From voodoo rituals to ghost tours, New Orleans leans into its haunted past. Photo / Richard Nowitz
Haunted mansions, voodoo rituals and a state that celebrates the afterlife with gleeful abandon: welcome to Louisiana, where death and drama dance together.
Chloe was desperate to hear what was going on behind the door. On a hot Mississippi day, she pressed her ear against the smooth wood, only to tumble awkwardly into the room when the door unexpectedly opened. Judge Clark Woodruff and his wife, Sara, decided a “fitting” punishment for eavesdropping was to cut off their slave woman’s ear.
Chloe is one of the many ghosts who haunt the antebellum mansions and historic streets of Louisiana, in a state whose haunted cities embrace the Other Side.
This is a place that celebrates darkness, turning it into light via festivals and music. This is a place where voodoo reigns, where ghosts are welcomed and where the darkness is honoured.
This is New Orleans. Or as the locals drawl it into a single drawn-out word: “Nyawlins”.
Huge inflatable skeletons dwarfing the houses wherever we travel throughout Louisiana hint that this is a state that launches itself into Halloween with gleeful abandon.
New Orleans owns Halloween, and its celebration of death and gore. Ghosties and goblins caper and skeletons and bloody cleaver-wielding butchers abound as locals take their seats for the city’s unique annual Krewe of Boo Parade. The annual institution is held the weekend before Halloween. I, dressed as a gruesome clown, and my fellow butchers, buccaneers and zombies, take our place on a parade float, fully stocked with “throws” – beads, snacks, plushies, plastic cups – that are received with almost religious fervour by the crowds lining the parade route.
Further north in Baton Rouge, the 13th Gate is an incredibly well-curated scarefest worthy of a horror film set. You shriek your way through 13 rooms from a pirate ship to a haunted asylum to a graveyard oozing zombies. The real scares are built through subtlety: you walk into an eerie room lined with blank-eyed dolls and you just know that one of them is going to scare the bejeebers out of you. But you don’t know which one – until it does. Definitely not for the weak of bladder.
But death is also a serious affair and we are reminded of that at the thoughtfully curated World War II Museum opposite the Higgins Hotel, where we stayed in New Orleans. We step into a train carriage to start the journey through the museum, movies streaming past the windows to give us a taste of what those departing soldiers felt on their way to deal to the Hun in Europe. It continues through recreations of bombed and blasted European villages and exhibitions of the battles whose names are also so familiar here in New Zealand. “Snow” falls in the Solomon Victory Theatre during the Tom Hanks-narrated exhibit outlining the harsh winter conditions soldiers faced during the Battle of the Bulge. The museum is exceedingly well done and the wait lines to come in were pleasingly lengthy.
Death seems to walk hand in hand with life in Louisiana. A high water table means it is common for people to be buried above ground and cemeteries are often a picturesque collection of mausoleums, the final resting place for entire families. On a cycle tour of cemeteries in Baton Rouge we came across a gravestone for four children who died during one of the yellow fever outbreaks in the city. Only three of the children had names: the fourth died nameless so its parents wouldn’t “waste” a family name on a child that would not survive.
Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge is home to two Native American burial mounds, believed to be the oldest manmade structures in North America, pre-dating even the pyramids. The mounds are fenced off but clearly visible. Although, we were somewhat distracted by the university’s football team mascot that lives nearby; Mike is an actual living Bengal tiger housed on the campus and looked after by the university’s vet school. College football is inexplicably huge throughout the US: the university’s stadium holds more than 100,000 people. For school sport.
Louisiana was also a slave state and horrific stories emerged about the lives of those stolen souls, such as Chloe.
The Myrtles Plantation is a beautiful antebellum home in the deeply charming little town of St Francisville, about half an hour’s drive up Highway 61 from Baton Rouge. The little village on the bank of the Mississippi River is packed with 100-year-old lovingly maintained homes, complete with gingerbread trim, and rocking chairs on front porches.
The picket fences are painted white and Spanish moss drapes from centuries-old oak trees that provide welcome shade in the late autumn heat. To the locals, who sounded like they had just stepped out of Forrest Gump, we were “y’aaaawl”.
And over a barbecue dinner at the Myrtles, we hear the story of Chloe.
In revenge for losing her ear, Chloe baked a poison-laced birthday cake for the family, which killed Sarah Woodruffe and her two daughters. The outraged slaves then hanged Chloe and her unquiet spirit is said to roam the Myrtles, wearing a green turban to hide her owners’ savagery. She isn’t alone either; legend has it that Judge Woodruff and some of his children also haunt the property. Disappointingly, we never met Chloe.
New Orleans, United States.
GETTING THERE
Fly from Auckland to New Orleans with one stopover with Air New Zealand.
DETAILS
New Zealand Herald Travel travelled to New Orleans courtesy of Air New Zealand, New Orleans & Company and Explore Louisiana.