The Haunted History of New Orleans: Ghosts of the French Quarter by James Caskey

Author:James Caskey
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780988252905
Publisher: Subtext Publishing
Published: 2013-01-01T23:00:00+00:00

Shot of Room 401 taken right before the author had a brush with the supernatural.

Tragedy? Or Something Else Entirely?

Once we made it safely without incident back to the lobby (and my heart stopped pounding), we continued to talk. I’m glad I left my recorder on, because Vincenzo was very eloquent in these closing moments. We discussed why New Orleans has such a haunted reputation. He said: “Let me tell you what I know about New Orleans. The city was founded by the French, who were so unsatisfied with Louisiana that they privatized it, gave it away to John Law, who treated it like a commodity and ran the biggest Ponzi scheme in human history called the Mississippi Bubble. Most of the investors in the Louisiana scheme lost everything, so they gave it back to the French Crown, who didn’t want New Orleans either. The French King gave it to his cousin, who happened to be the King of Spain. The Spanish, well, they got things in line a bit, but wound up giving it back to the French, which was ruled by Napoleon by that time; Napoleon turned right around and sold the whole thing to the Americans. So New Orleans was given away or pawned off five times. And the Americans understood absolutely nothing about Louisiana, so they largely left it alone to fend for itself. We became sort of a little band of self-reliant smugglers. So you see, there’s not this huge tragedy that everyone talks about. Interesting history, but tragic enough to explain all the hauntings?” He pointed upstairs from whence we had just come, as if it were punctuating his point, “No. Not even close.”

My role in this conversation was that of Devil’s Advocate, so I brought up The Battle of New Orleans, Yellow Fever Epidemics, Native American genocide, numerous great fires, and hurricanes. It seemed to be a pretty convincing argument in favor of the fact that some awful things had happened in New Orleans. Vincenzo seemed to consider this, and said, “I don’t buy it. That’s the easy answer, too pat. I don’t think New Orleans is haunted simply because of the adversity that’s happened here. A lot of places have had a lot of tragedy, I mean I’ve been to Bosnia and lived in Istanbul like I mentioned; I’ve been to some places in my life that have seen some hardships. Let’s talk about New Orleans’ tragedy: the place has never seen a serious war, never, not even once. We had one engagement here, the Battle of New Orleans, and as much as we make a big deal out of it, how many people actually died in the battle? The number was low.” I realized from my reading that he was right: while the battle had been tactically significant, the Americans lost under two hundred men, total, and the British lost at most just under a thousand. This from a clash of two armies which totaled around fifteen thousand soldiers.”

He continued: “The Yellow

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