Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016)

IV

USELESS MEMORY

cities and towns

In the fall of 2004 I attended a conference in Binghamton, New York, almost two hundred miles from Manhattan along the Pennsylvania border. My flight arrived late at night, and I caught a cab to my hotel—a hotel that, when I had booked it, had been called the Ramada Limited, but by the time I arrived had been sold (Ramada no longer finding much of value in Binghamton) to a private operator. It was late but I was on West Coast time and still very much alert, and as we drove to the hotel the chatty cabdriver unfurled an endlessly depressing history of Binghamton.

Driving down Front Street toward my hotel, the cabdriver let me know, “This street used to be in the Guinness Book of Records for the most bars on a single street.” A dubious claim (and one that several other towns also boast) but still impossible not to hear the pathos in his voice as he listed them as we drove: “That used to be a bar”—he gestured to an empty lot—“and that used to be a bar”—now a Laundromat—“and there, and there, and there, too. All gone now.” He continued this the length of the empty, lifeless street. And then he told me about the curse.

No white person from Binghamton, he said, is ever able to leave. Even if you move away, sooner or later you’ll be drawn back in. It’s the curse on the city, he said, laid on it by the Native Americans who once lived here—revenge for the violence inflicted on them centuries ago, a revenge that is only now coming to fruition.

Binghamton is built on land once occupied by the Onondaga and Oneida people, who, along with the Mohawk, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora, once made up the Iroquois Confederacy. Most of these tribes sided with the British during the Revolutionary War, and in 1779 Major General John Sullivan led a contingent of American troops through the heart of New York in a scorched-earth campaign, laying waste to at least forty Iroquois villages throughout the state, including the Onondaga and Oneida land that is now Binghamton.

The curse, supposedly, is in the water itself, which saps the drinker of any desire to leave town. Binghamton doesn’t have anything close to the reputation of other haunted cities, but mentions of the curse surface occasionally, often in the form of a joke: a lame excuse offered for those townies without the motivation to leave, a dumb anecdote to entertain friends. But the night I heard of it from the cabdriver who bore me into the town’s heart, there was no mistaking the sadness in his words, the ache in his voice, as he tried to make sense of his town and what had happened to it.

Binghamton might have lost its bars and its jobs, but what it does have is carousel horses. The benevolent owner of the massive Endicott Johnson shoe factory had given back to the town generously, from building cinemas for his workers to donating six antique carousels for free public use in local parks; stand-alone horses also dot the downtown streets. Once meant to look jolly and inviting, they’ve taken on a different pallor amid the vacant storefronts. With their mouths open and their ears flared back, the horses could be screaming, or running from a fire—or trying to escape Binghamton itself.

Which is not to say that Binghamton doesn’t have dreams of recovering. An investment in Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York system, has helped revitalize the local economy, and the population has stabilized. But the city sustained massive damage during floods in recent years and in 2009 was the site of a mass shooting, when a man named Jiverly Wong killed thirteen people and wounded four before turning his gun on himself. Wong, a Vietnamese immigrant who’d lived in the United States since the early ’80s and had become a naturalized citizen, had been taking English classes at the American Civic Association, and on April 3, 2009, he returned to his former classroom and began killing his classmates, along with a substitute teacher. In a letter he’d mailed to a local news station shortly before the killings, Wong hinted that his deepening psychosis was at least in part due to low job prospects.

So Binghamton has experienced its share of hardships and tragedies, and a curse—stretching back as it does to the earliest confrontations between whites and Iroquois—encompasses all of them. Binghamton’s troubles were due not to outsourcing or demographic shifts but to an age-old conflict, an act of revenge for violence committed more than two hundred years ago.

And what’s more, the specific aspect of the haunting is unusual: rather than whites being driven from the land they wrongfully seized, they’re not able to leave. The city in decline is a trap, a dead-end street. The curse on Binghamton renders the city a spectral penal colony, one whose borders are nebulous but still mystically enforced.

How does an entire city come to see itself as haunted? At what point does a city cease to simply have a few haunted buildings and instead begin to define itself as a haunted city?

Most cities commemorate their pasts, often with statues, plaques, renamed streets, or even parades. But cities that are haunted don’t just try to keep the past alive; they seem to straddle past and present, as though two versions of the same city are overlaid on top of each other. To paraphrase Hamlet, hounded by the ghost of his father: time in these places is “out of joint.” The past seethes in the streets, always on people’s lips, always at the edge of one’s vision. In such places the past may be dead but it isn’t past.

