How Ghost Stories Get Started

Our first night in New Orleans we did a Drunk History tour. It was a two hour walking tour of the more macabre side of French Quarter history, with stops at bars to refill anytime anybody in the group needed a drink.

Link to full size photo

The picture above is a night time picture of the LaLaurie House. The LaLaurie house is probably the most famous haunted house in New Orleans. The high-society LaLauries brutally tortured and mutilated their slaves, many of whom died in the house. It was so bad that public opinion turned against the family, and they fled New Orleans in April 1834, never to be heard from again.

According to the newspaper, the New Orleans Bee, all of the victims were naked and the ones not on tables were chained to the wall. Some of the women had their stomachs sliced open and their insides wrapped about their waists. One woman had her mouth stuffed with animal excrement and then her lips were sewn shut.

The men were in even more horrible states. Fingernails had been ripped off, eyes poked out, and private parts sliced away. One man hung in shackles with a stick protruding from a hole that had been drilled in the top of his head. It had been used to “stir” his brains.

The tortures had been administered so as to not bring quick death. Mouths had been pinned shut and hands had been sewn to various parts of the body. Regardless, many of them had been dead for quite some time. Others were unconscious and some cried in pain, begging to be killed and put out of their misery.

If you had asked me immediately after taking that photo if there was anybody in the frame, I would have been 100% sure when I said no. The residential side streets of the French Quarter were not that busy, and I would have waited a couple of seconds for any random passer-by to clear the frame of my photo. The guy was not there when I took the picture.

Also, the reflection in the truck window is weird. There was no flash used, would the street light be enough light to create the reflection? Also, the guy's head appears to be floating above his body, and the reflection looks more like a female than a male to me.

So obviously I caught a ghost on film ;)

Also of interest, at another haunted site, a tavern where a young woman hung herself, the tour guide pulled up a text message she got that day from someone that took her tour the previous day. The tourist had taken a picture of the dark interior, and there was a clear but faint image of a woman swinging from a noose. That one was clear enough to be a little creepy, although obviously it's just a random occurrence of light and maybe some noise in the digital picture, along with a BAC above zero and the power of suggestion in expecting to see something. It was still creepy though.