ten of the studies are unpublished doctoral dissertations, two are masters’ theses, and the rest are published primarily in parapsychological journals.” He asserts that “these publications have peer review standards as rigorous as many medical journals.”

However, as I have mentioned before in this column, the standards of medical journals are quite low compared to other science fields such as physics. This is presumably necessary to assure that useful therapies are not kept from needy patients for too long. Unlike physicians, however, physicists and parapsychologists are not in the business of saving lives but rather that of investigating extraordinary phenomena. Those who search for evidence of psychic or spiritual phenomena should be bound by the stricter standards of physics and other fields which deal with extraordinary claims. After all, the scientific confirmation of such phenomena would be of world-shaking significance.

No respectable physics journal would publish a result with a p-value of one percent. If it did, every hundredth paper or so would contain a false claim that was only a statistical artifact, wreaking havoc with the whole research enterprise. In fact, the publication standard in physics is typically a p-value of 0.01 percent, that is, only one in 10,000 similar experiments would be expected to produce the reported effect or a greater one as a statistical fluctuation. If this standard were applied to Dossey’s sample, none of the 131 trials mentioned above would be published.

The same can be said for all the intercessory prayer studies that have been published in medical journals, accompanied by great media hype. For example, cardiologist Randolph Byrd has claimed evidence that coronary patients benefitted from blind, distant intercessory prayer. But his p-value is only five percent.3 Such results would be expected from statistical fluctuations alone every twenty experiments, on average. Another study along the same line as Byrd’s has been published in a major medical journal, Archives of Internal Medicine, with nine coauthors.4 There, positive results are reported at a p-value is four percent, but for different criteria than Byrd’s. In fact, they fail to confirm Byrd’s specific results.

Dossey is simply wrong when he says the evidence is “simply overwhelming that prayer functions at a distance to change physical processes in a variety of organisms, from bacteria to humans.” Even without examining the detailed protocols of these experiments, the statistical significance is insufficient to draw such a conclusion. We have no idea how many experiments may have been done that gave no positive effects and consequently were never published (the “filedrawer effect”). These papers should not have been published either.

This article is abstracted from my latest book, Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe, to be published by Prometheus Books. Thanks to Bill Jefferys for helping me clarify the statistical issues.

Notes

1. Larry Dossey, Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine (San Francisco: Harper, 1993).
2. Daniel J. Benor, Survey of spiritual healing research. Complementary Medical Research 4, no. 1 (1990):9-33.
3. Randolph C. Byrd, Positive therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer in a coronary care unit population, Southern Medical Journal 81, no. 7 (1988):826-29.
4. W.S. Harris, M. Gowda, J.W. Kolb, C.P. Strychacz, J.L. Vacek, P.G. Jones, A. Forker, J.H. O'Keefe, and B.D. McCallister, A randomized, controlled trial of the effects of remote, intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients admitted to the coronary care unit, Archives of Internal Medicine 159 (1999): 2273-8.

Marie Laveau

A “free person of color,” Marie Laveau was the illegitimate daughter of a rich Creole plantation owner, Charles Laveaux, and his mistress Marguerite (who was reportedly half black, half Indian). Marie was probably born about 1794. At the age of twenty-five she married a carpenter named Jacques Paris, also a free person of color, who soon went missing and was presumed dead. Following the custom of the time, she began calling herself the “Widow Paris.” Soon, she entered a common-law marriage with one Christophe de Glapion with whom she would have fifteen children, but as late as 1850 a newspaper still referred to her as “Marie Laveaux, otherwise Widow Paris” (Tallant 1946, 67).

The Widow Paris learned her craft from a “voodoo doctor” known variously as Doctor John, John Bayou, and other appellations, and by 1830 she was one of several New Orleans voodoo queens. She soon came to dominance, taking charge of the rituals held at Congo Square and selling gris-gris throughout the social strata. Marie worked as a hairdresser, which took her into the homes of the affluent, and she reportedly developed a network of informants. According to Tallant (1946, 64), “No event in any household in New Orleans was a secret from Marie Laveau.” She parlayed her knowledge into a position of considerable influence, as she told fortunes, gave advice on love, and prepared custom gris-gris for anyone needing to effect a cure, charm, or hex.

If she did not actually save anyone from a sentence of death, she allowed such stories to flourish. “The Widow Paris thrived on publicity,” observes Tallant (1946, 58). “Legend after legend spread about her and she seems to have enjoyed them all.”

The legend of her perpetual youth is easily explained: She had a look-alike daughter, Marie Laveau II, who followed in her footsteps. About 1875 the original Marie, bereft of her youth and memory, became confined to her home on Rue St. Ann and did not leave until claimed by death some six years later. “It was then,” reports Tallant (1946, 73), “that the strangest part of the entire Laveau mystery became most noticeable. For Marie Laveau still walked the streets of New Orleans, a new Marie Laveau, who also lived in the St. Ann Street Cottage.”

