It is said that New Orleans is one of the most haunted cities in America. Haunted hotels, former slave quarters, voodoo priests and priestesses—the place is a minefield of paranormal activity.1
For example, the Andrew Jackson Hotel supposedly sits on the site of an orphanage that was destroyed in the New Orleans fire of 1794; today, guests complain that they hear mysterious children laughing and playing in the halls. “Some guests have even claimed to be on the receiving end of harmless pranks, such as turning televisions on at night and other ghostly hijinks,” says the website of the hotel, which clearly is playing into its haunted status. There are other allegedly haunted hotels in the city as well, but they don’t like to advertise their ghosts.
A more gruesome, and apparently true, story concerns the LaLaurie mansion, pictured during the carnival parade I blogged about earlier. In 1834, when a fire broke out in the mansion, Madame LaLaurie refused to turn over the keys to a locked upstairs room. Firemen broke into the room, and they found, according to an account in the New Orleans Bee,
Several slaves more or less horribly mutilated, were seen suspended from the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other. Language is powerless and inadequate to give a proper recollection of the horror, which a scene like this must have inspired. We shall not attempt it, but leave it rather to the reader’s imagination to picture what it was!
According to one website—and it’s on the internet2, so it must be true—
Some believe that Dr. Louis LaLaurie and his wife were conducting horrific medical experiments on the slaves.
According to accounts, the victims were men, women, and children, and included a caged woman who had her limbs broken and set at unnatural angles so as to resemble a crab; a mutilated sex change operation; a woman whose limbs were removed and odd circular pieces of skin removed to resemble a human caterpillar, and some had pieces of their faces removed to resemble gargoyles. Seven were suspended from their necks and were badly mutilated. Two of these survivors died shortly after their rescue.
To the right is a woman dining in a side room at Muriel’s restaurant. The story here is that the building was once the house of a Pierre Antoine Jourdain, who lost the house in a poker game and consequently hanged himself in a room on the second floor. According to legend, Jourdain never left, and he was deeply offended to discover that the new owners were hosting dinners to which he hadn’t been invited; as a result, the restaurant staff would open the building to prepare for a night’s service and sometimes find that dishes had been smashed all over the dining room. After holding a séance to find out what the ghost wanted, the owners began setting a table aside for Jourdain so he feels included, and guests can book the table to join him—but they have to be respectful, otherwise he begins smashing things up again.
These photos show the séance room at the Hand of Fate emporium, where one can go for tarot readings. If you click on the second photo, of the skulls, and look above the right skull, you will see a small blue dot. According to our tour guide, this is not a lens flare or a reflection, but rather a paranormal energy orb. She even showed us photos on her iPhone of other energy orbs that she had captured. One can believe it or not, but I think it’s more fun to believe I caught something, just as, when we were above the arctic circle to see the Northern lights, the lights looked grey to the eye but in photos were bright green.
Next: more fun and creepy stuff.
- Regarding the first photo on the left: some people would consult voodoo practitioners for medical treatment instead of regular doctors, and because these practitioners often weren’t literate, they would create dolls that resembled the patients instead of keeping written records. Furthermore, to remember what the patients’ ailments were, they would stick pins in the spots on the dolls where the patients complained aches and pains. Naturally, when other people found these dolls, they assumed that the practitioners had put the pins in to cause the complaints rather than to record where the complaints were. Wisely, the practitioners kept the secret of this record-keeping system to themselves so people wouldn’t f*** with them. ↩︎
- https://nolaghosts.com/lalaurie-mansion/ ↩︎