Hotel Monteleone

History

Antonio Monteleone came to New Orleans from Sicily and worked as a cobbler at the corner of Royal and Bienville Streets. By the hotel’s own account, he built that trade into the city’s first shoe factory. In 1886, he bought a three-story hotel at the corner of Royal and Iberville Streets and sold shoes on its first floor. He raised it to five stories in 1896, and in 1908, he began an overhaul that added a Beaux-Arts front and 220 guest rooms. He died in 1913, and his son Frank took over. By 1926, the hotel had bought more lots along Royal Street, and a 1920s addition brought 200 more rooms and 14 floors. Historic Hotels of America, the National Trust for Historic Preservation program the hotel belongs to, says the original building was torn down in 1954 for a new one. Nearly 140 years on, the family still owns the hotel.

The Monteleone is also known for its writers. William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Anne Rice all stayed here, and Tennessee Williams, a frequent guest, put the hotel in his play The Rose Tattoo. In 1999, the hotel was named a Literary Landmark, a program the American Library Association now runs. Truman Capote liked to say he was born at the hotel. In fact, his mother went into labor while staying here, and the staff helped her to Touro Hospital, where he was born. The Carousel Bar, a revolving bar the hotel opened in 1949, is still turning.

Hauntings & Lore

The Monteleone tells its own ghost stories. Its history page lists “doors that open on their own and elevators that insist on the wrong floor,” along with “the playful shadows of children.” The one ghost it names is a little boy.

Maurice Begere, the Boy in the Halls

The hotel’s version starts with a visit from paranormal investigators. “In March 2003,” its page says, “the International Society of Paranormal Research spent several days at the hotel.” The team “made contact with more than a dozen entities,” it goes on, including “a friendly toddler named Maurice Begere.” The boy died in the hotel, by this account, “and his distraught parents returned frequently in hopes he might visit them.” The page ends on him: “Maurice eventually appeared to his mother and comforted her, and to this day, guests report seeing him near the room where he died.”

Historic Hotels of America tells a fuller version on its history of the hotel. In its telling, Maurice was a toddler who stayed at the hotel with his parents, Jacques and Josephine, in the 1890s. They were avid theatergoers who often went to the French Opera House on Bourbon Street and left him with a nurse when they went out. One night, before his parents left for the opera, Maurice developed a fever in his nanny’s care and died later that night. His parents came back every year, hoping to see his ghost. “According to legend,” it says, they didn’t have to wait long. Up on the 14th floor, the boy “supposedly appeared before his mother,” telling her, “Mommy, don’t cry. I’m fine.”

Sidney Smith of Haunted History Tours, a French Quarter ghost tour company, puts the boy in the hallways. A little boy named Maurice, Smith writes, “who supposedly died in the hotel, is often seen playing in the halls.” Guests have also reported “everything from flickering lights to eerie figures appearing in mirrors,” Smith says.

No record of a Begere family in New Orleans has turned up. The censuses on either side of the story, in 1880 and 1900, list Begeres only in New York City, and the 1890 census was lost. The hotel’s own timeline leaves no 14th floor in the 1890s, either: the hotel had five stories at most then, and the 14 floors came in the 1920s.