New Orlean's Krewe from Boo parade is the city's Halloween Parade. Photo / Supplied
Ghosts, cocktails, costumes and chaos — in New Orleans, the party never stops, and even the city’s haunted past comes wrapped in revelry, writes Helen van Berkel.
Everything in New Orleans is a drama - it’s a spectacle, a festival, a parade. Because no matter what you might say about New Orleans, this is a city that loves, loves, loves a party.
I arrived in the vibrant southern city the week before Halloween, which is when the reputed most haunted state in the union celebrates all that is spooky and kooky with its annual Krewe of Boo parade.
My group and I climbed aboard one of the 15-odd floats (US$625/NZ$1100 for a membership plus US$400 for a “throw package” - more on that later) to trundle through the city’s French quarter, skirting the Mississippi River. To the left of me was a pirate, to the right a scarily tall bald man with an extremely bloody apron and casually wielding a machete. The face that looked back at me from the mirror was a demented clown with an ear-to-ear grin that was definitely more murderous than friendly.
The Krewe of Boo parade, originally set up as a fundraiser after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, is now an annual Halloween event on the crowded New Orleans festival calendar. Locals line the streets as the floats pass, all eager to catch a “throw” - which could be a bag of crisps, jambalaya mix, a plastic cup, beads or, for the lucky few, a small stuffed animal.
New Orleans, consistently at the top of most haunted city lists, leans joyfully into its dark past, shaped by its history of slavery, voodoo and tragedies. The LaLaurie Mansion, where Madame Delphine LaLaurie tortured slaves, still stands in Royal St and is said to be haunted by the tormented souls who died here; there’s the Museum of Death and its macabre exhibits of horrific murders. And then there’s the Haunted Mortuary, helpfully situated next to a cemetery in Canal St and allegedly surrounded by “more than a million graves”.
Originally built as a private mansion, the 1400sq m, three-storey Victorian edifice operated as a mortuary for more than half a century, fully equipped with embalming rooms and viewing spaces. Into the darkness we crept, screaming like children as ghouls and cadavers gurned and groaned at us from the shadows. Sack-wrapped figures swung from the walls in narrow passageways allegedly haunted by a phantom woman and prank-playing child ghost. Disappointingly, I saw no ghostly beings. But, just in case, I held tightly to the hand of a stranger as we cringed through the labyrinth of autopsy rooms and creaking staircases.
From Muriel’s in Jackson Square, we joined a NOsecretsTour, which took in the haunted corners of the French Quarter. Muriel’s itself, haunted by its former owner, has a table permanently set up for its ghostly guest. The tour finished with a psychic reading that moved a staunch Australian in our group to tears after he was told his late father was in the room with him.
But after all this communing with the phantoms, we were ready to turn to spirits of a different kind because a party was going on in the streets of the Big Easy.
Our group walked the streets from the former haunt of pirates, to Bourbon St for impromptu jam sessions on the corners, to a drag show. In the sunny courtyard at Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop Bar, America’s oldest bar and where pirates are said to have plotted, we were introduced to the mysterious concoction known as “Purple Drank”. Like an alcoholic fairground slushy, the jumbo-sized cocktail is made of this’n’that, which likely included bourbon, grape juice and possibly vodka. From there it was martinis at Mr B’s Bistro, and Hand Grenades at the Tropical Isle. Served in a long pale green glass with a grenade-suggestive bulb at the bottom, the Grenade is another New Orleans mysteriously mixed must-experience cocktail. New Orleans’ official cocktail, though, is the Sazerac: another explosive mix of spirits that included the love it or hate it absinthe.
We were grateful by this time that large parts of the French Quarter are pedestrian only as we wandered from the Cat’s Meow for its self-proclaimed “world-famous” karaoke to the Apple Barrel for live jazz in the downstairs bar and stopped in at the Golden Lantern for a drag show.
This is, of course, where jazz was born and it seemed like all you had to do was turn up with an instrument and a jam session would break out a street corner or in one of the Quarter’s dozens of bars.
The narrow streets of the Quarter are designed for walking and were comfortably packed with locals and visitors who, like ourselves, took advantage of New Orleans’ relaxed liquor laws to carry our drinks from bar to bar.
When our feet grew weary, we sat inside or outside one of the many iconic establishments to listen to the music, to watch the people, to sample the tastes and flavours of New Orleans. And all around us pulsed the drama and exuberance of the Big Easy, the tapping toe of America.
New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
GETTING THERE
Fly from Auckland to New Orleans via San Francisco or Houston with Air New Zealand and United.
DETAILS
New Zealand Herald Travel visited courtesy of Louisiana Office of Tourism and Air New Zealand.