New Orleans Travel Stories: Haunted History
New Orleans Travel Stories: Our first night in New Orleans, we arrived around 2pm and immediately began our vacation.
After eating amazing Gumbo (which Sara really liked!) and a 3/4 of a giant turkey club, We ventured into the French Quarter and found ourselves on the Haunted History Tour.
Mortalis had recommended Haunted History by name after she returned from New Orleans, and I'm glad we followed her advice.The tour was more historical than sensational, and the guide talked about hauntings with a tongue-in-cheek irreverence. One story is paraphrased below:
"One of the peculiar features of architecture you'll see here in the French Quarter is the galleries that are above you. These are different from balconies in that they extend over the entire sidewalk, and are supported by the iron columns that you're leaning against.
If you look up, you'll notice this gallery has spikes protruding all around near the top of the column. Now these are as much to keep out burglars as they are to protect what's inside, and if anyone here has a teenage daughter, you know exactly what I mean. Here in New Orleans, we have a special name for those spikes, Romeo-Catchers.
One night, at his very gallery, a man was to take out his family to dinner, but his daughter didn't feel up to it. She feigned illness, but insisted that the rest of the family go without her. You can already see where this is going, can't you?
Sure enough, as soon as the family is gone, her beau shows up, and they begin to do exactly what teenagers do when their parents aren't home... Talk politely in the study of course, or at least that's what the daughter would profess to later, because you see, as soon as the father got to the restaurant, he realized, "gawl dang it!" He forgot his wallet. So he starts on home to get it.
When you're a teenager, you know everything, don't you? There isn't anyone that can tell you anything. So the boy, in his brilliance, doesn't go out the back when he sees the father coming, no. He doesn't hide quietly downstairs no! He goes POUNDING up the stairs to the daughter's bedroom.
Well the father he comes in, and he knows something is up, he hears the noise going up the stairs, and he does what any good southern man would do in his situation... He grabs his shotgun.
His daughter wailed, and tried to stop him, she didn't want him to go upstairs and kill her boyfriend, but he simply moved her aside, and went on up the steps. Now later, the father would say that he didn't load that shotgun, or at least that's what he said in the official police report, which was in the paper, which you can find down at town hall. All of our papers were transferred onto uncatalogued microfiche, so you'll have to search, but it's there for you to find.
Now the boy had gotten a brilliant idea. He was going to slide down the gallery pole and let go just as he passed the Romeo-Catchers, and then grab back on. He was all set, and had just let go, everything was going well when BOOM! The father bursts in the door.
The boy sees that angry father, and he sees the shotgun, and he's so scared, he grabs right back on to that pole.
The Romeo-Catcher catches him in the leg, but it doesn't stop there, It tears up through his thigh, through his pelvis bone and up through his stomach, crack crack crack through his ribs, and finally breaks his collarbone, and the boy falls to the street below.
Now the head, they say it can survive 45 seconds without proper blood supply, and they say the boy looked back up at the Romeo-Catchers from where he lay and saw, streaming up from his stomach, the eviscerated bowel which had just been ripped from his body trailing back up to the iron spikes.
So if you're standing out here on a warm spring night, leaning on that very pole that you're leaning against, and feel something dripping on your shoulder, and go up to touch it, and realize that it's a bit sticky, you look at your hand. Suddenly, you begin to panic, because you realize that there's blood on your hand, dripping into your hair, and you look up and see the gore oozing down that pole, you're going to scream. You're going to run up and down this street, screaming that someone's been killed on the gallery, but no one's going to come out.
Nope, they've heard it before. Multiple reports of the same story are in our papers, dating back for ages. I've seen the papers down at the library, but I'll let you look for yourself and make up your own mind.
