Gabriel Knight sightseeing in New Orleans

• Features by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu
• Published:

“What can you tell me about Voodoo?” 

After my and my spouse’s recent trip to New Orleans, quite a bit actually! We had been wanting to travel to New Orleans to visit for a few years, and this year we decided to make it happen. But as adventure game fans, and specifically as Gabriel Knight fans, we had to make sure we hit as many of the locations from Sins of the Fathers as we could during our stay in the French Quarter. And I am happy to report that we were successful – no signs of a cult trying to tear down modern society with dark magic, but tons of incredible history and amazing food!

Our trip began at the historic Jackson Square after checking in at our hotel. Being a giant nerd, I immediately looked around to try to find a mime to get a selfie with. Unfortunately, while there were lots of other talented street performers and musicians, there was no mime to annoy the local police force with. I was impressed with the sheer number of street vendors present: artists, fortune tellers, tarot readers, jazz bands… Anyone and everyone was out, both in and around Jackson Square. While taking all that in, I was surprised to hear we were about an hour away from the start of a Halloween parade that we learned about right after checking in at our hotel. While not as big as some of the Mardi Gras festivities at other times in the year, getting to see some actual Halloween-themed Mardi Gras floats was a genuine treat – my spouse and I even managed to catch a set of spooky Mardi Gras beads for each other!

After the unexpected parade, we decided to head over to Bourbon Street for a night of fun and trying out some of the local cocktails. For the uninitiated (of which I was included) – in New Orleans, particularly in the French Quarter, it is entirely legal (even encouraged!) to walk around with an open container of alcohol in public. While we wandered through the sea of people, it suddenly made a ton of sense to me why Gabriel set up St. George’s Book Shop on Bourbon Street. Where else would someone like him decide to sell rare books, somewhere where he couldn’t get bored and get a cocktail to go in the middle of work hours? Unlike Gabriel, after we had a couple drinks we called it an early night, since it had been a long day of plane flights and exploring.

Our next day was our reservation for a walking tour with the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum. When we arrived at the museum, we first had the opportunity to look through the exhibits of artifacts. One that stood out for me was a depiction of the Rougarou, the gator-headed figure that you could find in the Dixieland Drug Store in Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. While there is no actual Dixieland Drug Store, it was cool to see that background element was directly inspired by an actual artifact from the real Historic Voodoo Museum. If you want to experience a close approximation of Dixieland, there’s thankfully a number of Voodoo shops you can go to throughout the Quarter (Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo and Voodoo Authentica are two we visited, which have a large variety of items you can purchase, from gris-gris bags to Voodoo dolls).

Back to the Historic Voodoo Museum – while looking around at the artifacts on display, something we immediately noticed was that the museum looked nothing like its portrayal in the game. Instead it consists of two rooms and a hallway leading away from the front-end retail space. But everywhere you look there are incredible artifacts and blurbs going over the history of what’s on display. While there wasn’t a deadly snake waiting for its chance to strangle us hanging from the ceiling, the Voodoo wishing stump and portrait of Marie Laveau from Gabriel Knight are both real items you can see in person. There are even some helpful instructions provided on how to leave a wish with the stump, if you want to participate while on the visit. 

One of the displays focuses specifically on the serpent Loa, Damballah. Contrary to how it is portrayed in the game (you know, the whole crushing of enemies in its coils and terrible violent destruction worshipped by the Gedde Voodoo Cartel), Damballah is actually more of a primordial creator figure who forms life rather than taking it away. Something that I especially appreciated through the whole museum was how based in fact the descriptions of the pieces on display were – if you go to this museum, there’s a good chance you’ll learn something new. I certainly did!

After going through the museum, we were taken to two important sites – the location where Marie Laveau’s cottage once stood, and Congo Square, where slaves were allowed to gather on Sundays (this was the only place where enslaved people were legally allowed to hold gatherings in the city) and is largely believed to be where Marie Laveau led dances for Voodoo rituals. While neither place is directly linked with a particular moment in Sins of the Fathers, I highly recommend visiting both of these locations to anyone wanting to learn more about Marie Laveau’s fascinating history outside of her involvement in the game’s story.

By the time we had finished our walking tour, my spouse and I had worked up quite a bit of an appetite, so we decided to stop in at the bar and restaurant that had been suggested to us earlier that day: Napoleon House. (Full disclosure, we did not realize this was the bar from Sins of the Fathers until the next day.) Their signature muffuletta sandwich was absolutely incredible, and I strongly encourage any fans of Gabriel Knight to try one when stopping in. I also learned during our lunch that the Napoleon House was named due to it being the intended refuge for Napoleon Bonaparte after his exile from France – the building itself looking like a time capsule into late 1700s architecture. 

