New Orleans looks to voodoo to bring city back from the dead

THE last time Don Glossop saw his customers they were ritually burning green candles, hoping voodoo would pierce the federal bureaucracy and hasten the arrival of desperately-needed relief cheques.

Mr Glossop’s shop, New Orleans Mistic, has been closed since Hurricane Katrina swamped the city two months ago, and most of his clients, who practice a local variant of the voodoo religion, have scattered across the country.

He fears that Katrina, which laid waste to entire neighbourhoods and claimed hundreds of lives here, may take another casualty: New Orleans’s status as the US voodoo capital.