Just a foot in front of me was a statue of a skeleton dressed in monastic robes gripping a scythe, it's bare teeth contorted into a grim smile below the black hollows of its eye sockets. I was here to undergo an exorcism at the altar of this chilling idol.

Lukzero wore a gold and purple cap which she claimed allowed her to communicate with the powerful spirits which were present. I could feel her hot breath against my neck as she chanted softly directly into my ear in a strange language that sounded like an ancient Aztec dialect.

The witch told me to start praying to the figure for acceptance - as the room filled with acrid smoke from incense sticks held over a red candle.

Lukzero lit a cigar and drew deeply on it before blowing the heavy smoke directly into my face. It was then that things began to turn uncomfortable…

I had paid the equivalent of £10 for an 'exorcism' with a witch of the Santa Muerte - or Our Lady of Death - which is the fastest growing religion in the world, according to some experts.

It was born out of the Mexican criminal underworld, where the violent wars between rival drugs cartels has made the murder rate soar and the value of life plummet. Here criminals will unthinkingly take your life for less than the value of a new pair of shoes.

Followers began building shrines hidden in their homes to pray to her for protection, help and the 'gift' in this violent society of the chance to die a peaceful and 'holy' death without judgement.

The first Western exposure came in an episode of Breaking Bad, the hit series about Walter White, a teacher-turned meth dealer in New Mexico.

When twin brothers, the Cousins supposedly belonging to the brutal Sinaloa cartel, are sent to wipe out White, they are seen praying to a shrine covered with candles surrounding a statue of Santa Muerte. They crawl on their hands and knees to reach her altar and make offerings, just as her real-life adherents in Mexico City do.

But Santa Muerte cannot be dismissed as fiction, it's lure has become very real. The Santa Muerte cult now has an estimated ten million followers from Buenos Aires, Los Angeles to Japan and Australia.

The rate of its growth is staggering in the seventeen years since the first church was publicly established in Mexico's capital.

The exorcism which I was undergoing is said to help people filled with sadness or negativity; a shamanistic ritual which purport to purify the soul, ridding it of destructive spirits which have taken hold within. 

(dailymail.co.uk)