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So what I teach at the University of Maryland is constitutional history and I've done a lot of writing about a famous Supreme Court case to come out of New Orleans called the Slaughterhouse cases, which took place in the early 1870s.

And as I was searching the New Orleans newspapers,

looking for references to the slaughterhouse cases,

I stumbled across in June 1870 these allegations that a baby had been

abducted for use as a voodoo sacrifice. And I said, that is really interesting.

And anyone has done historical research knows there's all these things you stumble across

and you're like, wow, if I have time, I'll come back to that someday.

But I started as I was reading each day of the New Orleans Papers

following it as if it was the events of 1870 and the story just got better and more complex and more intertwined with

reconstruction and I said this is a story that needs to be told.

That's Mike Ross, a history professor at the University of Maryland. But before moving to Maryland, Mike taught at Loyola University in New Orleans.

And what he described in the beginning of this episode, the experience of stumbling upon a crazy

story is familiar to me.

Most of the big stories I've worked on, whether their podcast, news articles or documentaries, came out of other stories.

...