The night the Misfits were arrested in New Orleans for grave robbing in 1982
Fittingly enough for a city where death is always lurking, grave robbing used to be incredibly easy in New Orleans. It’s why The Big Easy has such a reputation for its cemeteries, but the Misfits arrived a couple of hundred years too late to take advantage of it.
New Orleans is essentially built on swampland. The kind that flooded very easily in the early days of the city’s existence. This flaw was problematic for a number of reasons, but the biggest was easily the fact that the settlers there were still trying to bury their dead.
This was the 1700s, there was a metric fuckton of death everywhere you looked, yet still, their loved ones tried to do right by them and give them a proper Christian burial. Then the floods came, and you can probably work out what happened next.
The reason that grave robbing was easy in New Orleans was that the very ground itself tried to help out. In the best-case scenario, the coffins themselves would rise from the ground like a flake popping out of the most cursed serving of chocolate ice cream you ever did see. However, most of the time, the combination of running water, heavy mud and cheap wood would cause the coffins to break. Suddenly auntie Clara came back for a visit despite her bout with yellow fever. Good news, though, she’s only missing most of her head.
Thus, New Orleans became the first city in America to make it standard practise to be buried above ground, at least among the rich. If you weren’t wealthy, you were most likely carted out of the city to be buried in solid ground further inland. If you had money or cultural clout, however, you were buried in one of the above-ground ‘cities of the dead’ which still stand today, one of the true joys of visiting New Orleans for a history buff.
Given that these graveyards are among the biggest historical treasures of New Orleans, they are also heavily protected. These aren’t places you can just go for a stroll in whenever you feel like it. Rather, they stand as arguably being the very heart of a city that’s been defined by death from the very beginning. With that in mind, it makes sense that when the Misfits played in New Orleans in 1982, they wanted to pay one of those cemeteries’ most famous residents a visit before they left.
After all, the Misfits may have been punks, but rather than focus on gritty reality the way that most bands of their time did, they combined that with a fascination with romance, glamour and death. Naturally, when they finished up their headline show at the NOLA club Tipitina’s, the Misfits decided to make the most of their time by visiting the grave of the New Orleans Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau. If you ask Glenn Danzig, it was simply to pay tribute; however, the police weren’t so understanding of their presence.
In the minds of the officers, they were just a bunch of punks in corpse paint breaking into a cemetery and going straight for one of the most famous graves in the world. Danzig, along with the entire 14-strong Misfits touring party, was arrested for grave robbing. If it were any other punk band in the world, I’d think there was at least a reason to suspect some grave robbing going on here.
However, the cops definitely didn’t know one crucial fact of the matter. Danzig is a massive, massive dork about the occult. He of all people would have treated the grave of Marie Laveau with a respect bordering on reverence. That was a grave that would have gone completely undisturbed save for perhaps a few more fawning messages written on it in lipstick or eyeliner.
Still, though, cops gonna cops, and they arrested the entire touring party, with a few of NOLA’s finest giving the more femme members of said party a beating while they did it.