By Michael E. Miller April 1 at 8:11 AM
Devon Machuca
The witch hunt began in late 2015.
On Dec. 12, a New Orleans resident posted an angry message to Facebook.
“This is a public alert,” wrote Desier Deja Galjour. “Seriously. Anyone know this little [expletive]? Better tell her to stay the [expletive] out of Holt Cemetery or HER bones might get broken. I am not joking. Please spread the word and keep a look out for yet another [expletive] cultural VULTURE.”
The target of Galjour’s rant was someone named Ender Darling, who had left an even more startling post on Facebook.
“[Content warning]: graves, bone hunting,” Darling’s post began.
“About twenty minutes from my house in New Orleans is what we call the poor man’s graveyard,” Darling continued. “When it rains of course bones wash up, the older the grave the more you find. You can literally walk around and see femurs, teeth, jaws, skull caps, etc etc. This is where I go to find my human bones for curse work and general spells that require bone.”
Darling then offered to sell any “left over” bones to those interested in casting their own curses and spells.
Five days later, Galjour’s outrage trickled down to Tumblr, where someone else accused Darling of “stealing human bones from cemeteries in Louisiana.”
“Please don’t let them get away with this and spread the word/signal boost!” the Tumblr user wrote.
The post spread like wildfire on the social media website, quickly morphing into a meme combining anger, disbelief and amusement over the accusations of grave-robbing and curse-casting.
But as the Internet anger machine went into overdrive, authorities also took notice. By the time BuzzFeed wrote a Dec. 18 article about “Boneghazi,” as the controversy became known, Louisiana Assistant Attorney General Ryan Seidemann admitted that he had ordered an ongoing investigation into the possible removal of human remains from Holt Cemetery in New Orleans.
This week, the New Orleans Advocate revealed that authorities had raided Darling’s home in January, confiscating a laptop, cellphone and at least 11 bones and four teeth.
“I had them on an altar,” Darling told the newspaper in a defiant interview published Tuesday. “It was just a bunch of little shards of bones and pieces of teeth I had picked up off the ground. I said [to the agents], ‘Here you go. There’s probably human bones in there, but I know better than to give you that answer.’
“They were coming in seriously expecting to find bodies and human organs and have me and my roommates arrested for black-marketing human remains,” added Darling, a self-styled witch whose birth name is Devon Marie Machuca. “You should have seen their faces when they walked into the house and found a bunch of sleeping hippies.”
Although Darling called the raid a “waste of time,” some of Darling’s critics rejoiced in the news.
“So excellent,” one wrote.
“Glorious,” added another.
“Good,” said a third. “I hope their life is utterly destroyed.”
Darling declined a request for comment from The Washington Post.
But a friend said the online campaign against Darling was a modern-day witch hunt on multiple levels, involving public shaming on social media rather than pitchforks and bonfires in public squares.
Darling has been hounded not only due to Wiccan beliefs, Kristy Casper-Saxon said, but also because of Darling’s ethnicity, alternative appearance, sexual orientation and gender. (Darling does not identify as a man or woman, according to the Advocate, and identifies as a person of color.)
“I think this is targeting a member of a racial minority and sexual minority,” Casper-Saxon told The Post in a message. “Everything about [Darling’s] identity questions the status quo, and that’s what we love about them.”
The debate over Darling’s admitted practice of taking bones from the cemetery also strikes at issues of gentrification and cultural appropriation in New Orleans, a city with a long and cherished spiritual history that has seen an influx of money and outsiders since Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans in 2005.
“I am so sick of selfish people from elsewhere coming to New Orleans to indulge their arrested-development fantasies,” one man commented on the Advocate article. “Is there anything more boring and cliche than young white slackers coming to NOLA to live THE LIFE — going native to escape the undifferentiated dreariness of their middle class suburban origins?”
Whatever the reasons behind the campaign against Darling, the witch could now face serious consequences for admitting to taking bones from a cemetery.
Although Darling has not been charged with a crime, authorities listed several felony statutes in their application for a search warrant, according to the Advocate. One was a grave-robbing law, violations of which are punishable by up to five years in prison.
New Orleans has a deep history of alternative religious beliefs, particularly voodoo. Until the Civil War, the city was a major slave market. And while slaves’ African religions were largely eradicated in other parts of America, they survived in New Orleans, where they were combined with Catholicism.
Today, voodoo is part of New Orleans culture. The city boasts several voodoo museums. When the local NBA team, the New Orleans Pelicans, was recently struck with a spate of freak injuries, coach Alvin Gentry invoked the religion.
