New Orleans has the reputation of being one of America’s most haunted cities with its mausoleum-filled cemeteries, vampire interviews, and the eerie Vieux Carré (“old square,” or the French Quarter, although a quarter is half of a square haha). So, what better place to take a nighttime ghost walking tour? Through these streets with historic homes with shutter doors, florid wrought iron balconies, glowing lamps, and a palpable sense of history, you can walk with a guide who’ll show you the most energy-charged sites.
Upon a recommendation from the tourist center, my friend and I chose the New Orleans Ghost Tour run by Cajun Encounters. Everyone gathers first at a Decatur Street location; we were split into two groups with different leaders. Even so, as we wandered out into the night, we saw multiple other tour groups. Sometimes, we’d even bottleneck and have to wait a few minutes for the group ahead of us to move on so we had room on the sidewalk. It’s a popular thing to do, and New Orleans has plenty of ghost stories to share—interrupted here and there by street musicians or drunk folks walking past loudly narrating their own stories.
One of the first stops was the Ursuline Convent. Today, it’s the Catholic Cultural Heritage Center but in the mid-1700s, it was an active convent. We were told that on the third floor, young girls brought from France were thought to be vampires. Called the Casket Girls because they brought their earthly belongings with them in a casket-shaped box, the New Orleans residents thought their skin an unearthly shade of pale white, giving rise to the idea of them being vampires. However, being on a ship at sea for three months, becoming Vitamin C deficient and scurvy-ridden, was more likely the cause.
Another stop was the restaurant Muriel’s, built on the site of a small cottage said to have once been a holding space for enslaved people before they were sold at auction. That cottage was torn down in favor of a grand home, damaged by the fire of 1788. A man named Pierre Antoine Lepardi Jourdan then rebuilt it in grand style. But as a gambler, he lost the house in a poker game and in regret and shame, died by suicide on the second floor of the now-restaurant. Today, a candlelit table is always set for his ghost. The table can be seen from the street through a narrow alleyway.
Of course, any ghost tour has to stop at the infamous LaLaurie house (pronounced La-lure-ee). Here in 1834, a fire broke out and brought firefighters inside, who, according to legend, discovered seven enslaved people who had been chained up in the attic to be tortured (with details that I won’t share here). It seemed that the fire had been set by an enslaved woman chained to a stove: a cry for help or a desperate plan to destroy herself and the mansion. However, these horrific tales may have been a smear campaign by a spurned male neighbor against the owner Delphine LaLaurie. A lit window on the third floor shows where an enslaved girl was said to have plunged to her death on the cobblestones below.
As time wore on, my friend became uncomfortable and told me she had just stopped listening. She insisted she didn’t want to leave the tour, but it had been my idea and I felt guilty. Worse, because of our pre-purchased tickets, I had pulled us from a fun karaoke night at the Cat’s Meow before we got called up to do a duet, and I regretted trading the nightlife scene for this quiet, dark parade of hearing horrible things done to fellow humans. My spectral preference is for something filmy you might see in an attic, a forlorn soul stuck between two worlds—but these ghosts were victims of serial killers, of racial brutality. The stories were a little too upsetting.
Plus, I had previously listened to the This American Life podcast episode “Ghost Industrial Complex” where reporter Chenjerai Kumanyika had gone on ghost tours in Savannah, Georgia and noticed how tour guides “would breeze through these violent stories of enslaved people getting killed for pure shock value or laughs.”
In these distinctive streets with French/Spanish architecture, it’s easy to squint and imagine these same structures with folks emerging in 19th-century clothes, part of the bustle of a busy port town whose transactions continued through the night. During the day, I had noticed a restaurant so popular a line extended out the door. A plaque on its brick side said that it had once been a slave auction site. It was jarring to think of eating in a space filled with so much fear and with families ripped apart. That building wasn’t on the tour, but if you believe in ghosts, it’s a prime candidate for housing agonized spirits.
Is it possible to take a light-hearted ghost tour? Not sure. The very premise behind ghosts is that they died terrible deaths and are still too upset to move on. Others may be of stronger cardiac material, and had we been in a different mood or better prepared for the stories we’d hear, the tour is quintessential New Orleans and definitely worth experiencing.