Satanic Ritual
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Connecticut, US - A satanic ritual held in a Bridgeport cemetery involved pouring cologne on chickens and setting them on fire, police said.

Bridgeport Police Officer Ken Ruge said in a report that as he was patrolling early Saturday, he noticed a large, scorched patch of ground in St. Augustine Cemetery at Arctic and Helen streets.

He said he found a rooster, burned to death on the ground and an empty bottle of cologne nearby. Apparently the cologne was poured on the rooster, which was then set on fire, Ruge wrote.

A second chicken was found behind a headstone, burned but still alive, and the officer called the city Animal Control Department, which sent Officer Jim Gonzalez. He brought the chicken to a veterinary hospital, officials said.

Police said Monday that the cemetery has been the scene of several such incidents, and residents seeing someone entering a cemetery after dark should report it.

Police here investigated several similar incidents two years ago, including one in which a woman killed several chickens as part of a Santeria curse she put on an ex-boyfriend.

That scene included two beheaded roosters, hanging upside down from a tree limb about 10 feet off the ground, police and paranormal investigators said. At the base of the tree was a bag containing a black knit cap and a box cutter, and nearby there were three coconut halves, what appeared to be a sheep's jawbone and a snakeskin.

No arrests were ever made, but a member of the Connecticut Soul Seekers group of paranormal investigators claimed to have spoken to the couple.

Police Sgt. James Myers, who is himself a paranormal investigator, said at the time that there had been an upswing of occult activity in Bridgeport, much of it related to voodoo or Santeria, a Caribbean religion that combines elements of West African Yoruba and Roman Catholicism.

In June 2009, officers found a human skull, a beheaded chicken, chickens' blood and other animal parts in a Madison Avenue basement during a drug raid. The next month, two human skulls were found in a circular blanket of loose dirt and bloody papers with names on them at Mountain Grove Cemetery.

Just days later, the body of a 2-year-old girl stolen from her Stamford grave showed up in a New Jersey river with chicken bones nearby.