There are lots of things to see and hear in New Orleans, but if you believe the local legends, not all of them are of this world. New Orleans, in the state of Louisiana, is considered to be one of the most haunted cities in the US, and the French Quarter, its oldest district, is at the heart of it.
the curse
One reason for the city’s macabre reputation is that it has suffered a lot of death in a relatively short space of time. In fact, the original French settlers were warned not to build a city here by the indigenous peoples because — they said — the area was cursed. When they tried to do so, they had to deal with a series of calamities: from cannibal attacks to disease epidemics.
THE 18TH CENTURY
New Orleans was founded in 1718, but the suffering and destruction continued. In the late 18th century, two devastating fires almost annihilated the French Quarter. There were twenty-seven major epidemics of yellow fever that killed tens of thousands of people. Public executions took place in the main square, and the city also hosted the country’s biggest market for buying and selling slaves. All this fed into New Orleans’ infamy as a place where paranormal activity was common.
THE 19TH CENTURY
Probably the most notorious building in the French Quarter is the LaLaurie Mansion. In the early 1800s, it was the home of Madame LaLaurie, a socialite who tortured and murdered slaves. After her crimes were discovered in 1834, she fled from her home and was never prosecuted. The mansion became internationally famous after it appeared in the popular TV show American Horror Story. It was bought by the actor Nicolas Cage, who subsequently went bankrupt.
REST IN PURGATORY
A history of violence, death and sustained superstition has given rise to continual reports of supernatural occurrences in New Orleans. This has, of course, also drawn many visitors to the city, believers, sceptics and the merely curious. Ghost tours are big business here because, according to the tour guides, “People say ‘rest in peace’, but what if you can’t?”
A ghost tour
Sidney Smith runs Haunted History Tours, a New Orleans company that offers guided walking tours of the city with a focus on its paranormal side. Specialist walks include a vampire tour, a cemetery tour, a voodoo tour and, most popular of all, a French Quarter Ghosts & Legends tour. On this tour, a guide leads visitors to the most haunted buildings in the French Quarter and tells stories of their ghosts from the past and the present. Speak Up met with Smith. We began by asking him what to expect on one of these tours.
Sidney Smith (American accent): It’s not a Halloween spook house. We don’t have people jumping out trying to scare you along the way. The Haunted History tour is an actual tour which takes you to several different sites in the French Quarter connected to real, documented hauntings, places that have been researched by paranormal investigations, mediums and things like that. The stories we tell you are very true. Some of them are very horrific. But they’re all based in [on] reality.
SENSITIVE TO SPOOKS
We then asked Smith whether ghosts appeared during the tour.
Sidney Smith: Some people are more sensitive to paranormal activity than other people are. Some people can hear it, feel it, see it, experience it on a regular basis. I can tell you right off the bat [that] we’ve had over one thousand faintings on our tour. That might sound outrageous in itself but it’s all happening at the same location, and that location is the LaLaurie Mansion, the most haunted site in the French Quarter. When it first started, I thought people were just messing with us. I mean, they would literally collapse in front of that location. I thought well maybe that [they] had too much to drink or didn’t eat enough food or it was too hot. It’s happening over and over and over again. Sometimes people’s watches will stop. It’s an odd place on the tour. But many times, in fact probably 80 per cent of the time, people take photos with their cameras or with their phones, and things show up in their photos that weren’t there. Paranormal activity will show up in their photos, whether it’s an orb or whether it’s a full-blown apparition. People send us photos all the time and they share with us at the end of the tour. It’s pretty amazing.
TRUE STORY
And he went on to describe a few of these unexpected hauntings.
Sidney Smith: Oh, well, I can give you a couple: one is kind of humorous and one is kind of spooky. The humorous one is that Nicolas Cage actually owned a house in the French Quarter. He purchased the LaLaurie Mansion. But Nicolas Cage never stayed there. In fact, he went on The Tonight Show and [David] Letterman and all these other shows saying that he just couldn’t deal with staying in that house. And that house is the crown jewel of our ghost tour. But one night, one of the tour guides is telling the story and he was explaining that Nicolas Cage owns the house but, he says “But the Ghost Rider never stays here.” And then from the balcony, he hears a voice, “I’m here tonight!” The crowd goes wild and the poor guy is very embarrassed.
The other one involves a tour that I was doing myself and this will make the hair on your neck stand up. One night, several years ago, there was a single mother on the tour with a child about six or seven years old and this was the only child on the tour. And about thirty minutes into the tour, the child starts walking alongside me. Kids will gravitate towards the leader. And I had the child next to me. About thirty minutes into that, the mother comes frantically running up to me, “Have you seen my child? Have you seen my child?” The kid’s right next to me, he’s been next to me for thirty minutes. The mother looks at the child and she says, “Why did you leave me?” And the child, in all honesty, looks up at his mother and says, “Because you were holding that other boy’s hand, Mommy.” There were no other children on the tour. The crowd went, “Wooh!” True story.
NO WAY OUT
We then asked Smith why he thought the dead insisted on staying in the world of the living.
Sidney Smith: It’s a soul that is trapped here, somebody who doesn’t realize they’re gone. Violent death and strong emotion contribute to hauntings, and quite often murder and suicide, things like these, are contributing factors to paranormal activity, and there’s been no shortage of them here.