History
When Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, founded New Orleans in 1718, he chose a spot on the east bank of the Mississippi where the river made a “fine crescent.” Three centuries later, it’s still the Crescent City. The ground had a history before the French arrived. Native Americans had gathered there for centuries to trade, make alliances, and hunt, and the Choctaw called it Bulbancha, the Land of Many Tongues. Today, it’s the French Quarter, and its streets still follow the grid laid out in the early 1720s.
Spain took Louisiana over in the 1760s, and under Spanish rule the town burned twice. The fire of March 21, 1788, destroyed 856 of the city’s more than 1,100 buildings, and a second fire in December 1794 took much of what had just been rebuilt. This time the city rebuilt in brick and plaster. In the words of The Historic New Orleans Collection, the “almost pastoral, French-looking town began to resemble cities throughout the Spanish American empire, like Havana, San Juan, and Cartagena.” That’s why so much of the French Quarter looks more Spanish than French. The church that became St. Louis Cathedral was rebuilt after the first fire, and the old cottage that houses Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop bar is said to have come through both.
New Orleans became an American city in 1803. For most of the decades before the Civil War, it was the Deep South’s largest and wealthiest city and the fourth busiest port in the world. It’s the city most often tied to jazz, and its Mardi Gras goes back to the colony’s early years. In 1729, a young Parisian clerk named Marc-Antoine Caillot dressed as a shepherdess, beauty marks and all, and led a party of masked friends to a wedding reception.
Why Is New Orleans Haunted?
New Orleans gives its ghosts plenty to work with: its age, its cemeteries, Voodoo, epidemics, slavery, fire, and flood. Daphne Schobert, a guide with Haunted History Tours, sums it up: “New Orleans was born in tragedy, grew up in tragedy and tragedy creates emotional attachment, and emotional attachment creates most hauntings.”
Age
Three hundred years is a long time to collect stories, and New Orleans has collected its dead, too, sometimes right under its own streets. The city’s first formal burial ground, the St. Peter Street Cemetery, was nearly full by the 1780s, and St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 replaced it in 1789. By 1800, the old cemetery had been closed and built over. “The government just expropriated the land and built buildings on top of it,” says Lee Leumas, who directs the archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Many of those buildings still stand in the French Quarter.
In 2011, a property owner on Rampart Street had archaeologist Ryan Gray of the University of New Orleans dig a test pit before putting a pool in his condominiums’ courtyard. Five feet down, Gray’s shovel hit wood. It was a coffin. Standing at the corner of Burgundy and St. Peter Streets, Gray once guessed how many people lay under his feet: “Six, eight, ten people.” Every night, ghost tours lead their groups across those same streets.
Cemeteries
New Orleans doesn’t so much bury its dead as house them. Its tall tombs stand above ground, crowded together like little houses, which is why its cemeteries are called cities of the dead. Most people will tell you the dead go above ground because of the high water table, but historians call that a myth. The archdiocese that runs St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 says the main reason is the city’s French and Spanish heritage.
After dark, the cemeteries are where many ghost tours take their groups. Some stop at the gates, and New Orleans Ghost Adventures takes its bus inside an above-ground cemetery at night.
Voodoo
Voodoo (Voudou, in the older spelling) blends African religious and magical beliefs with Roman Catholicism. It took root here in the 1700s, when enslaved West Africans, taught the Catholic faith, found familiar figures in the Virgin Mary and the saints. Its charms, called gris-gris, were taken seriously: in 1773, several enslaved people were tried for plotting to kill their master with gris-gris. Some of its rituals called for human remains and “graveyard dust.” In 1809, nearly 10,000 refugees from the revolution that created Haiti arrived and brought their own Vodou with them.
On Sunday afternoons, enslaved Africans gathered in Congo Square to drum, sing, and dance, honoring the beliefs that informed Voudou. The rhythms played there are found at the core of early New Orleans jazz.
The most famous of the Voodoo queens was Marie Laveau, a free woman of color and a lifelong Catholic who held weekly ceremonies at her home on St. Ann Street. She is credited with leading the St. John’s Eve celebration on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain every June 23, with bonfires, drumming, singing, dancing, ritual bathing, and a communal feast. The night falls at the summer solstice, which pre-Christian Europe believed was a time when the human world and the spirit world meet.
