Bourbon Orleans Hotel

History

The Bourbon Orleans Hotel takes up the corner of Bourbon and Orleans Streets in the French Quarter, and its oldest part is a ballroom. The Théâtre d’Orléans opened here in 1815, after the War of 1812 had held it up. A fire in September 1816 destroyed the theater along with every other building on this block of Orleans Street, a first ballroom included. The hotel’s history says an entrepreneur, John Davis, bought the land in 1817, rebuilt the theater, and added the Orleans Ballroom. (New Orleans Magazine dates the ballroom to the early 1820s.) Operas, masquerade balls, and carnival balls filled the theater and ballroom, and at times the state legislature and a district court met there.

By 1881, the ballroom was known as the First District Court House. That September, it was sold at a sheriff’s sale, and six days later, the Sisters of the Holy Family bought it. Henriette Delille, a free Afro-Creole woman, had founded the order in New Orleans in 1842 to care for the poor, the enslaved, and free people of color. The sisters made the ballroom building their convent, with a school for African American girls called St. Mary’s Academy, and built an orphanage for girls next door. The hotel says its courtyard and pool sit where the orphanage’s courtyard and playground were. In 1964, after 83 years, the order sold the property to move to a larger convent in New Orleans East. After a long preservation fight, developers tore down the sisters’ later buildings but restored the ballroom building. When the Bourbon Orleans Hotel opened in 1966, that building held its lobby, bar, and dining room.

Hauntings & Lore

The Bourbon Orleans tells its own ghost stories. Its history page names a Confederate soldier and “a lonely ghost dancer,” along with children and nuns from the old convent and orphanage. The ghosts, it says, “lived during many different eras of this building’s history.”

The Dancer in the Ballroom

The hotel calls the Orleans Ballroom “home to the grandest social events of the nineteenth century.” It says the room is also home to “a lonely ghost dancer seen dancing underneath the ballroom’s crystal chandelier.” There have been several reports, the hotel adds, of rustling and of someone hiding behind the ballroom’s draperies, “without a window open or person actually there.” Sidney Smith, of the French Quarter ghost tour company Haunted History Tours, passes on what’s said about the dancer: that she wears “a beautiful ball gown” and is “forever waiting for her partner.”

The Advocate, the Baton Rouge daily paper, wrote about the hotel’s second annual Ghost Camp before it began in September 2014. The paper talked to New Orleans Ghost Hunters, whose members would investigate alongside the campers. Casey Crouch had come to the first camp and joined the group. “Last year in the ballroom we caught an apparition on two separate mediums, video and photography,” Crouch said. “We all felt it in that room that night.” Mark Laville, another member, told the paper he’s a skeptic. “We don’t go in there to prove that something exists,” Laville said. “We go in there to prove that (a ghost or apparition) doesn’t exist.”

Room 644 and the Sixth Floor

Upstairs, the stories move to the guest floors. The hotel tells of a Confederate soldier it calls “The Man,” whose story “surrounds both the sixth and third floors.” It also tells of “a little girl rolling her ball and chasing it down the sixth floor corridors,” and of light footsteps in the hallways. The hotel says its ghost children and female ghosts most likely date from the sisters’ years, when the building was a convent, a girls’ school, a medical ward, and an orphanage.

Tour guides told The Advocate in 2014 that visitors and employees have reported paranormal activity, in particular on the third and sixth floors. Etienne Skrabo of Gray Line Tours told the paper the most frequent reports were of children in the hallways, a lone dancer, a nun who had taken her own life, and a Confederate soldier. The paper said Room 644 was “believed to be the most haunted room in the hotel,” and the camp’s investigations were set for Room 644 as well as the ballroom.

In 2018, FOX 8, a New Orleans TV station, said guests report hearing screams and cries from Room 644: “the most haunted room where a nun allegedly took her own life.”

Ask for Room 644 when you book, or a room on the sixth floor.