Spectres, Soucouyants, and Song: The Many Hauntings of Lopinot
Author: Daphnee Béchard, Concordia University
Editor: Beatrice Moritz
Located in Trinidad (Trinidad and Tobago), Lopinot village was the site of the first episode of Ghost Hunters International’s third season investigating the paranormal worldwide. The episode’s plot began to unfold following a decidedly gruelling uphill car drive (during which “We’re going to die” was uttered a few times), when the GHI crew reached the quaint Northern Mountain Range village, object of their journey to the Caribbean island. Although the group’s motivations were first put into focus in the van, in an introductory discussion of sorts, crucial additional context for their ghost hunting mission was provided from locals. The show featured accounts from several of Lopinot’s inhabitants, including Martin Gomez and Donna Mora, members of the Lopinot Tourism Association, from whom the GHI team learned of the intricacies of the village’s folklore, with what appeared to be the local consensus made clear: a haunting had been taking place in Lopinot.[1]
The village of Lopinot, originally La Reconnaissance Estate, was founded through colonial conquest by a French Count, Charles Joseph de Lopinot.[2] At the time Spanish territory, Trinidad’s lands were often allotted to the Catholic French by the Spanish Crown. Lopinot, originally a slavemaster in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), fled due to the Revolution, taking his slaves with him. Once in Trinidad, Lopinot came across an abundant river contained within a lush rainforest valley, where he established his cocoa estate. As his plantation was instituted, his treatment of his slaves became sadistic. In an interview I conducted with Donna Mora (of the Lopinot Tourism Association), she recounted, “Even the government at that time investigated him three years after he died, because when they came [to] the estate, they realised they were coming to meet 100 slaves, [but] there were only 48 slaves. So it's alleged he hung most of them, or at least 52 slaves.”[3]
The village’s chestnut tree, used to conduct these hangings, has been alleged to bleed by the present-day inhabitants of Lopinot, the weight of a past of death still carried on. Upon investigation, Ghost Hunters International corroborated the claim that red liquid came out of the tree, but gauged it to simply be red-tinted sap. Accounts of supernatural activity permeate the village, with many individuals claiming to have been able to perceive the phantoms of either the Count de Lopinot or his slaves. With the help of their ghost-hunting technology, GHI identified what they believed to potentially be a mid-flight Soucouyant (an elderly woman who can transform herself into a ball of fire), as well as several other, more minor spectral occurrences.[4]
Modern-day ghost hunting is predicated on mixing the scientific and the un-scientific in an apparent rebuttal of Western ways of knowing, entrenched in the scientific values of the Enlightenment. In theory, an American-produced television show promoting belief in the supernatural would only interest the fringes of its reached public and be, to a certain extent, countercultural. Nonetheless, when GHI and other reality TV series of a comparable nature aired, they enjoyed popularity. Rather than acting as a rejection of science, these programs sought to present their paranormal content in a way that would adopt the aesthetics of the scientific, potentially appealing to the skeptics. Through various auditory and visual media production tools, ghost hunter shows attempted to gather proof of the existence of their subject matter, seemingly presenting their evidence to viewers with the specific intent of having them evaluate whether the findings fall within the purview of rational probing and analysis.[5]
In the Lopinot Tourism Association’s tours, folkloric spiritual items are baked into objective historical fact, allowing for a more holistic perspective that reflects the integral part the folktales play in the village’s identity. Far from being a source of constant terror, experiences with the spirits have become an almost banal occurrence to villagers, who simply “go on with [their] life” once they end, according to Donna Mora. Maintaining the knowledge of Lopinot’s folklore, to her, is an essential aspect of preserving its history, oral storytelling being the principal vehicle to do so.[6] Although the Age of Enlightenment led to evidence-based science and rationality being ingrained into European society, Europe’s coeval domination of the Americas oversaw and ensured a mode of economic production rooted in the extreme brutalization of entire peoples, justified by racial pseudoscience. When the availability (and non-availability) of historical archive is derived from this state of affairs, thus mirroring its conditions, collective memory provides an alternative history in spite of its subjective nature, shaped by its reactivity, its omissions, its amnesias, and its vulnerability to “manipulations.”[7] Folklore, passed down from each generation to the next, is part and parcel of this memory.[8]