(For more biographical and critical information on Marie Laveau, see ”Voodoo in New Orleans” in an earlier Skeptical Inquirer [Nickell 2001].)

The Wishing Tomb

Controversy persists over where Marie Laveau and her namesake daughter are buried. Some say the latter reposes in the cemetery called St. Louis No. 2 (Hauck 1996) in a “Marie Laveau Tomb” there. However, that crypt most likely contains the remains of another voodoo queen named Marie, Marie Comtesse. Numerous sites in as many cemeteries are said to be the final resting place of one or the other Marie Laveau (Tallant 1946, 129), but the prima facie evidence favors the Laveau-Glapion tomb in St. Louis No. 1 (figure 1). It comprises three stacked crypts with a “receiving vault” below (that is, a repository of the remains of those displaced by a new burial).

A contemporary of Marie II told Tallant (1946, 126) that he had been present when she died of a heart attack at a ball in 1897, and insisted: “All them other stories ain't true. She was buried in the Basin Street graveyard they call St. Louis No. I, and she was put in the same tomb with her mother and the rest of her family.”

That tomb’s carved inscription records the name, date of death, and age (62) of Marie II: “Marie Philome Glapion, décédé le 11 Juin 1897, ágée de Soixante-deux ans.” A bronze tablet affixed to the tomb announces, under the heading “Marie Laveau,” that “This Greek Revival Tomb Is Reputed Burial Place of This Notorious ‘Voodoo Queen’ . . . ,” presumably a reference to the original Marie (see figure 2). Corroborative evidence that she was interred here is found in her obituary ("Death” 1881) which notes that “Marie Laveau was buried in her family tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.” Guiley (2000) asserts that, while Marie Laveau I is reportedly buried here, “The vault does not bear her name.” However, I was struck by the fact that the initial two lines of the inscription on the Laveau-Glapion tomb read, “Famille Vve. Paris / née Laveau.” Obviously, “Vve.” is an abbreviation for Veuve, “Widow"; therefore the phrase translates, “Family of the Widow Paris, born Laveau"-namely Marie Laveau I. I take this as evidence that here is indeed the “family tomb.” Robert Tallant (1946, 127) suggests: “Probably there was once an inscription marking the vault in which the first Marie was buried, but it has been changed for one marking a later burial. The bones of the Widow Paris must lie in the receiving vault below.”

The Laveau-Glapion tomb is a focal point for commercial voodoo tours. Some visitors leave small gifts at the site-coins, Mardi Gras beads, candles, etc.-in the tradition of voodoo offerings. Many follow a custom of making a wish at the tomb. The necessary ritual for this has been variously described. The earliest version I have found (Tallant 1946, 127) says that people would “knock three times on the slab and ask a favor,” noting: “There are always penciled crosses on the slab. The sexton washes the crosses away, but they always reappear.” A more recent source advises combining the ritual with an offering placed in the attached cup: “Draw the X, place your hand over it, rub your foot three times against the bottom, throw some silver coins into the cup, and make your wish” (Haskins 1990). Yet again we are told that petitioners are to “leave offerings of food, money and flowers, then ask for Marie’s help after turning around three times and marking a cross with red brick on the stone” (Guiley 2000, 216).

When I visited the tomb it was littered with markings, including single Xs; an occasional cross, heart, pentagram, etc.; and a few inscriptions or other graffiti, sometimes accompanied by initials (figure 3). One comment read: “Her eyes / lit up with Fire / For the dreams / she entertained . . . / Seems something in her / knew already / just how well / They'd burn. / A.R.P. / 11-19-00.” The predominant markings were sets of three Xs-suggesting that the folk practice is undergoing transition (the specified number of raps, turns, etc. apparently becoming transferred to the number of Xs).

Although some of the markings are done in black (as from charcoal), most are rendered in a rusty red from bits of crumbling brick. One New Orleans guidebook says of the wishing tomb: “The family who own it have asked that this bogus, destructive tradition should stop, not least because people are taking chunks of brick from other tombs to make the crosses. Voodoo practitioners-responsible for the candles, plastic flowers, beads, and rum bottles surrounding the plot-deplore the practice, too, regarding it as a desecration that chases Laveau’s spirit away” (Cook 1999). Echoing that view, another guidebook advises: “On the St. Louis tour, please don’t scratch Xs on the graves; no matter what you've heard, it is not a real voodoo practice and is destroying fragile tombs” (Herczog 2000).

