Читать книгу The Zombie Book - Nick Redfern - Страница 34

The most popular version of the Bourbon Street Devil Baby legend began in the early 1800s, when a young Creole woman married a plantation owner, a very wealthy man who wanted a male heir to continue the Louisiana family name he had established. He already had three daughters from his first wife, so the new wife was kept continually pregnant. After bearing six healthy female children, she was dismayed to find herself pregnant with her seventh child. She knew this child had better be a boy, or she would be likely to find herself abandoned and a new wife would be selected to bear a male heir. The anxious mother-to-be is said to have gone to a Voodoo-Hoodoo Queen and asked her to use her powers to help her deliver a boy child.

Unbeknownst to the desperate mother-to-be, the Voodoo Queen hated the plantation owner because of his past actions against her, so under the guise of manifesting a healthy male heir for the woman to deliver to her husband, the Voodoo Queen cursed the unborn child, making certain that the woman would bear Satan’s son. The Voodoo Queen’s magic was strong, for the boy child was delivered from the womb with horns, red eyes, cloven hooves, claws, and a tail. The Devil Baby’s birthday was said to be on a Mardi Gras Day.

The Devil Baby of Bourbon Street is said to look like a small, bald-headed child with hooves and a ratlike tail. (Art by Ricardo Pustanio).

The horrific newborn proceeded to eat the neighbors’ children, bare its teeth at its terrified siblings, and was locked away in the attic garret room. It was here that his parents held him captive before he escaped to begin his reign of terror on New Orleans’ citizens.

The legend of a Devil Baby invites a number of accounts of its origin. Rather than the desperate wife of a plantation owner insistent upon the birth of a male heir, certain versions of the lore have the monster born of a slave girl who was raped by a plantation owner. Still others state that the horrid abomination was born of a French aristocrat’s daughter who was addicted to absinthe. As the lurid story goes, she was drunk to the very hour that she gave birth, and that she abandoned the grotesque infant in Pirates Alley. His demonic cries are said to have disturbed the Ash Wednesday Mass.

St. Anthony’s Garden, sometimes called the Devil Baby’s Playpen or simply the Devil’s Garden, is said by some to be the place where the Devil Baby hides at night to attack unsuspecting passersby. The garden is thought by some locals to be one of the very seven gates of Hell.

Another old New Orleans oral tradition tells that the Devil Baby was born in that very garden. According to this version of the creature’s birth, its mother took refuge here in the late hours of her labor just before dawn on a Mardi Gras Day. As dawn approached and the long early morning hours turned to day, some churchgoers at early Mass later testified that they had seen a bloodied young woman staggering from the garden, just as a scream from Hell could be heard coming from the low hedges. The woman managed to walk toward the church and leave the newborn devil infant on the back door steps before she died.

The large open garden behind the eighteenth century St. Louis Cathedral is said to be the best spot to sight the Devil Baby today. A history of duels fought and much bloodshed on the grounds is said to be the reason that he haunts the spot.