On a broader cultural level, the mechanisms behind these types of folk beliefs can be explained through the act of “bricolage.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, in The Savage Mind, introduces the idea of bricolage, designating two contrasting life perspectives as categories of inventors: engineers, with a pre-planned, orderly, and intellectualized approach; and bricoleurs, who improvise with the materials available to them.[9] Bricolage is dependent on this fixed amount of materials and on the bricoleur’s ability to assess them and adapt to circumstances, which can include instances where available materials can be enhanced.[10] While the team of GHI could be categorized as engineers due to their focus on methodology and the quest for evidence, their findings, however, are contingent on constant improvisation. Rather than employing a scientific methodology, their hypotheses are built on the information given to them through folklore being “confirmed” by their subjective perceptions, themselves adapted to their ghost hunting activities. Their materials include infrared cameras, electromagnetic field detectors, and thermal imaging cameras, whose original purposes were subverted to reveal the paranormal, transforming these objects into carriers of the supernatural.[11]
In the historical context of the wider Caribbean region, bricolage was exerted on a cultural scale, its process being one of violence and oppression. Colonized and enslaved populations were forced to adapt to a reality in which their cultures were fragmented. In her 2006 article “Colonization, Creolization, and Globalization: The Art and Ruses of Bricolage,” Wendy Knepper explains: “the usefulness of a bricolage as a strategy of self-determination and identity is to be discovered by unearthing its deconstructive and ambivalent potential, both in “creating” new fragments to choose from and as a process of “re-membering” the fragmentary in the context of a new cultural object or discourse. Historically speaking, creolization was enacted through the bricolage as an uneven process of adaptation to the New World and the resources it offered for use”.[12]
After the rupture created by the forced separation of enslaved West Africans from their homeland, and the ensuing violent obliteration of their initial African identity, history progressed leaving the Afroascendant Caribbean population with fractured memories, the right to archived history being tethered to the power they lacked. The “bricolage materials” they could access belonged to different peoples, resulting in different linguistic systems, aesthetics, and philosophical viewpoints merging to reconstruct culture. This materialized identity, borne of the creolization of distinct cultural elements, is thus one of survival.[13]
The blueprint for Caribbean folk tales as they are currently envisioned surfaced during slavery. Storytelling, an important part of many African cultures, continued to be practiced by the enslaved, whose environments compelled them to alter their tales. These influences primarily stemmed from the imposition of European cultural practices, as well as interactions with Indigenous populations with whom they shared material conditions resulting from enslavement and subjugation.[14] After the abolition of slavery, indentured labourers (a majority originating from the Indian subcontinent) were also taken to Trinidad, additional cultural influences being brought alongside the people put into the boats of colonial forces.[15] Bricolage, as a function of creolization, is a never-ending process, its fragmented “materials”, in their finiteness, being continuously re-adapted and replenished.[16] How Caribbean folklore is elaborated relies heavily on an assemblage of these different fragments.[17] An example of this would be Papa Bois, a folkloric woodland character, who has been likened to Yawahu, an Indigenous “Arawak” spirit with similar mythological functions, as well as Taino spirit Yaya and the French Basque “Lord of the Woods” figure.[18] Mama Dlo, another important piece of folklore, has been associated with Yoruba Orisha Yemaya, voodoo loa Erzulie Dantor, “Arawak” spirit Ori-yo, Warau spirit Ho-aránni, Kalinago spirit Oko Yumo, an Ancient Minoan goddess, as well as a type of European demon called “lamia.”[19] The figures of Papa Bois and Mama Dlo, amongst others, are an integral part of traditional Trinidadian storytelling, making apparitions throughout a variety of narratives, both oral and written.
