Weird World Adventures Season 2 Spotlight: Episode 2 The Gates to the Voodoo Underworld

I have a rule when I travel for Weird World Adventures: never go into a city assuming you already understand it. I’ve applied this rule to ancient salt mines in Romania, to the inside of Icelandic volcanoes, to ghost-lit streets in Salem. But nowhere has this rule mattered more to me personally than New Orleans.

Because New Orleans is one of those cities that presents itself to the world in one way and then, if you’re willing to go looking, reveals something else entirely — something older, more complex, and considerably more alive than the bead-throwing, bourbon-drinking surface suggests. I went to New Orleans to find the seven gates of Guinée. The seven portals, according to Voodoo cosmology, that lead to the realm of the dead. And what I found was something that changed how I think about religious syncretism, cultural resilience, and the relationship between the living and their ancestors.

Let me back up.

Voodoo — Louisiana Voodoo specifically, distinct from Haitian Vodou and West African Vodun but deeply related to both — holds that the world of the dead, the underworld called Guinée, is accessible through a series of gates. Seven of them. Hidden throughout the city of New Orleans. To reach the spirit world, to communicate with the lwa (the spirits), you have to pass through each gate in sequence. The Voodoo queen Marie Laveau is said to rest at the crossroads between those worlds. And her tomb — which to this day is covered in lipstick marks, offerings, and X’s scratched by those asking her for favors — sits in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, a place that feels less like a burial ground and more like an active conversation between the living and the dead.

We began our hunt at Muriel’s in Jackson Square, which is one of those restaurants that has become as famous for its resident ghosts as its food. The story goes that Pierre Antoine Lepardi Jourdan, a gambler who lost his beloved home in a card game in 1814, was so heartbroken he took his own life upstairs. A seance table is set for him every night. The food is extraordinary. The atmosphere is the kind of thing I genuinely cannot manufacture in a studio.

What I also discovered — and this was one of the more fascinating research rabbit holes this show has sent me down — is the historical relationship between Voodoo practice and what we might recognize as early patient documentation. The Voodoo doll, which most people understand as a tool for harm (Hollywood has a lot to answer for here), functions in its original context much more like a patient chart: a physical representation of a person, used to focus healing intentions, track symptoms, and maintain a connection between the practitioner and the person receiving care. As someone studying anthropology with a focus on the occult, the overlap between magical practice and early medical systems is endlessly fascinating to me — and deeply human.

Our hunt for the seven gates of Guinée took us through the French Quarter, through cemeteries, through neighborhoods that tourists rarely see, and eventually to the tomb of Marie Laveau herself. I’ll be honest: standing at that tomb, surrounded by evidence of ongoing devotion from people who still come to her for help, hit me differently than I expected. This isn’t folklore in the sense of something that used to be believed. This is a living spiritual tradition that has survived slavery, colonization, religious persecution, and centuries of being misrepresented by people who should have known better.

Did we find the seven gates? Watch the episode and find out.

Weird World Adventures Season 2 is streaming now on Amazon Prime, free for Prime members internationally and available in the US. Free streaming is also available via the Fawesome app on Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, and other platforms. New Orleans has been waiting for you. Don’t keep it waiting.