Disjointed history can be a great way to raise money through tourism, as places like Salem, New Orleans, and Savannah have found, but only if that history can be packaged in a way that doesn’t offend anyone. Savannah, for example, is famous for its ghosts and its glamorous, dark past, and many tour operators there do a brisk business in ghost tours—but, as former tour guide Elena Gormley later wrote of her experience, the ghost stories she recited would turn the city’s turbulent past into a pleasant night’s outing. “A few stories came across as fairly light,” she wrote, “but most repackaged the rape, abuse, and lynching of vulnerable women into family friendly entertainment.”

There are, for example, the stories surrounding the beautiful Sorrel-Weed House, an elegant Greek Revival mansion built in 1841 for Francis Sorrel, a prosperous plantation owner. Though married, Sorrel was secretly having an affair with one of his slaves, a Haitian woman named Molly. In 1860 his wife, Matilda, discovered the affair and threw herself out a third-story window, smashing her head on the paving stones below. Shortly thereafter, Molly was found hanging from a noose in the carriage house, another supposed suicide.

Not unlike the story of Chloe at the Myrtles Plantation, the tour script presents a well-worn version of the Jezebel narrative: a sexually aggressive black woman destabilizing a white man’s marriage. Gormley offers another, far more plausible version of events: Francis’s wife “may have committed suicide after she discovered her husband had raped his slave, and in the story, Molly’s suffering didn’t end there. At the tale’s conclusion, a group of men, who some locals allege may have been Francis and his sons, lynched her.”

As part of the tour script, Gormley would play an EVP recording provided for her that supposedly documented the paranormal screams of Molly from beyond the grave. “Help! Get out! Oh my God!” a disembodied voice on the tape would cry out, and whenever she would ask the guests what they’d heard, Gormley notes, the “white tourists always made smart comments. Once, on a charter tour for auto parts managers, a man yelled, ‘Sounds like my regional manager!’ His buddies all laughed.”

Savannah, like a number of historic cities (New Orleans and Washington, D.C., among them), requires that anyone who gives a tour (ghost or otherwise) pass a test of the city’s history. (“Where did Savannah’s major Revolutionary War battle take place?” “At which cemetery can graves of the victims of the 1820 yellow fever outbreak be found?” “In which square is the Greene Monument located?”) A way to ensure a base level of quality and lack of misinformation, it’s notoriously difficult—the college professor who wrote it estimates that it would take three months of full-time studying to master.

But the real goal of the test seems to cement certain narratives of the city over others. Gormley believes that the test is ideologically slanted toward minimizing controversial or problematic aspects of the city’s history in favor of things that portray it in a neutral or positive light. “The city’s very obsessed with its brand,” she told me. This may explain why several groups filed suit against the city, alleging that the test infringed on their right to free speech. “By limiting the universe of speakers to those who have memorized and regurgitated the City’s official version of Savannah history,” attorneys for the plaintiffs argued, “the City plainly hopes to ensure that tour guides draw upon that official narrative in their speech to tourists.” In the fall of 2015 the city backed down, dropping the testing requirement and moving instead to restrict the available hours in which tour groups were allowed in primarily residential areas.

Of the Sorrel-Weed House the testing manual mentions only that it is a “distinguished” building built in 1841 on the southwest corner of Harris and Bull streets. There is no mention of Francis Sorrel’s relationship with his slave Molly, nor of her death or the death of Sorrel’s wife, Matilda. As Tiya Miles discovered when she began researching the house, the story probably is fictionalized. Miles hypothesizes that the Molly legend was concocted by brothers Stephen and Philip Bader sometime after they purchased the house in 1996 and began renovations (Stephen Bader, however, contends that he has documents attesting to the veracity of the story). Not only could they capitalize on Savannah’s reputation, established by John Berendt’s 1994 book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, as a creepy, haunted city; they could also get away with a half-renovated house, she adds, playing up its ruined, gloomy state of disrepair as part of its haunted aura. And so, for all the city’s emphasis on its daunting test of factually correct history, licensed tour companies still do a brisk business on fabricated stories and distortions.

Binghamton isn’t trading on its curse to sell tickets to walking tours (not yet, at least). For every city basing a tourist industry on its famous hauntings, there are a dozen other cities that have come to be known as haunted in a different way, one devoid of the charm and cheer of a Salem or Savannah. These cities are haunted by what they once were, what they might have been; towns haunted by some series of past failures or tragedies that encompass more than one or two buildings and swept up the whole city.

