Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Now, there are people who practice voodoo out of Haiti.
Chapter 2: What are the Santeria murders and how do they relate to voodoo rituals?
What scared me is that part of the rituals was to either cure someone of something or curse someone with something. And what's really interesting about that is it works. Santeria, voodoo, satanic ritual murder. These types of deaths are very rare, but they do happen. And when they do, somebody has to walk into that room.
Someone has to step over the candles and the blood and the animal remains, the altars, the strange symbols carved into the walls and figure out what actually happened. And that person is our guest today, Barbara Butcher, the former NYC death investigator who has walked into thousands of violent scenes, murders, ritual deaths.
Chapter 3: How can psychics assist in finding missing bodies?
Grifters, psychopaths, the darkest stuff that the city produces at 3 a.m. And she's the person that they call when someone's gone and no one knows why. And today we're going into all the weirdest corners. We're talking about the voodoo ritual deaths, what it's actually like walking into a Santeria altar scene outside. and the time that she actually worked with a psychic to locate a victim.
We also talk about the symbolic crime scenes, like curses and fear-induced deaths, and the placebo effect. Is it possible that someone can really die because they believe that they're cursed?
Chapter 4: What is the connection between emotions and death investigations?
This episode is fascinating, but it is dark and uncomfortable, so I encourage you to watch it with some discretion. And if you're interested in crime, in ritual death, and ultimately what death can really teach us about how to live, this is the episode for you. Barbara is fantastic and an amazing storyteller, and I think you guys are really going to enjoy it.
So without further ado, sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. I wanted to ask you specifically, you've dealt with so many cases where the scenes are fairly cut and dry. You can tell more or less what happened here. There's some type of gang affiliation. There's some random act of violence.
I want to know about the cases that seem more ritualized, that seem like they have weird details that are strange, unexplainable, perhaps connected to some type of ritualized murder or some type of religious act crime where you showed up to a scene and you looked around and you said, this is bizarre and unlike anything I've ever seen. What comes to mind? Centuria.
Centuria is a valid form of religious practice of worship.
Chapter 5: How do men and women differ in their patterns of death and murder?
using the old gods from African origins or Hispanic, Cuban, Dominican origins, where, you know, when slaves from Africa were brought to the islands and intermarried with the local indigenous people, a lot of the old gods came with them. And so this form of worship came up. Somehow in there, they became a sacrificial element.
Now, I have never seen a person sacrificed in a Santeria ritual, but I did come to a house, an apartment, someone was dead, a woman, and there was an altar.
Chapter 6: What is the story of Clark Fredericks and his experience with a killer?
I can't remember the god to whom it was, but it was a huge altar filled with all kinds of offerings. You know, an apple, a piece of cooked flesh, a little burned pot with something in there that looked like a bone. And all around the house, there are different icons and figures of the gods.
Chapter 7: What happened in the investigation of Jonathan Levin’s murder?
And I thought, does this have anything to do with her death? And sadly, I don't remember what she died from. I wish I could remember. A lot of things I blocked because they scared me, you know? Wow. So I don't have the memory anymore.
Chapter 8: What unusual findings can occur at crime scenes?
I cannot remember if she was murdered or it was... It was a violent death. Right. But I cannot place it because it scared me. Really? Yeah. And, you know, we had an anthropology consultant at the time. This is, again, back in the 90s, who came and said, that little bone there, the burned bone, that is an animal bone. So I was like, thank God, because it looked like a human finger. Mm-hmm.
And the little pieces of meat were like organs from an animal, like a charred heart. And what scared me is that I believe that part of the rituals were was to either cure someone of something or curse someone with something.
Now, there are people who practice voodoo out of Haiti, a particular brand of this so-called voodoo religion, in which there are curses put on people and spells and all kinds of things. And what's really interesting about that is it works. In Haitian culture, there have been many cases of people who, they were told that the voodoo priest has put a curse upon you and you're going to die.
You're going to wither away and die in a month. And you know, they stop eating and they get hysterical and freaked out and they actually do die of fear, of terror. Wow. So it's a placebo response. Yeah. It's like it's a mental response to a physical threat that is terrifying because you think of the voodoo priests, the voodoo gods are going to destroy you.
And I'm wondering if there are any studies on that. I'd like to read a book about it because it happens. That is fascinating. Have you heard of the book The Serpent and the Rainbow? I've heard that name. Would you mind Googling that, Christos? This was written by an anthropologist from Harvard that went down, I believe it was, to Haiti.
And he was specifically looking at these witch doctors that were performing... these types of spells, curses to the people of the island. And Chris, feel free to correct me if I'm off on this, because this has been a long time since I've read the excerpts. But there was a specific case where there was a witch doctor or I guess a voodoo priest that was
giving people drugs to effectively make it look like they died, and then they would handle the burial process, and then they would exhume them. And they'd come back to life. And they weren't dead, and they came back to life.
And they either used this as proof of their divine powers, that I can save this person, bring them back to life, and there's been a couple cases where the priests, these voodoo priests, would then enslave these people, where effectively they lived in their homes as like indentured servants, and they would continue to give them drugs. That's the origin of zombies. Right.
The zombie tale comes out of that where people are restored to life. Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis that investigates Haitian food and pharmacology basis of zombies. So he travels to Haiti to undercover how these priests are using potion induced near death states to create these zombies as a part of this secret society social control. And it sounds insane. It is.
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