Is the earth flat or is it round? For most people the answer is clear, it is round, but how do you know? Because you believe it and if you would believe the world is flat it would be flat for you. The world is what we believe it is and the same applies to Voodoo, Black Magic or any other religion. For some reason people face a serious issue to admit not to know. Our children in school learn about the creation of the pyramids even though no scientist actually really knows how they were built. Nobody can or wants to say, we don’t know. So, my answer to the question if Voodoo exists would have been years ago a definite no. Today I would have to admit, I don’t know, or actually it does, at least for some. The rational viewpoint is that our mind is very strong and can create whatever we believe in. The medicine calls it the placebo effect, if a patient receives a sugar pill but believes it is real drugs, it can have a healing affect as it would have been real drugs. It’s the power of our mind. The world is what we believe it is, what we believe we see or smell, even though it is all happening inside of us. How do we know that our eyes are projecting the right information to our brain? What is if somebody’s brain is wired different than most other people’s brain and what appears for many people a house is for some a mountain. Both experience the reality of it inside their mind, it is real to the individuals. At least it is something we can see; or we believe we can see because our brain gets the information from our eyes. Religion is about the world we cannot see; we have to believe in it sometimes without evidence. That makes it for rational minds difficult to believe it. But so many in the world believe in their religion and their legends attacked to it and the same is for Voodoo. Anybody who believes in Voodoo also believes in its power and creates its reality. Somehow this would be already enough explanation for my rational mind if there wouldn’t have been certain encounters in my life in Haiti which were quite spooky and suggested that there was a bit more to it. I would have never looked deep into it if it wouldn’t have affected my family, especially my daughter and maybe also me. We lived in a very small apartment in the capital of Haiti, Port au Prince. We had a bathroom, a living room/sleeping room in which we separated with curtains a small extra bedroom for our daughter and there was a tiny kitchen. The kitchen was not more than 9 square meters. We started to have a terrible smell in the kitchen. I believed it came from the sink and my landlord tried everything. He replaced the u-shaped tube below the sink and installed outside underground another one. We took the kitchen apart and still the smell stayed and actually was in the middle of the kitchen, but there was nothing else than the ceramic floor. We started to freak out when my daughter started turning her eyes up and looked at us exactly like in horror movies when some doll or child was possessed by some evil spirit and she made the same strange noises. She was around one year. She was only watching some DVD’s or selected Netflix shows, for sure she never watched any kind of scary movie where she could have seen such a face. My wife’s family is from Latin America and she reached out to a Shaman her family is using for cleansing and healing. The Shaman was shocked, he told my wife it was a very evil spirit somebody sent to us. He was never in Haiti and had no pictures from our apartment but could describe my wife exactly where the the spirit was located, in the middle of the kitchen. He needed the help of another Shaman for a protective ceremony to get rid of it and we had to clean our apartment with incense smoke and holy water and Clorox for the floors. The smell disappeared. The Shaman also described us the person who sent us the spirit which gave us an idea who it was. It was my first spiritual fight against an evil black magic curse. I never gave the evil spirit the power in my mind the general population did in Haiti, but I thought to have somebody on our side who can protect us in the spiritual world was still very useful, or even for none-believers couldn’t do much harm. When I asked my friend Father Tom for holy water, he told me that the sisters of an orphanage close to him were asking him also almost every week for the same reasons he said, some of them saw or at least felt the evil around them.