For better or worse, the language of hauntings and ghosts is a convenient metaphor for a whole host of problems not connected to the supernatural, and the recourse to such vocabulary becomes a means to process or make sense of experiences that can otherwise seem overwhelming and mystifying.

A city obsessed by its ghosts seems to be weighed down by a conflicted view of the past. Something close to melancholy: a weight it can’t quite let go of, a lingering sadness. And though we don’t often think of the United States in these terms, this melancholy is as much a part of our history as our triumphs.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE WET GRAVE

New Orleans, LA

Walk through the streets of New Orleans, and you’re beset on all sides by ghosts. In the French Quarter it’s best early in the evening, when the day-trippers have gone home and what’s left of the tourists have quarantined themselves on Bourbon Street or in tucked-away white-napkin restaurants. You can slip past these places into the gloom of old New Orleans, in and out of the pools of light from the streetlamps, in and out of the past.

Perhaps, if you are lucky, it’ll be raining—the cool, clarifying rain that drives out the humidity and the tourists—and you’ll be free to walk the cobblestones alone. Through the soft hum of the rain pelting the streets, you might hear a murmur of a song, something maybe coming from a nearby bar or perhaps somewhere more distant. Not something you’d hear at a bar. What folklorist Jeanne deLavigne described as “a song which rises like slow smoke from the heavy ashes of experience, fanned by the winds of perplexity.”

New Orleans, Lafcadio Hearn once wrote, is a place that “actually resembles no other city on the face of the earth, yet it recalls vague memories of a hundred cities.” You are at once in the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris or a Spanish port city and yet still in the bowels of a swamp. The dampness only adds to the mystery, creating halos of mist around the lights, adding a heaviness to the air that you can’t shake; it’s a dampness that Hearn called “spectral, mysterious, inexplicable.”

Soon the nightly ghost tours will be out, traipsing the quarter in clumps of fifteen to twenty people, gathering at corners to hear stories that stretch credulity but that have been honed through years of telling, polished to a high sheen for maximum intensity.

On the 700 block of Royal Street, a naked woman will appear on the roof of one building under the moonlight. Before and after the Civil War, white men sometimes kept octoroon mistresses—women who passed as white but who had an exotic charm about them. Because of the notorious one-drop rule (the notion that a single drop of black blood makes an individual black), such women could be discarded at will by wealthy men shuttling back to their wives or on to the next mistress. In this particular house, though, things turned out differently.

The wealthy Frenchman who lived here kept a mistress, whose name is sometimes given as Julie. He never saw her as anything more than a plaything, but she fell in love with him nonetheless. After repeatedly denying her entreaties to marry her, he devised a cruel prank and told her that if she lasted an entire night on the roof fully naked, he would marry her. Whether or not he thought that would be the end of it, he underestimated her resolve, and she ascended to the roof and disrobed, preparing to spend the night there to prove her love. At some point before dawn, she caught a chill, and she died shortly thereafter. She can still be seen, they say, when the moonlight is right. Not unlike the story of Chloe at the Myrtles Plantation, Julie is a stock character: the tragic mulatto who wants to join white society but is rebuffed by her white lover, with fatal consequences—a reminder that many of New Orleans’s ghost stories are more concerned with affirming stereotypes than with offering proof of the paranormal.

Which is not to say that the city doesn’t try hard to convince you it’s haunted. As deLavigne wrote in the introductory note to her Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans, “There is not a corner of the city that does not harbor some unearthly visitor in one guise or another. They hug close as feathers on a bird.” New Orleans is very haunted. New Orleans ghost hunter David Laville told me that the three-hundred-yard radius around Jackson Square is the most haunted place in the country. Asked why, he gives four reasons. First, because the city’s so old. Second, its long history of tragedies: not just fires and floods but disastrous outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever, among other epidemics. Third, its history of violence: crime, of course, but the city is also known for public executions in the main square and a preponderance of duels to settle disputes. Fourth, all this activity has, for centuries, been packed into the tiny area of the French Quarter. He offers, finally, a fifth reason: “It’s just a city that everybody loves, so, naturally, the people who lived and died here—they don’t want to leave.”