The scuttlebutt, according to the professional guide I commissioned (Krohn 2000), is that the practice may have evolved from ordinary graffiti which was then transformed by an early cemetery guide into a pseudo-voodoo custom that brought him tips. One writer wryly observes of the wishing practice that there is “no word on success rates” (Dickinson 1997).

Perturbed Spirit

Given the belief that Marie Laveau’s spirit can be invoked to grant wishes, it was inevitable that there would be alleged sightings. According to the author of Haunted City (Dickinson 1997, 131): “Tour guides tell of a Depression-era vagrant who fell asleep atop a tomb in the cemetery and was awakened to the sound of drums and chanting. Stumbling upon the tomb of Marie Laveau, he encountered the ghosts of dancing, naked men and women, led by a tall woman wrapped in the coils of a huge snake.” Or so tour guides tell. But did the “vagrant” perhaps pass out from drink and have a vivid dream or hallucination? How much has the story been embellished in the intervening two-thirds century or so? Do we know that the alleged event even occurred? These are among the problems with such anecdotal evidence.

The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits asserts: “One popular legend holds that Marie I never died, but changed herself into a huge black crow which still flies over the cemetery.” Indeed, “Both Maries are said to haunt New Orleans in various human and animal forms” (Guiley 2000). Note the anonymity inherent in such phrases as “popular legend” and the passive-voice construction “are said to.” In addition to her tomb, Marie also allegedly haunts other sites. For example, according to Hauck (1996), “Laveau has also been seen walking down St. Ann Street wearing a long white dress.” Providing a touch of what literary critics call verisimilitude (an appearance of truth), Hauck adds, “The phantom is that of the original Marie, because it wears her unique tignon, a seven-knotted handkerchief, around her neck.” But Hauck has erred: Marie in fact “wore a large white headwrap called a tignon tied around her head,” says her biographer Gandolfo (1992, 19), which had “seven points folded into it to represent a crown.” Gandolfo, who is also an artist, has painted a striking portrait of Marie Laveau wearing her tignon, which is displayed in the gift shop of his New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum (and reproduced in Gandolfo 1992, 1).

With a bit of literary detective work we can track the legend-making process in one instance of Laveau ghostlore. In his Haunted Places: The National Directory, Hauck (1996) writes of Marie: “Her ghost and those of her followers are said to practice wild voodoo rituals in her old house. . . .” But are said to by whom? His list of sources for the entry on Marie Laveau includes Susy Smith’s Prominent American Ghosts (1967), his earliest-dated citation. Smith merely says of Marie, “Her home at 1020 St. Ann Street was the scene of weird secret rites involving various primitive groups,” and she asks, “May not the wild dancing and pagan practices still continue, invisible, but frantic as ever?” Apparently this purely rhetorical question about imaginary ghosts has been transformed into an “are-said-to"-sourced assertion about supposedly real ones. In fact, the house at 1020 St. Ann Street was never even occupied by Marie Laveau; it only marks the approximate site of the home she lived in until her death (then numbered 152 Rue St. Ann, as shown by her death certificate). That cottage, which bore a red-tile roof and was flanked by banana trees and an herb garden, was demolished in 1903 (Gandolfo 1992, 14-15, 34).

Many of the tales of Marie Laveau’s ghost, if not actually invented by tour guides, may be uncritically promulgated by them. According to Frommer’s New Orleans 2001, “We enjoy a good nighttime ghost tour of the Quarter as much as anyone, but we also have to admit that what’s available is really hit-or-miss in presentation (it depends on who conducts your particular tour) and more miss than hit with regard to facts” (Herczog 2000). Even the author of New Orleans Ghosts II-hardly a knee-jerk debunker-speaks of the “hyperbolic balderdash” which sometimes “spews forth from the black garbed tour guides who are more interested in money and sensationalism than accurate historical research” (Klein 1999).

A Haunting Tale

One alleged Laveau ghost sighting stands out. Tallant (1946, 130-131) relates the story of an African-American named Elmore Lee Banks, who had an experience near St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. As Banks recalled, one day in the mid-1930s “an old woman” came into the drugstore where he was a customer. For some reason she frightened the proprietor, who “ran like a fool into the back of the store.” Laughing, the woman asked, “Don't you know me?” She became angry when Banks replied, “No, ma'am,” and slapped him. Banks continued: “Then she jump[ed] up in the air and went whizzing out the door and over the top of the telephone wires. She passed right over the graveyard wall and disappeared. Then I passed out cold.” He awakened to whiskey being poured down his throat by the proprietor who told him, “That was Marie Laveau.”