After executing various paranormal tests, the team of GHI engaged in a small activity break before unveiling their results. Being in Trinidad, they decided to take a lesson in the Republic’s national instrument, the steelpan. Also a product of bricolage (the instrument being the result of creating indentations in an oil barrel), its inclusion highlights the importance of music in Trinidadian culture.[20] During the time of the Count de Lopinot, the enslaved were allegedly prohibited from playing the drum, while in modern Lopinot, the steelpan and other percussion instruments are used in musical performances.[21] This is often done in the context of the local Christmas music genre, parang, another essential part of Lopinot’s identity, with nearly all of its inhabitants somehow taking part in it during “parang season.”[22] Parang is said to have been brought to Trinidad by the Cocoa Panyols, Venezuelans from the state of Oriente who arrived to the island in the 19th century to work on its cocoa estates.[23] Although initially culturally distinct and isolated from broader Trinidadian society, they eventually began to integrate into the Afro-Trinidadian population’s culture, both groups sharing similar material conditions and placement in the societal hierarchy.[24]
The word “parang” itself is a form of cultural bricolage. The Venezuelan immigrants partook in “parranda,” celebration music in Spanish. Over the course of time, this genre of music began to mostly be played at Christmas-time, with songs generally tackling spiritual and religious matters relating to the festivity, making “parranda navideña” the main form of “parranda” in Trinidad. The term “parranda” was then orally shortened to “parran”, until it eventually became “parang”, designating in the twentieth century a now Trinidadian genre of music.[25] In spite of French-based Patois and English being the dominant languages during and after the emergence of parang, Spanish remained its language of expression, despite many Trinidadian parang singers being unable to speak the language.[26] It is almost as though, through the usage of their tongue, the songs are being sung by the first Cocoa Panyols, who brought this tradition to Trinidad and contributed to the culture’s further creolization. In this way, music has become a space transcending time and physical existence, where lyrics do not necessarily make sense to the singer or audience while a deeper meaning still resonates, creating a liminal space between “understanding” and “not understanding” that, for those with Cocoa Panyol origins (of which there are many in Lopinot), could perhaps even feel like ancestral echos.
Stories passed down from ancestors are ever-present in Trinidadian music. Inspired by both the griots of West Africa and the European storytelling styles people were exposed to during slavery, song lyrics have long been a medium to transmit narratives, a tradition made observable in genres such as calypso, as well as its offshoot, rapso.[27] Although for many decades in English, calypso emerged in the early twentieth century through (French-based) Patois-language songs. From the eighteenth century onwards, Patois was the most spoken language in Trinidad, its Creole dialect being unique to the island. Many songs were composed in the language, including Christmas-season creche music, currently sung by singers who on many occasions do not comprehend the lyrics.[28] Speaking to France Télévision’s Caribbean outlet Martinique la 1ère, Ethmi Nicholas, an anglophone Patois singer who does not speak the language, describes her artistic experience in spiritual terms that evoke the aforementioned idea of liminal space:
Quand vous chantez en créole, ça vient du cœur. Vous vous sentez différents, ce n’est pas comme chanter en anglais, vous ressentez quelque chose de plus profond, vous sentez beaucoup plus en contact avec Dieu, l’impression que le Seigneur est plus près de vous.
(When you sing in Patois, it comes from the heart. You feel different, it’s not like singing in English, you feel something deeper, you feel much more in touch with God, the impression that the Lord is closer to you.)[29]
After the British conquered the island from the Spanish (and consequently the French settlers), English was put in place as the official language as a show of force, with the speaking of Patois being made taboo and ill-perceived. Today, Patois is a dying language, with a handful of its last speakers among the elders of Lopinot. Efforts are made to preserve the language, seen as a highly valuable key to a better understanding of cultural history. Patois, itself a spectre, is the original language in which Trinidadian folk tales were narrated, an important additional dimension to its otherworldly nature.[30]
The concept of liminality has been used to explain the emergence and development of said folktales. Anique Jordan, in her 2015 Master’s Thesis entitled “Possessed: A Genealogy of Black Women, Hauntology and Art as Survival”, presents liminal space as engendering a creativity “of subversion and liberation”, that “can only be understood through the haunting,” which lays outside the invisibilizing perimeter of archived colonial memory.[31] What is made invisible is decided by the extractive forces that have established the binaries necessary to the White supremacist system, racially delineating between human and non-human, life and death. Liminality, at its core, fundamentally draws from and contradicts the state of being a means to an end in the process of production, becoming a place that both shapes and is shaped by those within it, where multiple, sometimes contradictory realities coexist. This existential plane is not only the journey from Point A to Point B - and between two differing identities (from freedom to enslavement, as well as from a specific African ethnic identity to a Black one) - but it is also the destination in itself, a source of agency in spite of victimization that eschews binaries to allow for complexity.[32] Creole identity, via creolization, is therefore inherently liminal, as it entails constant transformation in relation to the environment.[33]
Hauntedness is a result of this state of liminality, Jordan posits, as spectres emerge from the blurring and merging of the fields of the physical and the spiritual, of the certain and the uncertain, of the visible and the invisible, of the past and the present, and of the present and the un-present. She writes, “I propose liminality is a site of magic,” later tying its sacredness and transformative powers to the process engaged in during Trinidadian Carnival.[34] After being transferred from a multiplicity of ancestral origin points through fragmentation, the diverse cultural elements and traditions present in Trinidad are hybridized by Carnival, where imaginative expression takes on an abundance of forms in virtually all strata of society, the grand celebration of freedom colouring the “road” and merging reality and surreality. Characters, often either taken from or partially inspired by folkloric traditions, take to the streets, adding to the visual rendering of ancestral spiritualities.[35] These types of encounters with ghosts demonstrate that these entities belong to the liminal.