New Orleans’s inordinate obsession with death stems in part from the constant dance it’s had with the geology of the area; the city may be old, but the ground on which it stands is new. In a place with such a high water table, it’s hard to bury corpses six feet under, so New Orleans is unique among American cities for its necropolises filled with elaborate—and aboveground—mausoleums. These cities of death parallel the city of the living: in places like St. Louis Cemetery #1, just across Basin Street from the French Quarter, family crypts have the stately grandeur of the fine villas they neighbor, though some have begun to majestically decay into ruins. Those who can’t afford a grand crypt are entombed along the wall, in vaults sometimes referred to as “bake ovens.”

New Orleans is particularly cruel to the corpse, whose bacteria thrive in the humid, temperate environment. A body in the Northeast or Midwest will keep longer, if it’s winter; a body in the Southwest will dry out; but in the Pelican State the environment is perfect for the work of decay. In New Orleans you cannot avoid the fact of death and decomposition. The living and the dead have always occupied close quarters here, which helps explain why the city, over the years, has become death-haunted.

There are, of course, ghosts in St. Louis #2, as there are in all of New Orleans’s graveyards and cemeteries. But you need not leave the French Quarter on a night like this to find ghosts. From Royal Street wend your way to the Hotel Provincial, on Chartres Street, which guides will tell you operated as a hospital during the Civil War. Countless men died within its walls, some from wounds received in battle but many from the barbaric methods of healing employed on them. Guests on the fifth floor claim to see a doctor, still in his bloodied apron, walking the halls. Forget for a moment that the building was operating during the war as a hair salon, according to journalist Paul Oswell. Allow yourself instead to be captivated by the city’s spells, its love of the tall tale and legend, and let yourself be carried on past the Hotel Provincial to the corner of Governor Nicholls and Royal.

On the southeastern corner stands a particularly majestic building, the highlight of any ghost tour in the French Quarter, a place of legend: the Lalaurie Mansion.

The Lalaurie Mansion is larger than many of the houses in the French Quarter, its façade stretching down both streets. It’s been a part of New Orleans’s tourist industry for more than a century; by the 1890s the mansion was already being advertised as a haunted house. An Italian immigrant who bought it in 1893, Fortunato Greco, complained that its “reputation for spooks” had rendered it unsalable. In order to make a profit off his white elephant, he hung signs announcing that it was not haunted and charged people ten cents if they wanted to come in and see for themselves. Within a few years he’d made enough on ghost tours that he opened a thematic bar on the ground floor, the Haunted Exchange. In the early twentieth century the building was cut up into tenement slums and occupied by immigrant Italian and Sicilian families; the tradition continued, children charging five cents for tours of the haunted house while they dragged chains across the attic floor and ran past windows dressed in sheets. In an 1895 guide to New Orleans, Henry C. Castellanos wrote that while “no spirits wander through its wide halls,” there was indeed a curse on the house “that follows every one who has ever attempted to make it a permanent habitation … every venture has proved a ruinous failure.” That curse may help explain why actor Nicolas Cage, who bought the house in 2006, lost it to foreclosure only three years later.

The house was built in 1831 by Delphine and Louis Lalaurie. Louis was her third husband. Delphine’s first marriage had been to Ramon López y Ángulo de la Candelaria, when she was fourteen and he was a thirty-five-year-old widower. López y Ángulo died in a shipwreck five years later, while Delphine was pregnant with their child. The day she turned twenty (March 7, 1805), she married again, to another widower more than twice her age. Her second husband, Jean Paul Blanque, died in 1815, leaving her a widow once more. Having inherited considerable real estate holdings upon her mother’s death, she was already wealthy when she met Louis Lalaurie, a doctor, with whom she had a child out of wedlock before marrying him in 1828. The marriage, according to friends, was not a happy one. As the young doctor was still establishing his medical practice, their lavish lifestyle was funded by his wife’s considerable real estate holdings and other assets. By 1832 their marriage had grown so intolerable that she petitioned a judge to allow the couple to reside separately.

It was during her third marriage that Delphine’s reputation for beating slaves emerged. Several times in the late 1820s and early 1830s she was accused of what a neighbor termed “barbarous treatment of her slaves contrary to law”: willfully mistreating them, incarcerating them, and depriving them of necessities.* Despite these allegations Lalaurie repeatedly escaped prosecution, since testimony by slaves against whites was inadmissible. Court records don’t preserve the specifics of her alleged crimes, but what is clear is that an unusually high number of her slaves died while they were owned by her. Later apologists tried to justify this by asserting that Delphine Lalaurie’s mother was killed at the hands of slaves, either in the Saint-Domingue slave rebellion or by family slaves—but neither of these stories bears any ring of truth.