Writer Robert Tallant’s 1946 book Voodoo in New Orleans describes one of those nights “near the spot where Bayou Tchoupitoulas met Lake Pontchartrain.” About 300 people filled a cauldron with water, black pepper, and “a snake cut into three pieces,” then added a live black rooster and “a cat whose throat Marie Laveau personally slit.” Everyone disrobed while she put powders into the pot. “At twelve o’clock all hands raced into the lake.” Historian Carolyn Morrow Long calls the book “a sensationalistic view of Marie Laveau and Voudou,” but it’s easy to see how nights like that one fed the city’s ghost lore.
Many of the city’s ghost tours fold Voodoo into the night’s stories, but Voudou isn’t just a story here. Real congregations still meet in New Orleans.
Epidemics
Disease made New Orleans a city of the dead in the plainest sense. Cholera, a bacterial infection of the intestine, arrived in 1832 and killed an estimated 5,000 people in two weeks, close to 10 percent of the city. Across its four rounds in the 19th century, it took more than 17,000.
Yellow fever was worse. It struck New Orleans in 67 summers between 1800 and 1900, and because it killed so many immigrants and newcomers, people called it the “stranger’s disease.” In 1853, the worst year, about 8,000 people died. On a single day that August, 230 deaths were reported, and newspapers named it the “Black Day.” A sanitary commission’s report the next year called New Orleans “the sickliest city in the Union.”
The fever still turns up in the city’s ghost stories. Upriver at Destrehan Plantation, visitors have described seeing Lydia, a 17-year-old who died of yellow fever in the house in the 1800s. Her younger brother died of it too, at nine.
Slavery
The cruelest part of the city’s history is slavery. After the United States banned the international slave trade in 1808, selling enslaved people within the country stayed legal, and New Orleans became the center of that trade. Historian Erin Greenwald of The Historic New Orleans Collection calls it “the largest slave market in America during the antebellum period.” People were bought and sold under the domed rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel, where the Omni Royal Orleans stands today. By 1840, more than 23,000 enslaved people lived in the city, nearly a quarter of everyone there.
Solomon Northup saw that market from the inside. Born free in New York, he was kidnapped in the nation’s capital in 1841 and shipped to a New Orleans slave pen run by a trader named Theophilus Freeman. There, the people waiting to be sold were “paraded and made to dance” for buyers while Northup played the violin. He watched a mother named Eliza sold away from her little girl, Emily, and wrote that “never have I seen such an exhibition of intense, unmeasured, and unbounded grief.” His 1853 memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, became the film that won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2014.
In January 1811, enslaved people on the sugar plantations upriver rose up in the largest slave revolt in United States history. Drummers beat time as they marched toward the city, chanting “on to Orleans!” General Wade Hampton took command of the force sent against them, the first time federal troops were used to put down a slave revolt in the United States. By January 12, he could write to Governor Claiborne from Destrehan’s plantation that “the chiefs of the party are taken.” About 75 rebels faced tribunals, and the one at Destrehan sentenced 21 of them to death by firing squad. Close to 100 died in all. To scare off any more uprisings, white residents set the heads of the dead on poles along more than 30 miles of levee, up to the gates of New Orleans.
A night tour at Destrehan now tells the story of the 1811 revolt alongside the ghost stories of the house. One of the city’s most famous ghost stories came out of the same trade, at the LaLaurie Mansion on Royal Street.
Fire and Flood
Fire took the old town twice in the 1700s, and it came back for the French Quarter in 1973. On June 24 of that year, someone poured lighter fluid on the stairs of the UpStairs Lounge, a gay bar on a second floor, and set them alight. The stairs were the only way in or out. The fire killed 32 people, the deadliest on record in New Orleans.
Water did worse. When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, the levees broke and left about 80 percent of the city underwater. A year later, Louisiana had counted 1,464 dead. At Charity Hospital, floodwaters trapped doctors and patients inside its dark halls for days, and it never reopened as a hospital. Sidney Smith, who founded Haunted History Tours, says people swear they’ve “heard footsteps or seen apparitions” in the empty building. On his last visit, he “could have sworn I heard the distant sound of laughter and crying.”
The ghost stories started before the water was gone. Less than three weeks after the storm, CBS 5 in San Francisco reported that the soldiers using Sophie B. Wright Middle School as a base had the feeling they weren’t alone. Sgt. Robin Hairston of the California National Guard woke in a sleeping bag to see “a little girl” in the doorway. “It wasn’t my imagination,” Hairston said. One chaplain went as far as commanding Satan “to leave the dark areas of this building.”