Lopinot village has always been the meeting point of contradictions, its very name symbolizing this. Its ghostly (super)nature exemplifies the liminality inherent to the emergence and passing down of folklore in Trinidad, with its otherworldly manifestations having been theorized to be the result of the practice of voodoo, per Donna Mora:
I believe that the slaves that [came were] Haitians, and their religion is voodoo. So because of that, of course things would have been left on the estate [...] Even the Amerindians, they would have left… we found artefacts in our cemetery. [...] And then, the Haitians, with their voodoo, and then the indentured labourers, [..] and then the Cocoa Panyols and the French Creoles, they have their necromancies as well. [...] From the Indigenous, the African, Cocoa Panyol, French Creole, [...] the indentured labourers, I think all of them left their mark. But, however, what made it worse is the treatment of the Count de Lopinot of his slaves. And I think some of the things that he did caused them to reach out to their own motherland. [...] He had them so distressed, I believe [...] for them to keep their [...] tradition [...] was part of keeping the African heritage.[36]
When it developed in Haiti, voodoo was already the result of the fragmentation of West African belief systems, with aspects of European Christianity incorporated inside; by nature, it is a creolized, liminal religion.[37] Its potential transportation to Count de Lopinot’s estate would have been marked by continued concealed practice, speculated by Mora to have occurred in the “cocoa house” atop the village’s church, a highly unusual architectural design feature.[38] Should this ever be found to be historical fact, belief in the village’s unique spirits alongside belief in island-wide Trinidadian folklore would almost constitute a form of double syncretism, generally devoid of any worship, which would be heresy to Lopinot’s Christian majority.
Lopinot’s unique spiritual baggage, as well as fear the storytelling tradition could disappear for the next generation of Trinidadians, motivates Mora to embed folklore into the Lopinot Tourism Association’s guided visits of the village.[39] For many years an advocate for increased government funding of the Historical Complex, the Association aims to meaningfully contribute to the village economy, which bases itself in sustainable practices.[40] Preserving history and the memory of its ghosts, here, works in tandem with the development of the tourism industry. Similarly, the practice of ghost hunting in the United States has led to the inception of a ghost hunting economy adjacent to the proliferation of the activity’s community, GHI only being a facet of the plethora of media (and merchandise) inspired by the topic.[41] The storyline of the episode of GHI in Lopinot makes it appear as though the villagers called in the crew for its services, likening their work to that of any other professionals in the service economy. In turn, GHI used its ghost hunting and non-ghost hunting cameras to capture images of the village and its inhabitants (both physical and spiritual), creating a piece of media that will belong to its franchise and be transmitted as such. While spectres have always transcended death to characterize viewpoints present throughout history, it appears that they too must make a living if they wish to remain extant.
Appendix
Figure 1. Daphnee Bechard, "Photograph of Lopinot House overlayed with its 3D animated dreamscape version", November 2024.
Figure 2. Daphnee Bechard, "Glimpses of Lopinot, with Steelpan by Ukpöng “Pöng” Etang", dir. Daphnee Bechard, February 2025.
Footnotes
[1] Ghost Hunters International, season 3, episode 1, “Rising from the Grave: Trinidad.” Aired July 13, 2011, on SyFy. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh_i_ht2T6k&t=1993s.
[2] Donna Mora, “Interview on Lopinot’s Folklore and History,” interview by Daphnee Bechard, October 26, 2024; Johnny Coomansingh, “Parang Music as an Attraction for Rural Development: An Example from the Village of Lopinot, Trinidad,” Festival and Event Tourism, July 4, 2022, 21.
[3] Mora, “Interview on Lopinot’s Folklore and History.”
[4] Ghost Hunters International, “Rising from the Grave: Trinidad.”
[5] Tore Thun, “I am not sure what is real, or what my mind wants to be real": A study on epistemology among ghost hunters in Northern California" (master's thesis, Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet, Fakultet for samfunnsvitenskap og teknologiledelse, Sosialantropologisk institutt, 2013) 1, 7-12.
[6] Mora, “Interview on Lopinot’s Folklore and History.”
