A North Carolina woman dies after going on a Vodou retreat in Haiti. Her son wants answers.

“My mom went down to Haiti, they did this last piece of the ceremony, and something sinister happened,” said Timothy Jackson.

A North Carolina man is asking for answers after his mom died while on a Vodou retreat in Haiti.

Dana Jackson, 51, wanted to become a Manbo priestess. A Manbo priestess “is a female ritual specialist in the Haitian Vodou tradition. Like her male counterpart, the oungan (or houngan), she performs ceremonies, initiations, healings, and divinations,” according to an article on the Harvard University website.

Vodou is an African religion and comes from the word Fon which means “God” or “Spirit” and “originated in the ancient kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Nigeria, Benin, and Togo)”, according to an article on the religion by PBS.org. Alternative spellings of the religion include Vodun and Vodoun, but not Voodoo. The spelling Voodoo is considered “the sensationalist and derogatory Western creation,” the article continues.

Her son, Timothy Jackson, told USA TODAY that this was something that she wanted to do and had been practicing for a few years prior to her trip to Haiti.

“Four years ago, my mom started to do a little bit of research on the African traditional spiritual belief systems and Vodou was a part of that,” he said. “She had kind of been on this path of just kind of doing research and practicing, or at least, just doing her due diligence as far as research is concerned.”

Jackson said that his mom left for Haiti on July 1 and was supposed to return to the United States on July 26. His mom traveled with a group of people who had joined a house in order to participate in the Vodou rituals.

“The people that she went down there with, their name is Sosyete and I believe that that means society in the Turkish language and Nago,” Jackson said. “These weren’t strangers that she went down there with. These are people that she’s built a relationship with.”

Jackson said the group recently went on a trip to Boston together in June.

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No communication was apart of the Vodou ceremony

During part of the Vodou ceremony, Jackson expected to not hear from his mom.

“If you do any research about that part of the ceremony, even just on Google, it’ll tell you, that’s very sacred and things of that nature,” he said. “So she sent me one last message on the 13th, and she said, ‘we will talk on the 21st going to church tomorrow.‘”

Jackson and his mom spoke every day. The no communication part was nerve-wrecking to him, but he wanted to respect his mother’s decision to participate in the ritual. In the last message he received from his mom on July 21 she asked him to, “pray for her.”

“That whole entire week just kind of low key, (I was) having anxiety because I’m not able to hear from her, and I know that this is a very important part of the ceremony,” he said. “On the 21st, I didn’t hear anything from her. I did reach out to her at about 5 p.m. on WhatsApp. I didn’t get any response.”

Mom doesn’t respond after Vodou ceremony; son finds out about her death

The next day, Jackson still did not get a message from his mom, and he began to worry.

“I woke up. I’m not gonna lie, I was in a little bit of a panic, because I felt like by now, she at least would have responded to my text,” he said.

Around 5 p.m. on July 22, his grandmother broke the news that his mom had died.

“The way she told me was, ‘your mom’s not coming back from Haiti.’ So I hung up the phone with her,” he said  “I called her back. I asked her, ‘what did she mean?’ She said, ‘she’s not coming back from Haiti. She passed away.’ I hung up the phone. I called her again.”

After a lot of back and forth between Jackson and his grandmother, he called his grandfather, and he confirmed that his mom had died.

‘Something sinister happened’

In order to confirm his mother’s passing, Jackson reached out to one of the leaders of the group that went to Haiti with his mom. The first thing they asked him was, “how much did he know?”

“To be completely honest with you, my initial thought was my mom went down to Haiti, they did this last piece of the ceremony, and something sinister happened,” he said.

The person that spoke with him told him that his mom had gotten extremely sick during the ceremony. They told him that she kind of fainted. When she regained consciousness, she didn’t know where she was. When a member of the house asked her where she was, she said in Virginia, Jackson said.

However, Jackson said his family hadn’t lived in Virginia in over a year.

Jackson said they also told him that they brought her to the hospital. At the hospital, she started to have seizures, and they said she had a heart attack and a stroke.

“That was the initial story,” he said. “They said that my mom didn’t bring her medicine. So there was a red flag, because what medicine are you guys talking about? it sounds like they were trying to perpetuate a story.”

Jackson also was supposed to get an update on where his mom’s body is located on Aug. 16 but that still hasn’t happened.

“I haven’t heard anything, he said. “I don’t even think the U.S. Embassy got involved, or even received the necessary paperwork until about four days ago.”

USA TODAY reached out to the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, but they did not respond prior to publication.

Remembering Dana Jackson

Although Jackson’s mom had him at a young age, her goal was to work hard to create a better life for them.

In 1999, Jackson said that his mom took a job at a technology company that was based in Savannah, Georgia. In his mom’s role she was to help start the companies operations in the state. During their time in Georgia, Jackson remembers getting his own bathroom. bedroom, attending extracurricular activities and ultimately getting closer to his mom.

Years later he asked his mom why she decided to relocate.

“I asked her, many years later, ‘why did you decide to move down there?’ She said ‘Tim, I needed that time to learn how to become a mother to my son,’” he said.

Another memory that Jackson shared was in 2017 when his family took a trip to Las Vegas, Nevada where the two ended up meeting rapper Nelly. The rapper ended up turning around and talking to the two before he left the hotel, Jackson said.

“In Vegas, we were getting ready to check into our hotel, and Nelly was coming out. My mom looked at me, and I looked at her, and then we just both chased him,” he said. “That was just how in sync we were.”

GoFundMe created for Dana Jackson’s funeral costs

Jackson created a GoFundMe account for his mom’s funeral and additional costs that he will need in the future.

“(The GoFundMe was created for) funeral costs, any costs associated with bringing her body back,” he said. “I would like to do an autopsy. I’ve been quoted a price for that.”

His mom told him how she wanted her funeral to go.

“We had a conversation maybe six years ago where she told me she wanted to be cremated, and she told me what her last wishes were,” he said.

Dana Jackson was supposed to turn 52 on Sept. 13, Jackson said.

“We don’t know what happened in the last nine days, but whatever happened, my mom did not go to Haiti not to come back to the United States,” he said.