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Article snippet: On a leafy side street in East Harlem is a small park with a wrought-iron gate holding a heart-shaped design. To most, the heart is a charming architectural flourish, but to others, like Migene González-Wippler, it is indisputable proof of occult activity. “Someone was practicing serious voodoo in this park,” she said. “That heart is there for a reason. It is there to summon a god.” The heart, she said, indicates that the park was once the site of secretive voodoo rituals. It is a symbol called a veve, which is used to summon the religion’s spirits, known as the loa. Dream Street Park on East 124th Street, between Second and Third Avenues, is a grassy, desolate lot used by locals mostly as a dog run. Ms. González-Wippler, an author and expert on Afro-Caribbean religions, first noticed the heart in the late 1990s. Each voodoo spirit has its own distinct symbol, she said, and the red-painted heart shares an uncanny resemblance to that of the spirit Ezili, the voodoo goddess of love, right down to its curlicues. The cracked and poorly tended footpath encircling the park is also shaped like a heart. “The heart on the gate is too complicated and accurate for it to have been made for something else,” Ms. González-Wippler said. Veves, she added, can require “lots of rum, animal sacrifices and blood” in order to conjure their power. At Nirvana of New York, her new-age store on the fourth floor of a walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen, Ms. González-Wippler said she was also certain... Link to the full article to read more