The Lalaurie legend truly begins on the morning of Thursday, April 10, 1834, with a fire. It broke out first in the kitchen, on the first floor of the outbuilding. A crowd quickly gathered, both firefighters and dozens of concerned onlookers, as the flames quickly started to spread to the slave quarters above the kitchen.

A local judge asked Delphine’s husband for permission to have the slaves moved to a place of safety and was met with a harsh rebuke. “There are those who would be better employed,” Louis spat at him, “if they would attend to their own affairs instead of officiously intermeddling with the concerns of other people.” Neighbors already believed that the slave quarters were operated by the Lalauries as something of a prison, and the judge, thankfully, ignored the doctor’s insult and had the doors to the slave quarters broken down. Rescuers found a horrible sight: “several wretched negroes,” reported the Louisiana Courier, “their bodies covered with scars and loaded with chains.” The New Orleans Bee gave a similar account, of “seven slaves, more or less horribly mutilated … suspended by the neck with their limbs stretched and torn from one extremity to the other… . They had been confined … for several months in the situation from which they had thus been providentially rescued, and had merely been kept in existence to prolong their sufferings and to make them taste all that the most refined cruelty could inflict.” An elderly woman claimed to the mayor that she had been the one who’d set the house on fire, “with the intention of terminating the sufferings of herself and her companions, or perishing in the flames.”

It was too much for the people of New Orleans to take. Even in a city that was built on slave labor, whose slave markets—the largest in the country—were a symbol of the vile predation on black bodies by speculators and planters, the cruelty found at the Lalaurie Mansion and the desperate act of an old woman struck a deep chord. The Bee reported that after Delphine’s slaves were removed from the house and taken to the jail for their safety, “at least two thousand persons visited the jail to be convinced … of the sufferings experienced by these unhappy ones. Several have also seen the instruments which were used by these villains: pincers that were applied to their victims to make them suffer all manner of tortures, iron collars with sharpened points, and a number of other instruments for punishment impossible to describe.” The newspapers did their part to whip the citizens into a frenzy; the Louisiana Advertiser editorialized its hope that “justice will be done and the guilty be brought to punishment.”

It was too late for justice: the Lalauries had already fled. They left their home the afternoon of the fire, first making their way to New York City, then crossing the Atlantic on their way to France. By the time the mob arrived at the mansion, Delphine and her husband were already gone, so a crowd “composed of all classes and colors” broke in and destroyed everything in sight. According to the Bee, the riot “continued unabated for the whole of the evening” and into the next morning. By the time the sheriff dispersed the mob, nearly the entire edifice of the building had been pulled down, and all that was left of the house was its walls.

Delphine Lalaurie died in Paris, in exile, in 1849. Her remains were eventually repatriated to New Orleans. Despite the outrage of the people of New Orleans regarding the treatment of the Lalauries’ slaves, the newspa- pers of the period are entirely silent on what happened to them after they were rescued.

Judging by contemporary news reports, it’s clear that the Lalauries’ treatment of their slaves was absolutely horrific, without excuse. They displayed an utter savagery and indifference toward their fellow men and women, which they hid behind a veneer of civilized society. But what is also undeniably clear is that in the decades since that 1834 fire, the accounts of the Lalaurie Mansion have been consistently amplified and exaggerated as storytellers and historians have continued to pile atrocity on top of atrocity, blurring the historical record in a way that does no small amount of insult to the actual victims of Delphine and her husband.

As the house has become known as haunted, Delphine Lalaurie has come to be seen as a figure of monstrous duality: both her elegance and her sadism have been exaggerated for effect. Herbert Asbury (author of Gangs of New York) wrote of her that “this bewitching and engaging creature, who entertained the great of New Orleans at her sumptuous table and fascinated her guests by the brilliance of her wit, in reality had the heart of a sadistic demon and was unquestionably mad.” Jeanne deLavigne, in her inimitable style, writes:

Madame Lalaurie, under her soft and beautiful exterior, possessed a demon’s soul. Laughing and lovely to her friends and family, she would suddenly fly into rages which none but her slaves ever saw. On these occasions (which were by no means rare), her sadistic appetite seemed never appeased until she had inflicted on one or more of her black servitors some hideous form of torture. As her word was law in that house, and as she had the power to punish in ways far more excruciating than mere death, she could command and receive assistance in her diabolical drama.