[7] Wendy Knepper, “Colonization, Creolization, and Globalization: The Art and Ruses of Bricolage,” Small Axe 11, no. 1 (2006): 76.
[8] Patricia Mohammed, “Morality and the Imagination – Mythopoetics of Gender and Culture in the Caribbean: The Trilogy,” South Asian Diaspora 1, no. 1 (March 2009): 70, 74, 81–82; Wendy Knepper, “Colonization, Creolization, and Globalization: The Art and Ruses of Bricolage,” 73–78, 84–85; Sujin Huggins, “The Curators of Cultural Tradition: Storytelling Activities of the National Library of Trinidad and Tobago,” Storytelling, Self, Society12, no. 1 (March 2016): 67–70.
[9] Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 16–19.
[10] Knepper, “Colonization, Creolization, and Globalization: The Art and Ruses of Bricolage,” 71–74.
[11] Yidio, “Watch Ghost Hunters International Season 3 Episode 1 - Rising from the Grave: Trinidad,” Yidio, n.d.; Thun, “‘I Am Not Sure What Is Real,’” 2.
[12] Knepper, “Colonization, Creolization, and Globalization: The Art and Ruses of Bricolage,” 73.
[13] Knepper, “Colonization, Creolization, and Globalization: The Art and Ruses of Bricolage,” 73-76.
[14] Knepper, “Colonization, Creolization, and Globalization: The Art and Ruses of Bricolage,” 75-76, 81, 85.
[15] Huggins, “The Curators of Cultural Tradition,” 68; Mohammed, “Morality and the Imagination,” 65-66; Francisca Carol Allard, “Parang: Meeting Ground for Afro- and Indo-Trinidadians,” in Popular Culture: Arts and Social Change in Latin America, (Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials, 2014), 101–102.
[16] Knepper, “Colonization, Creolization, and Globalization: The Art and Ruses of Bricolage,” 75, 85.
[17] Dahlia James-Williams, “An Investigation of the Impact of Amerindian Mythology on Trinidad and Tobago’s Forest Folklore,” History in Action 2, no. 2 (September 2011): 1, 4–5.
[18] James-Williams, “An Investigation of the Impact of Amerindian Mythology,” 2; Mohammed, “Morality and the Imagination,” 77.
[19] Mohammed, “Morality and the Imagination,” 77-80; James-Williams, “An Investigation of the Impact of Amerindian Mythology,” 3.
[20] National Library and Information System Authority, “Steelband – NALIS – National Library and Information System Authority,” NALIS.
[21] Mora, “Interview on Lopinot’s Folklore and History.”
[22] Coomansingh, “Parang Music as an Attraction,” 22-23.
[23] Coomansingh, “Parang Music as an Attraction,” 22; Allard, “Parang,” 101-102.
[24] Allard, “Parang,” 102-103.
[25] Coomansingh, “Parang Music as an Attraction,” 22.
[26] Allard, “Parang,” 103; Sophia Leps, “Revitalization of the Patois Language in Trinidad – An Examination of the Effectiveness of Songs in the Process,” 11.
[27] Huggins, “The Curators of Cultural Tradition,” 71-72.
[28] Leps, “Revitalization of the Patois Language,” 11
[29] Martinique la 1ère, “Trinidad : Les Derniers Créolophones.” YouTube, accessed January 2, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYLzwfLQHQA.
[30] Leps, “Revitalization of the Patois Language,” 9.
[31] Anique Yma Jashoba Jordan, “Possessed: A Genealogy of Black Women, Hauntology and Art as Survival” (thesis, 2015), 45.
[32] Jordan, “Possessed: A Genealogy of Black Women, Hauntology and Art as Survival” 40-45, 47-49.
[33] Knepper, “Colonization, Creolization, and Globalization: The Art and Ruses of Bricolage,” 77-78.
[34] Jordan, “Possessed: A Genealogy of Black Women, Hauntology and Art as Survival” 44.
[35] Jordan, “Possessed: A Genealogy of Black Women, Hauntology and Art as Survival” 47-49.
[36] Mora, “Interview on Lopinot’s Folklore and History.”
[37] Knepper, “Colonization, Creolization, and Globalization: The Art and Ruses of Bricolage,” 76.
[38] Mora, “Interview on Lopinot’s Folklore and History.”
[39] Mora, “Interview on Lopinot’s Folklore and History.”
[40] Coomansingh, “Parang Music as an Attraction,” 24-26.
[41] Thun, “‘I Am Not Sure What Is Real,’” 1-2