Once filled with muffuletta, we continued our quest to visit more spots in the French Quarter – specifically St. George’s Book Shop. Okay, there isn’t an actual St. George’s Book Shop, but there are several book shops in the Quarter to scratch that particular itch. My personal favorite was Arcadian Books & Prints, where books were stacked so high around you that it felt like plucking bricks off the walls whenever you wanted to look at a particular title. There are other great book shops as well, with Dauphine Street Books being another cozy location with every wall lined with titles. While neither was host to a certain Schattenjäger, it was a welcome sight having multiple small stores to peruse through in the area.

Book shopping was the end of our Gabriel Knight-themed activities for the day, but the following day we decided to check out the interior of the St. Louis Cathedral before heading to our last stop on the Sins of the Fathers portion of our adventure. Upon walking in, I was immediately impressed by how accurate the depiction of the cathedral interior was in the game. But unlike the game, no dead body murdered with dark magic! (RIP Crash.) I can also confirm that we did not steal priests’ robes to sneak our way into grilling a local to tell us about an underground Voodoo cult, but we did walk through the sides of the main hall and admire the incredible architecture throughout. 

After stopping at the cathedral, we began walking to our final stop on our Gabriel Knight adventure: St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. When we walked through the gate of the cemetery with our tour guide, I was immediately taken aback by how meticulously the aboveground graves were laid out. While I was familiar with the basics on how aboveground burial worked and how it would look, it was a completely different beast seeing the specialized vaults and ornate tablets lining the cemetery. 

Our guide explained that each tomb vault – often three per tomb, owned by one or more families – acts to naturally cremate the bodies laid to rest due to their internal temperatures reaching the equivalent of an oven. For most people laid to rest there, after a year and a day the vault would be reopened and the ashes pushed back into a chamber at the bottom called a caveau to leave space in the main vault for another occupant to be entombed. The vault’s ornate tablet at the front of the tomb is then removed, along with a secondary brick wall, when the current occupant is ready to be moved to the caveau. Once a new body has been interred in the now-open vault, the front is resealed with brick and the tablet at the front updated to account for its new tenant. (The specific year-and-a-day timeframe is a local tradition, due to the long-held belief that this allows the previous corpse adequate time to fully decompose.) The ashes seep into the ground over time, and as such everyone entombed in this place eventually rejoins the earth together. I found it to be incredibly powerful, seeing all of these people from across eras all resting together. 

One tomb seemed different than a lot of the others – it looked to be in disrepair, and was covered in XXX markings like those I had expected to see for the person in particular we had come to the cemetery to see. Our tour guide informed us it was the alleged resting place of Doctor John, a Voodoo King in New Orleans (and likely the inspiration for Dr. John in Sins of the Fathers). A few more steps down the path, we were standing in front of our destination, the presumptive burial chamber of Marie Laveau. There are questions about the legitimacy of that claim, but as with Doctor John, the tomb that holds Marie Laveau’s vault was covered by a variety of XXX markings made by practitioners making a pilgrimage to see it. 

It was a humbling sight, seeing the impact someone like Marie Laveau still had over a century after her death, with the sheer number of markings and offerings laid out around the tomb. (We were told by our guide that the family who owned the other vaults in the tomb had to regularly have the tomb cleaned, so what we saw was only a fraction of the number of markings and offerings that have been left over the years). Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay long in the cemetery – there is limited space for capacity, and each tour is only allowed a brief amount of time to walk through its grounds. Even though our time was cut short, this was by far my favorite location on our trip.

While we were unable to visit Lake Pontchartrain during our time in New Orleans (the mosquitos were eating us alive already), getting to see the rest of these amazing locations from the game in the real world was an incredible treat. The cemetery was our last stop that related to Sins of the Fathers, but we visited a number of other places that any fan of Gabriel Knight would enjoy: the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum and all three vampire-themed bars come to mind: the New Orleans Vampire Café and Boutique du Vampyre’s Apothecary, and if you ask real nice at either location you’ll get an invitation to the vampire speakeasy, Potions.

The food, culture, and history in New Orleans were unlike anything I had ever experienced. If you’re a fan of Jane Jensen’s classic creation and are looking for an adventure, I can’t stress enough that you should make like a Schattenjäger and take your own journey down to the French Quarter to see this incredible place for yourself.

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