“I am gonna send out an all-points bulletin to anybody in the French Quarter or anywhere else,” he said. “We need a voodoo doctor or something here. We’ve gotta find the bones under this place. We gotta do something. Because this is becoming comical.”
A local voodoo priest agreed and promised to help lift the Pelicans’ curse, according to the Advocate.
If voodoo is no longer taboo in New Orleans, then witch craft — or the use of human bones practiced by Darling and some other witches, at least — still appears to be off limits.
Witchcraft is “seeing a resurgence among queer-identified young people seeking a powerful identity that celebrates the freedom to choose who you are,” Vice reported in August.
Darling began visiting Holt Cemetery, just a few blocks from where Darling then lived, several months after Vice published its report, according to Darling’s Facebook post.
Darling chose the cemetery because unlike most New Orleans graveyards, which feature above-ground tombs due to the city’s swampy earth, Holt was a “poor man’s graveyard” where bodies were buried in the ground and so their bones came to the surface during rainstorms.
“I find human bones are easier for work with me rather than animal bone,” Darling wrote. “I can relate and work with the energy they carry if that makes any sense.”
Darling then offered to “sell” surplus bones, but said it was only to cover shipping costs.
“I know human bones aren’t easy to come by,” added Darling, who self-identified on Tumblr as “Queer, Trans* Non Binary” and a “PrimalWitchyCreature.” Darling’s blog also expressed an interest in “bondage, rope… cuttings, bruises, baseball bats… blood, sex, gore, extreme body modifications [and] BDSM.”
After Darling’s Facebook post and Tumblr profile went viral, Darling deactivated both.
But it was too late. By then, La. authorities were already investigating Darling.
A team of at least four state investigators conducted “periodic surveillances” at Darling’s New Orleans home over a six-day period in January, the Advocate reported. They also subpoenaed Darling’s Facebook correspondence, pouring over more than 12,000 pages of information and finding messages indicating the witch had sent some bones to people who requested them online.
Some locals questioned the expenditure of tax dollars.
“A literal witch hunt in the ne century. Awesome,” one Louisiana resident sarcastically commented on the Advocate article. “And also glad to see that a task force staked out this place for a week and then had time to review 12,000 pages of information. Time well spent, especially since we have plenty of police to spare and such a low crime rate in the city.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ix-story-f-duplicate-duplicate:homepage/story
Devon Machuca
The witch hunt began in late 2015.
On Dec. 12, a New Orleans resident posted an angry message to Facebook.
“This is a public alert,” wrote Desier Deja Galjour. “Seriously. Anyone know this little [expletive]? Better tell her to stay the [expletive] out of Holt Cemetery or HER bones might get broken. I am not joking. Please spread the word and keep a look out for yet another [expletive] cultural VULTURE.”
The target of Galjour’s rant was someone named Ender Darling, who had left an even more startling post on Facebook.
“[Content warning]: graves, bone hunting,” Darling’s post began.
“About twenty minutes from my house in New Orleans is what we call the poor man’s graveyard,” Darling continued. “When it rains of course bones wash up, the older the grave the more you find. You can literally walk around and see femurs, teeth, jaws, skull caps, etc etc. This is where I go to find my human bones for curse work and general spells that require bone.”
Darling then offered to sell any “left over” bones to those interested in casting their own curses and spells.
Five days later, Galjour’s outrage trickled down to Tumblr, where someone else accused Darling of “stealing human bones from cemeteries in Louisiana.”
“Please don’t let them get away with this and spread the word/signal boost!” the Tumblr user wrote.
The post spread like wildfire on the social media website, quickly morphing into a meme combining anger, disbelief and amusement over the accusations of grave-robbing and curse-casting.
But as the Internet anger machine went into overdrive, authorities also took notice. By the time BuzzFeed wrote a Dec. 18 article about “Boneghazi,” as the controversy became known, Louisiana Assistant Attorney General Ryan Seidemann admitted that he had ordered an ongoing investigation into the possible removal of human remains from Holt Cemetery in New Orleans.
This week, the New Orleans Advocate revealed that authorities had raided Darling’s home in January, confiscating a laptop, cellphone and at least 11 bones and four teeth.
“I had them on an altar,” Darling told the newspaper in a defiant interview published Tuesday. “It was just a bunch of little shards of bones and pieces of teeth I had picked up off the ground. I said [to the agents], ‘Here you go. There’s probably human bones in there, but I know better than to give you that answer.’
“They were coming in seriously expecting to find bodies and human organs and have me and my roommates arrested for black-marketing human remains,” added Darling, a self-styled witch whose birth name is Devon Marie Machuca. “You should have seen their faces when they walked into the house and found a bunch of sleeping hippies.”
