A vision reportedly seen in a palm tree beside the falls in 1847 turned Saut-d'Eau into a pilgrimage site, and the church's response to that vision was to try to cut the tree down.
A vision, and an attempt to remove it
Tradition holds that an apparition of the Virgin Mary was seen in a palm tree near the waterfall in 1847, an event that quickly drew pilgrims and devotional attention. Church authorities, uneasy about the spontaneous, uncontrolled popular devotion the vision generated, reportedly had the palm tree cut down at one point in an attempt to discourage the growing pilgrimage, an intervention that did not stop the site's significance from continuing to grow regardless.
A shared feast day
The pilgrimage centres on the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel each July, a Catholic feast date that has become closely associated in Haitian Vodou practice with specific lwa venerated at the site, drawing large numbers of pilgrims who bathe in the waterfall's water for spiritual cleansing and healing, a single annual date serving two distinct but overlapping devotional frameworks at once.
As this entry's companion article covers
The specific character of spirit possession experienced by pilgrims at the falls, and the understanding that a person undergoing possession is not treated as exercising ordinary personal choice in that state, is addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.