Voodoo, Witchcraft, Mildly Intrigues Detroit Folks

Detroit Free Press, January 20, 1929 (enlarge)

Anybody need a voodoo love recipe? Here's a January 1929 potion from Papa Jo, a black priest from Detroit, as prescribed from his ramshackled shed at Hastings and Gratiot: 

Take a pint of water and a piece of tar paper and boil together for an hour in the full moon. Then add the left foot of a hen, five drops of turpentine (five being a sacred voodoo number), the tail of a mouse, the tongue out of an old shoe and a spoonful of sour milk. Boil five minutes longer and strain through the left glove of a pallbearer and then feed it to the "Big Boy" in his coffee or gin. 

Of course, the article that this was taken from uses some offensive language that I won't repeat, though the term "Big Boy" is likely disturbing enough to some. One could assume from that phrasing and that the participants were all of African descent that this spell might not work on a Caucasian, Asian, Arab, etc. man but who knows. 

Amid the illustrations and photos included is one of Major John Roehl of the Detroit Health Department and shows confiscated witchcraft and fortune-telling implements. The confiscations came amidst a crackdown on such activities as so-called "hex" and voodoo murders had begun springing up across the country. 

The most egregious slaying was still yet to come as the Benny Evangelista family of Detroit werer butally murdered in July of 1929 with all members either decapitated or bludgeoned to death. The children's ages ranged from 18 months to 7-years-old. Santina lay in bed decapitated with her baby beside her. Mario's skull had been crushed. The other three children lay slaughtered in their beds across the hall. Benny, the preacher and eccentric author of an obscure history of man, sat at his desk with his hands folded as if in prayer and his head at his feet where it had been cleanly severed from the torso. A bizarre altar was found in Evangelista's basement where he frequently held healing sessions and readings. The murder was laid at the hands of a fanatic or the work of the mob outfit known as the Black Hand but nobody was ever convicted of the crimes. 

While some bemoan the archaic laws forbidding fortune telling - Gundella the Witch's own daughter Veronica was an advocate for repealing such statutes in the 1990s - they were not without merit or pointed prosecution of the innocent as people were routinely swindled out of fortunes and cult slayings frequented the news blotter in the 1920s and '30s as immigration increased and the superstitious from the old countries fueled cult members to stave off the evil both therein society and within themselves.