Although Darling called the raid a “waste of time,” some of Darling’s critics rejoiced in the news.
“So excellent,” one wrote.
“Glorious,” added another.
“Good,” said a third. “I hope their life is utterly destroyed.”
Darling declined a request for comment from The Washington Post.
But a friend said the online campaign against Darling was a modern-day witch hunt on multiple levels, involving public shaming on social media rather than pitchforks and bonfires in public squares.
Darling has been hounded not only due to Wiccan beliefs, Kristy Casper-Saxon said, but also because of Darling’s ethnicity, alternative appearance, sexual orientation and gender. (Darling does not identify as a man or woman, according to the Advocate, and identifies as a person of color.)
“I think this is targeting a member of a racial minority and sexual minority,” Casper-Saxon told The Post in a message. “Everything about [Darling’s] identity questions the status quo, and that’s what we love about them.”
The debate over Darling’s admitted practice of taking bones from the cemetery also strikes at issues of gentrification and cultural appropriation in New Orleans, a city with a long and cherished spiritual history that has seen an influx of money and outsiders since Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans in 2005.
“I am so sick of selfish people from elsewhere coming to New Orleans to indulge their arrested-development fantasies,” one man commented on the Advocate article. “Is there anything more boring and cliche than young white slackers coming to NOLA to live THE LIFE — going native to escape the undifferentiated dreariness of their middle class suburban origins?”
Whatever the reasons behind the campaign against Darling, the witch could now face serious consequences for admitting to taking bones from a cemetery.
Although Darling has not been charged with a crime, authorities listed several felony statutes in their application for a search warrant, according to the Advocate. One was a grave-robbing law, violations of which are punishable by up to five years in prison.
New Orleans has a deep history of alternative religious beliefs, particularly voodoo. Until the Civil War, the city was a major slave market. And while slaves’ African religions were largely eradicated in other parts of America, they survived in New Orleans, where they were combined with Catholicism.
Today, voodoo is part of New Orleans culture. The city boasts several voodoo museums. When the local NBA team, the New Orleans Pelicans, was recently struck with a spate of freak injuries, coach Alvin Gentry invoked the religion.
“I am gonna send out an all-points bulletin to anybody in the French Quarter or anywhere else,” he said. “We need a voodoo doctor or something here. We’ve gotta find the bones under this place. We gotta do something. Because this is becoming comical.”
A local voodoo priest agreed and promised to help lift the Pelicans’ curse, according to the Advocate.
If voodoo is no longer taboo in New Orleans, then witch craft — or the use of human bones practiced by Darling and some other witches, at least — still appears to be off limits.
Witchcraft is “seeing a resurgence among queer-identified young people seeking a powerful identity that celebrates the freedom to choose who you are,” Vice reported in August.
Darling began visiting Holt Cemetery, just a few blocks from where Darling then lived, several months after Vice published its report, according to Darling’s Facebook post.
Darling chose the cemetery because unlike most New Orleans graveyards, which feature above-ground tombs due to the city’s swampy earth, Holt was a “poor man’s graveyard” where bodies were buried in the ground and so their bones came to the surface during rainstorms.
“I find human bones are easier for work with me rather than animal bone,” Darling wrote. “I can relate and work with the energy they carry if that makes any sense.”
Darling then offered to “sell” surplus bones, but said it was only to cover shipping costs.
“I know human bones aren’t easy to come by,” added Darling, who self-identified on Tumblr as “Queer, Trans* Non Binary” and a “PrimalWitchyCreature.” Darling’s blog also expressed an interest in “bondage, rope… cuttings, bruises, baseball bats… blood, sex, gore, extreme body modifications [and] BDSM.”
After Darling’s Facebook post and Tumblr profile went viral, Darling deactivated both.
But it was too late. By then, La. authorities were already investigating Darling.
A team of at least four state investigators conducted “periodic surveillances” at Darling’s New Orleans home over a six-day period in January, the Advocate reported. They also subpoenaed Darling’s Facebook correspondence, pouring over more than 12,000 pages of information and finding messages indicating the witch had sent some bones to people who requested them online.
Some locals questioned the expenditure of tax dollars.
“A literal witch hunt in the ne century. Awesome,” one Louisiana resident sarcastically commented on the Advocate article. “And also glad to see that a task force staked out this place for a week and then had time to review 12,000 pages of information. Time well spent, especially since we have plenty of police to spare and such a low crime rate in the city.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ix-story-f-duplicate-duplicate:homepage/story
