Baron Samedi heads the Ghede, the family of lwa who hold death. He wears a top hat, a black tailcoat, and dark glasses, and his nostrils are plugged with cotton — exactly as a body is dressed for burial in Haiti. He is foul-mouthed and fond of a joke, drinks rum steeped with hot peppers, and the digging of graves falls to him.
What matters is that he is the gatekeeper. Unless he accepts them, the dead do not pass over into the place of the dead. This makes him a lwa of resurrection as much as of death: if he stops digging for someone who is dying, that person does not yet cross.
He is said to keep the first grave of any cemetery alongside Maman Brigitte, counted as his wife. Popular media borrows his face for villains, but in the tradition he is less a punisher than a keeper of the threshold, reckoning what is owed.