Haitian Supernatural Myths and Legends

 

My name is Daryl; I was born and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. My parents are Catholic, and so were their parents; as a result, I was raised Catholic as well. Being raised as a Catholic made me believe that Catholicism was all that there was and all that there would ever be. I never wanted to learn about other religions, especially voodoo because of its connection with magic and the supernatural world. However, it is practiced in my country by many Haitians and that is mostly what got me interested in the supernatural and allowed me to discover things I never knew about and never knew existed.

 

The supernatural involves anything that science cannot really explain-- for example, ghosts. Ghosts are commonly known as the spirits of deceased people that remain attached to this earth and are wandering around. The spirits Haitians believe in are the loas; they are said to be the servants of God. There is a loa for almost anything. A Ougan and a Manbo are respectively a voodoo priest and priestess who can conjure and summon the loas. The priests summon them through voodoo ceremonies. Each loa has its own attributes; for example, pigs might be the representation of one loa, while cows might be the representation of another. In those ceremonies, they sacrifice the animal or the thing that represents the loa and thus summon it. When the loa appears, it takes possession of someone who is a believer and a voodoo practitioner. When that happens, the person does all kinds of weird actions, like eating glass or walking on hot coal. Sometimes, a ceremony is not needed to call upon the loa; some songs with specific rhythms and drum rolls can summon the loa and it will possess a person. I have seen this happen a lot during the carnival festivities when drums beat incessantly and people drop to the ground in a state of trance.

 

The Haitian loa that protects spirits and guides them to the afterlife is named Baron Samedi. It is said that when somebody dies and this loa doesn't have time to guide him to the afterlife, that's when this soul can be brought back as a zombie. In Haiti, Zonbis are known to exist. They are corpses rising from the dead by means of necromancy; in English, it’s written as “zombie”. When someone is brought back to life as a zombie, it serves its master, the person that brought him back. The zombie has no common sense and does not act like a normal human being. The only thing he or she knows how to do is to serve his or her master. Zombies do not eat people or kill them; they are usually used for stealing. I have a friend who frequently visited his aunt and cousins at their house with his parents. One evening, as they were playing outside, a man appeared at the bottom of the road near the slope that leads to the house. The security guard, from far away, told the man to leave because it was an inhabited property. The man didn’t say a word and continued walking toward the house. So the security guard fired a shot in the air, but the man still didn’t react. The lady who worked at the house then came out and yelled: “Pati, zonbi,” which means “Leave, zombie,” and then she recited a prayer in Haitian Creole. Only then did the man stop walking. The security guard then shoved and pushed him all the way down the slope and closed the gate. The man casually turned around and continued walking.

 

Some Haitian people believe in werewolves. They call them lougarous and say that they roam around Haiti on the night of full moon. This might be true, but most of the time, it is a loa that takes possession of a voodooist and makes him or her act like a werewolf because the nature of the loa itself is probably that of an animal of some kind-- for instance, a wolf or another wild beast. People who live in the provinces of Haiti frequently report on seeing or hearing the lougarous. They often say that they see unusual claw marks and ripped flesh and assume that it was somebody who turned into a werewolf or lougarou.  When I was little, my nanny used to tell me that children should not be outside at or after midnight, for the lougarous would take them away and eat them. However, those are probably stories to help keep kids homebound during the night.  

 

The supernatural is a broad and amazing subject, and it is even more fascinating when there are personal experiences involved. One night, I was with my parents on our way home to the mountains surrounding the capital city. We were stuck on the road because of some accident, so my dad decided he would take another route home. At a certain point on the road, in a nearby lot, I heard people yelling and chanting. I slowly raised my head; it was a full ongoing voodoo ceremony. Even though my father stopped the car, my parents didn’t want me to look, but I did anyway. I saw a woman dancing around a fire, chanting. At a point she took a piglet and opened it with a knife. She then bathed in the pig’s blood. After a while the manbo and ougan gave her permission to be possessed by the loa. The woman got even more excited and started shaking as if she was having a seizure. Then the crowd tightened around her, and she calmed down.

 

My personal experiences made me more aware of what is going on around me. They also changed my views regarding voodoo, which I used to think was a weird religion. Some things may still sound ludicrous to me, but I now believe reality is not one-dimensional. The more I learn about myths, customs, and supernatural occurrences in popular Haitian culture, the more I change my way of viewing the world.

 

Daryl Roc, Bridge Academy, 12th grade