In deLavigne’s telling, the first responders to that fateful fire found naked men chained to the wall, “their eyes gouged out, their fingernails pulled off by the roots”; others “had their joints skinned and festering, great holes in their buttocks where the flesh had been sliced away, their ears hanging by shreds, their tongues drawn out and sewed to their chins, severed hands stitched to bellies,” and on and on. Women whose orifices were crammed with ash and chicken offal, or smeared with honey to attract masses of ants. “There were holes in skulls, where a rough stick had been inserted to stir the brains.”

This is how Lalaurie’s reputation has solidified over the years: as a figure of barbaric cruelty par excellence, a Creole Marquise de Sade. Despite some attempts at rehabilitation by the white community, and by Lalaurie’s own descendants, in the first half of the twentieth century, this is the image of her that endures. This is how she is portrayed by Kathy Bates in American Horror Story: not just cruel but a sadist beyond compare, one who reduces black bodies into objects.

It’s not clear why subsequent accounts of the Lalaurie Mansion have exaggerated this story to such a great degree. The imprisonment and barbaric conditions of those enslaved apparently became, at some point, insufficient to raise the pity and sympathy of visitors. Why were the actual crimes not enough?

Writing of New Orleans’s history, the scholar Joseph Roach notes that here “memory operates as both quotation and invention, an improvisation on borrowed themes, with claims on the future as well as the past.” Ghosts are part of the city’s tourism now, like jazz and voodoo, brothels and booze. If places like Richmond, Virginia, have built a tourist industry by effacing certain aspects of their past, New Orleans has thrived by trumpeting these same aspects, though in the process there are bound to be inventions alongside the quotations, elaborations accompanying the documentation.

The city has always used its black culture as a commodity, taking living culture from the fringes and repackaging it for tourists in the French Quarter. Jazz, pioneered by poor blacks living in brothels, is now an upscale entertainment. The dynamic religious practices of the city, which combine Catholicism, evangelical Protestantism, and voodoo, are flattened out and reduced solely to the exoticism of voodoo, which is further misrepresented. And while Disneyland has borrowed the culture and aesthetics of the French Quarter for its “New Orleans Square,” the opposite could also be said: New Orleans has borrowed heavily from Disneyland’s tactics and aesthetics, in creating a French Quarter that exudes a mysterious allure while promising safety for tourists.

For those of us who don’t live there, the image of New Orleans that comes to mind is that of a bifurcated city. In the French Quarter one finds music, laughter, excess, and fun while beyond its invisible walls lie the specter of poverty and crime. As welcoming as Louisiana’s tourist board assures the city is, tour operators and guidebooks also warn about straying too far from the quarter. A recent Fodor’s guide to New Orleans, for example, recommends a visit to St. Louis Cemetery #3 for its beautiful sepulchral architecture and its ghost stories but also cautions, “This is a higher crime area, so take a group tour to see it.” For all the violence described on a typical New Orleans ghost tour, this violence is contrasted against ominous warnings of a different kind of violent experience. And by telling tales of two cities, New Orleans’s tourist industry only further heightens the economic disparity of the city.

Scholar Anna Hartnell refers to the French Quarter as a “site of translation,” in which the living, breathing aspects of the city—complicated, ambiguous, sometimes dangerous, but also palpably alive—are translated into a safe commodity to experience in easily digestible packages. Anthropologist Helen A. Regis more bluntly calls this “spatial apartheid.” The ghost stories are part of this mythmaking, of packaging the city for consumption, not unlike the branding of Salem. They tread on the city’s violent past while sectioning off that violence into a distant, romanticized past, a past that no longer has any connection to the city’s actual politics, racial relations, or history.

The Lalaurie Mansion offers a particularly stark example of this. For years it was left as a ruin. When Harriet Martineau, the English sociologist who abhorred slavery and used her travelogues to urge its abolition, visited New Orleans in 1836, she stumbled upon what was left of the house. “The house stands, and is meant to stand, in its ruined state,” she later wrote. “It was the strange sight of its gaping windows and empty walls, in the midst of a busy street, which excited my wonder, and was the cause of my being told the story, the first time.” Asking around, Martineau gathered eyewitness accounts and other local lore, filling in the gaps of the story of the house, but she was “requested on the spot not to publish it as exhibiting a fair specimen of slave-holding in New Orleans”; Lalaurie’s crimes could be held up only as an exception, not the rule. This, Martineau was willing to concede, but she quickly added that “it is a revelation of what, may happen in a slave-holding country, and can happen nowhere else. Even on the mildest supposition that the case admits of,—that Madame Lalaurie was insane, there remains the fact that the insanity could have taken such a direction, and perpetrated such deeds nowhere but in a slave country.”

