I recently went into St. Louis No. 1 and discovered that he moron tour guides have picked a new tomb to destroy:

Less reputable guides will tell their groups that a particular tomb has some powerful Voodoo practitioner buried inside and even beyond the grave is still to be feared. Ironically, they then tell you that the best way to pay your respect is to desecrate their tombs and give them a little errand to run on your behalf. I'm sorry, I don't know if this makes me want to laugh or cry. I don't care what your religious beliefs are, I don't care how young or gullible or hung over you are. Tell me if this makes any sense to you:

"Okay, we're going to break off a piece of someone else's tomb and use it to scratch 3 X's into this pooooooowerful dead lady's grave. And she'll be thrilled about that, by the way. So go ahead and scrape off some more of her plaster, no problem, then knock three times on the brick and then make a wish so the nice (but scary!) dead lady can get right to work on that!"

If it was just a silly superstition, I wouldn't care, but these graves are already falling apart faster than they can be put back together. And yes, each person takes just a small chip of brick- but dozens of times a day, 6 days a week?

Here is the side of that same tomb, and you can see how a layer of brick has already come loose and how the plaster is already coming off. This particular grave is well off the beaten path; I think the caretakers have been trying to discourage this practice, so I'm guessing whatever guide is doing this is trying to hide his activities:

Traditionally, it's been Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau's tomb they've chosen:

There, you can see the x's better because the plaster is being maintained, otherwise it would have long been worn away. While there's a controversy over whether the Queen is really in that grave at all, the tomb in that first set of photos doesn't even have a name on it and the guide likely doesn't even know who's inside. I have gotten into fights in St. Louis No. 1, telling people to knock it off and why. The amazing thing is how many of them are wide eyed that grave desecration would be any kind of a problem. One even dreamily told me that "it's just like wishing on a star!" Wow. It's enough to make you hope that Marie Laveau is in there, listening. It would have made that girl's dreams veeeeerrry interesting that night, I'm sure.