Want to know where New Orleans voodoo actually comes from? Skip the French Quarter ghost tours with costumed guides.
The real story lives in Treme.
What Makes This Different
Most voodoo tours stick to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 and Marie Laveau’s supposed tomb. They feed you Hollywood myths about zombie powder and voodoo dolls stuck with pins.
The tours that go deeper start in a different place entirely. They begin at Congo Square in Louis Armstrong Park, right on the edge of Treme — America’s oldest continuously occupied Black neighborhood.
This is where enslaved people gathered every Sunday. Spanish colonial law (later continued under early American rule) gave them one day off. They used it to preserve West African traditions through drumming, dancing, and spiritual ceremonies.
The Bamboula. The Calinda. The Congo dance. These weren’t performances. They were religious expressions blended with Catholic practices that slaveholders forced on them. That fusion became New Orleans voodoo.
The History Most Tours Skip
Congo Square wasn’t just a dance floor. It was where voodoo ceremonies happened openly — a rare thing in America. Marie Laveau herself practiced there before she became the city’s most famous voodoo queen.
But here’s what the costume-wearing guides won’t tell you: Laveau was a devout Catholic who attended Mass at St. Louis Cathedral. She ran a hair salon. She adopted children, nursed yellow fever victims, and helped enslaved people escape.
Voodoo wasn’t dark magic. It was survival. It was community organizing disguised as religion.
Tours through Treme connect those dots. They show you where Claude Treme (a French plantation owner) married Julie Moro (a formerly enslaved woman) and subdivided their land to create housing for free people of color.
They take you to St. Louis Cemetery No. 2, where you’ll find graves of jazz legends like Paul Barbarin and Earl King alongside civil rights pioneers. Not just Marie Laveau’s vandalized tomb with tourist lipstick kisses.
You’ll visit St. Augustine Church, where the “War of the Pews” erupted over segregated seating. You’ll see the Backstreet Cultural Museum’s Mardi Gras Indian costumes and learn how those traditions tie back to African spiritual practices.
Where To Book
Historic New Orleans Tours runs a Voodoo/Treme/Storyville walking tour that hits Congo Square, the old Storyville red-light district where jazz was born, and both St. Louis Cemeteries. They meet at Backatown Coffee Parlour on Basin Street.
Free Tours by Foot offers a similar route focused on Afro-Creole culture. Their guides have deep ties to the neighborhood and treat sacred sites with respect.
New Orleans Secrets Tours keeps groups to nine people max and visits over a dozen authentic voodoo shrines and altars, not gift shop displays.
What You’ll Actually Learn
These tours don’t sensationalize. They teach you how West African Vodun mixed with Catholicism under slavery. How voodoo queens like Laveau weren’t witches but community leaders who used their influence to help others.
You’ll understand why people still leave offerings at Congo Square. Why the Sunday drum circles continue there to this day. Why jazz, second lines, and Mardi Gras Indian traditions all trace back to those weekly gatherings.
The tours typically run 90 minutes to two hours. Expect to walk about a mile through Treme. Bring water — there’s not much shade in the cemeteries.
Why It Matters
Treme gave birth to jazz and preserved African culture when it was being actively erased everywhere else in America. The neighborhood tells the real story of voodoo as resistance, not superstition.
You won’t find that story in a French Quarter gift shop selling mass-produced gris-gris bags.
Congo Square still hosts free drum circles every Sunday at 3 p.m. The Voodoo Spiritual Temple (New Orleans’ only formal voodoo temple) sits right across the street.
This isn’t haunted history entertainment. It’s the actual history that shaped the city, and it’s still alive in Treme today.