But even left as a ruin, Lalaurie Mansion wasn’t considered haunted. It wouldn’t acquire that reputation until the publication of a short piece by George Washington Cable, “The ‘Haunted House’ in Royal Street,” which appeared in 1889. In Cable’s telling, the house exudes an uneasy aura:

The house is very still. As you stand a moment in the middle of the drawing-room looking at each other you hear the walls and floors saying those soft nothings to one another that they so often say when left to themselves. While you are looking straight at one of the large doors that lead into the hall its lock gives a whispered click and the door slowly swings open. No cat, no draft, you and ——— exchange a silent smile and rather like the mystery; but do you know? That is an old trick of those doors, and has made many an emotional girl smile less instead of more; although I doubt not any carpenter could explain it.

Cable and his two research assistants unearthed contemporary newspaper accounts and interviewed those present at the riot and their descendants. While he recounts the grotesque stories of the Lalauries, he’s far more concerned with a different troubling event that happened within the house’s walls. Because for Cable, who was an ardent champion of the rights of the black community in the postwar South, the mistreatment and torture of Delphine’s slaves is only the first—and not the most pressing—horror that occurred on that corner of Royale Street.

By 1872 the house had been rebuilt and was operating as a public high school for girls. The Lower Girls’ High School, as it was called, had been integrated and had some twenty black students attending. In 1874 a group of young white boys took it upon themselves to purge the school system of black students. They forcibly removed three black women from one school and a few days later the teenagers arrived at the Lower Girls’ High School, where they intimidated the black students there and finally drove them out. Neither the school superintendent nor the police intervened, and the local paper, the Daily Picayune, congratulated these “young regulators” on their “admirable firmness and propriety.”

Whatever the severity of Delphine and Louis Lalaurie’s crimes, the mansion’s reputation as “haunted” didn’t begin until after this second tragedy, as though the first outrage wasn’t enough to prove by itself that something sinister inhabited the house’s walls. Cable saw Delphine Lalaurie’s outrages as part of an endemic, systematic brutality that also included these “young regulators”—the true evil haunting the mansion’s walls.

Abolitionists like Harriet Martineau seized on the story of Lalaurie because they saw it as exemplary of a horrific system. If they embellished a little bit, it was only as a means of highlighting what they saw as the intrinsic barbarism of slavery. In the years since slavery ended, as Delphine Lalaurie’s crimes have been so exaggerated as to defy all rational conception, she’s been transformed from a brutal slave owner to something outright demonic, a sadist without a soul, an emblem of pure evil. Rather than becoming emblematic of slavery, then, she’s become its opposite: an outlier, an exception. Apologists can thus seize on the story of the Lalaurie Mansion for completely apposite ends: here is a sole example of cruel barbarism that was completely at odds with the “civilized” institution of slavery, with its fair treatment of slaves.* New Orleans exists on this kind of mythmaking, on turning tragedy into story, on making legends as a means of building and rebuilding.

From the Lalaurie Mansion, head toward Canal Street. If it’s still raining, you hear that same strange music when you reach Jackson Square, a humming you can barely make out, a singing without a voice. By now you know it’s not coming from any bar or any band in the plaza. It’s always close but just out of earshot, and it disappears when the rain stops.

They will tell you it’s the voice of Père Dagobert, a Capuchin monk who came to New Orleans in 1722, known for a voice like “liquid honey,” a benevolent presence throughout New Orleans in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1745 he was appointed priest of the St. Louis Cathedral, the central church in the French Quarter. Universally beloved, Père Dagobert was a pillar of the community, a man people came to for all manner of problems.

Not much historical data has been preserved of Père Dagobert, but he participated in a strange drama in the annals of New Orleans history. When France announced that it was turning Louisiana over to the Spanish crown in 1768, local Creoles rose up in bloodless rebellion, driving out the newly arrived governor. Spain responded by sending Alexander O’Reilly as his replacement: O’Reilly was an Irish officer who abandoned the English army in favor of Catholic Spain and rose through the ranks of the Spanish army. When he arrived in New Orleans in August 1769, he immediately set out to put down the rebellion. Offering friendship, he invited the leaders of the rebellion over for dinner, where he had them arrested. Of the ten men accused of being ringleaders, O’Reilly had five of them—Nicolas Chauvin de Lafrénière, Jean Baptiste Noyan, Pierre Caresse, Pierre Marquis, and Joseph Milhet—executed by firing squad in the Place d’Armes (now Jackson Square), on October 25, 1769. Afterward he commanded that their bodies be left where they fell as a deterrent to any other would-be conspirators.

