1875 New Orleans Cemetery and Pilgrimage Chapel of Ex-Votos
1725 St. Roch Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70117
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free; the cemetery and chapel are managed by New Orleans Catholic Cemeteries and open during posted daytime hours.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved cemetery paths between above-ground tombs; chapel entrance has steps
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1875 · Catholic Pilgrimage Chapel · Ex-Voto Tradition · Yellow Fever Epidemic Memorial
Reverend Peter Leonard Thevis, the German-born pastor of Holy Trinity Catholic Church in New Orleans's Faubourg Marigny, made a vow during the 1867 yellow-fever epidemic that if his parish was spared he would build a chapel and cemetery to St. Roch, the medieval French saint invoked against plague and pestilence. No parishioners of Holy Trinity died in the 1867 epidemic; none died in the more severe 1878 epidemic either.
Thevis purchased a parcel in what is now the St. Roch neighborhood and supervised construction of the Gothic Revival chapel and the surrounding cemetery. The cornerstone of the chapel was laid on September 6, 1875, and the cemetery was dedicated the same day. Burials in the surrounding plots, like those throughout New Orleans, used above-ground tombs because of the city's high water table.
The chapel became a place of pilgrimage almost immediately. Catholics across New Orleans visited to pray for healing from yellow fever, smallpox, polio, and other afflictions. Those whose prayers were answered, or who attributed their recovery to St. Roch's intercession, returned to leave ex-voto offerings — the Latin term for objects left in fulfillment of a vow. Over the next 150 years the chapel's side room accumulated plaster casts of healed limbs, glass eyes, dental plates, polio braces, crutches, false teeth, prosthetic limbs, and increasingly idiosyncratic objects including (in Atlas Obscura's documentation) a can of corn and a small Ronald McDonald figurine.
The chapel remains an active Catholic site, with mass celebrated on St. Roch's feast day (August 16) annually. The ex-voto collection is preserved as a living cultural and religious artifact rather than as a museum installation. New Orleans Catholic Cemeteries manages the property.
Sources
St. Roch Cemetery occupies an unusual position in New Orleans cemetery lore: its religious and pilgrimage significance overshadows the more typical above-ground-tomb paranormal narratives associated with St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 and other downtown burying grounds. Most accounts of phenomena at St. Roch are quiet and devotional in character rather than dramatic.
The most-circulated piece of folklore is the report of a black dog observed circling the chapel at dusk. The image, sometimes associated in Catholic iconography with the dog said to have brought bread to St. Roch during his own plague illness, recurs in local accounts but is not the subject of formal investigation.
Visitors entering the ex-voto room have occasionally described the figure of a person kneeling at the rail, only to find the room empty on second look. The room's accumulated contents — body parts cast in plaster, medical devices from a century of public health, and small objects whose meaning is known only to the pilgrim who left them — produces a strong atmospheric effect on first encounter.
The surrounding cemetery contains burials of yellow-fever victims, parish members across multiple generations, and a small section of children's graves that draws periodic visitor attention. Reports there are infrequent and individual.
The chapel's continuing religious use means it is not a paranormal-tourism destination in the commercial sense. Visitors interested in the ex-voto tradition and the public-health history of New Orleans will find more substance here than visitors looking primarily for ghost-tour content.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Walk an 1875 cemetery in New Orleans's St. Roch neighborhood and enter the small Gothic chapel at its center. The chapel's side room holds a century-and-a-half-deep collection of ex-voto offerings — plaster casts of healed limbs, polio leg braces, glass eyes, dental plates, prosthetic limbs, and crutches — left by pilgrims thanking St. Roch for healing.
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