Haunted New Orleans Stories: Which Parts Are True?

Three of the most repeated ghost stories in New Orleans share a pattern. There's a real place, a real event or two, and then a layer of legend that grew on top. Here's how to pull them apart.

Muriel's and the man who lost his house

Muriel's Jackson Square opened as a restaurant in 2001, in a building on the corner of Jackson Square. The legend is about Pierre Antoine Lepardi Jourdan, who rebuilt the place after the 1788 fire as his dream home, lost it in a card game in 1814, and took his own life upstairs. Every night, staff set a table with bread and wine for him. The second-floor lounge is called the Seance Lounge, and the restaurant says people there have reported a glimmer of light and objects that move on their own.

What can be checked: the nightly table is a documented practice of the restaurant. The poker game and the death are another matter. A researched profile notes that surviving records of the building's early owners don't confirm either one, and that a real early owner named Pierre Jourdan is recorded as dying of natural causes.

The hotel fire that may never have happened

The Andrew Jackson Hotel's best-known story is about five boys who died in the 1794 fire at a school on the site. The fire that year was real. Whether it reached a school on that spot is disputed, and one researcher found no evidence that it did. The full breakdown is in Haunted Hotels in New Orleans.

The LaLaurie house

This is the heaviest of the three, because the center of it isn't a ghost. It's the people held in the house.

What's documented: in 1834 a fire at Delphine LaLaurie's Royal Street home led to the discovery of enslaved people confined in the attic. The newspapers of the day reported it, and one account counts seven victims. LaLaurie left for Paris after the scandal and died there in 1849.

What's legend: the most extreme tales of torture and mutilation come from later retellings. The ghost tour company that profiles her says historians treat those versions as embellishment, and that the contemporaneous evidence doesn't support them. Historians do still argue about how to weigh the rest. One long-form piece puts it this way: the truth lies somewhere between the fiendish legend and the attempts to clear her entirely. If you want the careful version, Carolyn Long's biography, Madame Lalaurie, Mistress of the Haunted House, is built on eyewitness accounts, archival documents, and family letters.

One more thing worth noticing: in the retellings, the enslaved people at the center of this story are rarely named. The ghost story is a legend. The suffering is history.

A short checklist for any ghost story

• Find the earliest telling. A newspaper from the year it happened counts for more than a tour script.
• Separate the building from the legend. The building usually has a verifiable history. The legend often doesn't.
• Notice who's named, and who isn't.
• Leave room for "unknown." Sometimes the honest answer is that nobody can tell.

Another way to test a haunting is to ask whether the house itself could explain it. That's the subject of Ghost or Old House? Why New Orleans Houses Creak and Shift. The whole topic is mapped in the Haunted New Orleans guide.

Meet the Chief

If you'd rather have fiction than folklore, meet Chief Marcus Thibodeaux, a New Orleans police chief and former quarterback who has spent too many years squinting into other people's lies. His origin story, The Golden Boy, is free when you join the list. His ongoing cases, including the ones where he calls in a tarot reader, are on the Patreon.

Where I got this

• Pierre Jourdan, Ghost City Tours, for what is and isn't documented about the Muriel's story
• Our Ghost, Muriel's Jackson Square and the restaurant's page on Jourdan, its own account, and Seance Room at Muriel's, Gastro Obscura, for the 2001 opening
• Delphine LaLaurie, Ghost City Tours, for the 1834 fire, the seven victims, and the view that the extreme tales are embellishment
• A Portrait of Cruelty: Madame Marie Delphine LaLaurie, Vice, for the point that the truth lies between the legend and attempts to exonerate her
• Madame Lalaurie, Mistress of the Haunted House, University Press of Florida, Carolyn Long's biography, which also covers her exile in Paris and death there in 1849