What are we to make of this case? (Perhaps the reader will want to pause here and reflect on the possibilities. . . .) Let us assume, provisionally, that such an event did transpire, although the narrative has possibly been affected by the well-known influences of misperception, memory distortions, the unconscious temptation to embellish, and other factors. We can begin our analysis by noting a few clues. First, it seems significant that Banks was a customer in a drugstore; this suggests he may have been ill and/or on medication. Second, it seems curious that he “passed out cold” from a mere slap, perhaps especially a ghostly one. (It seems contradictory that ghosts-which are reputedly non-physical, often being reported to pass through walls-are able to perform physical acts.) A third clue, I think, comes from the contrast between the first part of the story, wherein the woman appears quite unghostlike and acts in concert with the real world, and the second part, in which her behavior (flying through the air) seems consistent with an hallucinatory experience. Putting the clues together gives us the following possible scenario: Banks visits the drugstore because he is unwell, possibly seeking to get a prescription filled or refilled. An elderly woman comes in, recognizes him (perhaps from some years before), and is bemused that he fails to recognize her. Suddenly, from the effects of his illness or medication or even alcohol, Banks passes out, but in the process of swooning and falling to the floor he hallucinates. This may have involved his brain perceiving the lowering of his body in relationship to hers as the converse action-as her rising above him-and so triggering a dream-like fantasy of her flying. (Hallucinations can occur in normal individuals with various medical conditions, including high fevers and reduced respiration rates, as well as alcoholic states and many other conditions. And hallucinations “share much in common with dreams” [Baker 1992].)

The various elements in the story may have become confused-misconstrued and misordered as to sequence-as Banks teetered on the brink of consciousness. For example, although the woman may have slapped him in anger, another possibility is that she did so slightly later in an attempt to revive him. Similarly, the proprietor may have run to the rear of the store not because he recognized the “ghost” but in order to fetch the whiskey with which to revive Banks. Subsequently, while seeming to have “witnessed” the entire event (Hauck 1996) and to have identified Marie Laveau, the store owner may in fact only have been commenting on the perceived events that Banks related. Over time, as Banks repeated and rehearsed his tale, it became a dramatic, supernatural narrative about Marie Laveau. States psychologist Robert A. Baker, “The work of Elizabeth Loftus and others over the past decade has demonstrated that the human memory works not like a tape recorder but more like the village storyteller, i.e., it is both creative and recreative” (Baker and Nickell 1992).

Such impulses may be especially strong in a climate of magical thinking. They have helped foster the many tales and claims about Marie Laveau. In addition, according to the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History (Salzman 1996), “the legend of Marie Laveau was kept alive by twentieth-century conjurers who claimed to use Laveau techniques and it is kept alive through the continuing practice of commercialized voodoo in New Orleans” (figure 4).

References

1. Baker, Robert A. 1992. Hidden Memories: Voices and Visions from Within. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 274-276.
2. Baker, Robert A., and Joe Nickell, 1992. Missing Pieces: How to Investigate Ghosts, UFOs, Psychics, and Other Mysteries. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 217.
3. Cook, Samantha. 1999. New Orleans: The Mini Rough Guide. London: Rough Guides Ltd., 110, 112.
4. “Death of Marie Laveau.” 1881. Obituary, Daily Picayune (New Orleans, La.), n.d. (after June 15), reprinted in Gandolfo 1992, 38-39. Dickinson, Joy. 1997. Haunted City: An Unauthorized Guide to the Magical, Magnificent New Orleans of Anne Rice. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press.
5. Gandolfo, Charles. 1992. Marie Laveau of New Orleans. New Orleans, La.: New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum.
6. Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 2000. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, second ed. New York: Checkmark Books, 213-216.
7. Haskins, Jim. 1990. Voodoo & Hoodoo. New York: Scarborough House, 59-61.
8. Hauck, Dennis William. 1996. Haunted Places: The National Directory. New York: Penguin Books, 192, 193.
9. Herczog, Mary. 2000. Frommer’s 2001 New Orleans. New York: IDG Books Worldwide, 158, 186.
10. Krohn, Diane C. 2000. Personal communication, December 3.
11. Klein, Victor. 1999. New Orleans Ghosts II. Metairie, La.: Lycanthrope Press, 64.
12. Nickell, Joe. 2001. Voodoo in New Orleans, Skeptical Inquirer January/February: 26(1).
13. Salzman, Jack, et al., eds. 1996. Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, vol. 3. London: Simon & Schuster and Prentice Hall International, 1581.
14. Smith, Susy. 1967. Prominent American Ghosts. Cleveland, Ohio: The World Publishing Co., 139-140.
15. Tallant, Robert. 1946. Voodoo in New Orleans, reprinted Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Co., 1990. (Except as otherwise noted, information about Marie Laveau and her daughter is taken from this source.)