This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Spenser St John served as British consul general to Haiti in the mid nineteenth century, a diplomatic posting that placed him in the country during one of its more notorious criminal proceedings. In 1864 the Haitian government invited a number of foreign diplomats, St John among them, to observe the Bizoton trial, a case that centered on allegations of ritual human sacrifice connected to Haitian Vodou.
Two decades later, in 1884, St John published Hayti, or the Black Republic, an account of his time in the country that included his description of the Bizoton proceedings. That book became the founding text behind a claim that would circulate for generations afterward, that Haitian Vodou routinely involves human sacrifice, repeated by later writers as though it were settled fact rather than one diplomat's account of a single, contested trial.
What later writers routinely dropped, St John's own book did not hide. His account records that confessions from the accused in the Bizoton case had been beaten out of them, a detail that undercuts the reliability of the very confessions the trial rested on, even as the book his observation produced went on to shape outside perceptions of Vodou for decades.