Bronze John Visited

New Orleans has the reputation for being the most haunted of cities in the U.S. We still have ghost sightings on a regular basis. voodoo is practiced even today, and the history of the city is rife with tales of the dead and un dead walking and creating havoc with the locals. I could give many examples of why the city of Anne Rice and literal ghosts and goblins is Halloween ready every day of the year. But today I will write to you about one of the many of our cemetery legacies to the past frights in New Orleans.

The Yellow fever epidemics of the 19th century gave the city tens of thousands of lost souls who crowded the cemeteries as wave after wave of the yellow fever (brought by mosquitoes, not evil spirits, it affected the liver to the extent that the sufferer turned a yellow tint of color) epidemic ravaged the city in the last century, giving New Orleans a reputation as graveyard of the nation. They called the fever, Bronze John . . . Yellow Jack . . . the Saffron Scourge and more. New Orleanians then always listened for the first whispers of the fever outbreak. During the plague season, from July to October, as much as a third of the population evacuated the city to escape not only the heat and mosquitoes, but death itself.

In the worst plague years, from 1851 to 1855, up to 10 percent of the people of New Orleans who didn't flee town died in the epidemics. The mortality rate was about 60 percent for those who caught not only Bronze John, but also smallpox, malaria and cholera. As thousands died in the brief months of the plague season, New Orleans' already scarce burial space was jammed beyond capacity.

Many of the cemeteries that are now tourist attractions are crammed with victims of the plague . . . in some cases buried in mass graves. There was a rapid expansion of cemeteries as they struggled to stay ahead of the growing demand. That's why the tourists here always make the cemetery tour. Just reading the tombstones of our above ground burial sights is an education about the city then and now.
But how to cope with so many deaths??? Because of fear of infection, funerals had been banned for decades at the famous St. Louis Cathedral (site where Napoleon sold Louisiana to the U.S. and oldest Catholic Church in the U.S.). The priests of St. Louis Cathedral built a little chapel now known as Our Lady of Guadalupe beside St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 (where some of my own relatives are buried), so that yellow fever victims could be blessed before they were buried.

The sheer mass of corpses demanded quick and shallow burial. Bodies buried only a foot underground surfaced quickly during the torrential rains, because of the extremely shallow water table here, it exposed the public to the sight of their decaying neighbors. Ugh! No wonder the huge Mausoleums later became so popular. No one wants to see Uncle Claude pop up from the ground after a heavy rain storm.

It was nearly 50 years after the New Orleans Yellow Fever plagues before scientists identified the virus as the carrier. New Orleans, with its above ground sewage gutters, filthy streets, surrounding swamps and stagnant runoff pools was a perfect breeding ground for the mosquitoes that carried yellow fever.

But alas! I am safe from Bronze John. Modern eradication programs, underground sewage and more sophisticated medical and public health expertise has ended the visits of Bronze John.
On Aug. 11, 1853 the New Orleans Daily Crescent newspaper reported the scene at one of the cemeteries. To get you in the mood for Halloween spooks. Here is what people in New Orleans read that day.

“At the gates, the winds brought intimation of the corruption lurking within. Not a puff was not laden with the rank atmosphere from rotting corpses. Inside they were piles by the fifties, exposed to the heat of the sun, swollen with corruption, bursting their coffin lids…what a feast of horrors. Inside, corpses piled in pyramids and without the gates, old and withered crones and fat huxter women . . .dispensing ice creams and confections, and brushing away . . . the green bottleflies that hovered on their merchandise and that anon buzzed away to drink dainty inhalations from the green and festering corpses."

Happy Halloween!