The slain men’s families went to Père Dagobert, believing that, as a priest, he would be allowed to remove the bodies and give them proper burial. The priest had never before run afoul of the law and appeared reticent to violate O’Reilly’s orders. In deLavigne’s telling, Père Dagobert replied to the women who’d come to him, “Wait here until night. I have a great deal to do. Spain is on us like a wolfpack. Do not venture out, for any reason whatsoever. Tell your prayer beads, and sleep a little if you can.” And so, the story goes, they waited for night, to see if Père Dagobert could redeem the fallen bodies of their loved ones.

That night a rain started as the Spanish troops stood guard. And then Père Dagobert emerged, somehow attended by an entire funeral procession of mourners, and without being noticed, they retrieved the bodies of those men, carrying them through the city through the night, singing “Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison”—“Lord, have mercy”—as they made their way to St. Louis Cemetery, under the oblivious eyes of the Spanish guards. No one knew how Père Dagobert could lead so many people, carrying those five bodies, those long blocks to the graveyard, singing all the while, and never be stopped, but many New Orleanians will tell you that on nights when it rains, you can still hear his voice singing softly, “Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison …”

But by now you’re past the square, and the colonial intrigues of centuries ago have likewise faded. Across Canal Street a new kind of ghost begins to appear. A local tour guide told me that several National Guard troops were driving down this street one night in the aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina when the driver saw in his headlights a group of disheveled pedestrians, who seemed to appear from out of nowhere. Going far too fast to avoid them, he braced for impact, but they disappeared as quickly as they’d appeared.

Other responders who came to New Orleans in the wake of Katrina found ghosts as well. If you keep walking far enough down St. Charles Street, you’ll reach the Sophie B. Wright Charter School, on Napoleon Avenue. During Katrina, the California National Guard was stationed here, and several Guardsmen reported strange goings-on. Sergeant Robin Hairston told a local television station, “I was in my sleeping bag and I opened my eyes and in the doorway was a little girl. It wasn’t my imagination.” Ghost sightings at Sophie B. Wright were confirmed by another member of the Guard: Specialist Rosales Leanor. “I was using the restroom and I just saw a little shadow,” Leanor reported, “kind of looming in front of me.” A third soldier claimed that when she opened a cleaning supply closet, she saw a little girl laughing.

This is unsurprising. After Katrina, bodies were left unburied for days, and some were never buried at all, washed away into Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. The disaster, the ineptitude of the response, and the breakdown of civil services created an entirely new relationship between the dead and the living. As Michael Osterholm, a doctor on the scene, later told the Washington Post, “One of the many lessons to emerge from Hurricane Katrina is that Americans are not accustomed to seeing unattended bodies on the streets of a major city.” As with soldiers in combat, those who survived Katrina have faced a variety of emotional fallout as they attempt to process what happened. As one resident said on the ten-year anniversary of the storm’s landfall, “Even cities feel trauma. It’s not just people.”

For a city that has long translated its tragic past into tourist entertainment, the response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina has moved along lines both predictable and unexpected. Within months of the event, disaster tourism had already sprung up. Visitors came to New Orleans now not just for gumbo and beignets but to photograph the ravaged Lower Ninth Ward and get a firsthand glimpse of what the disaster had wrought. Before long, tour companies had organized this fascination with poverty and destruction into bus tours that narrate and contextualize the storm. Too often, critics have suggested, these tours write out of history New Orleans’s poor black citizens, focusing instead on ecological issues and depopulated ruins. But this is what New Orleans has always done: take culture from its populations at the margins, smooth off the rough edges, and sell it to tourists around the globe. As with jazz, voodoo, and ghosts, so, too, with Katrina.

Given the city’s history of selling trauma, will those killed in the wake of Katrina find themselves in the illustrious company of New Orleans’s famous ghosts? Ghost stories, for good or ill, are how cities make sense of themselves: how they narrate the tragedies of their past, weave cautionary tales for the future. More than ten years later, the water has receded and some of the scars have healed, if unevenly. Yet even as the city continues to rebuild, some spirits remain.

Meanwhile, you’ve arrived at the corner of Jackson Avenue and Magazine Street, where the high-end burger joint Charcoal’s stands, home to the ghost of Vera Smith.

A squat, two-story brick rectangle, Charcoal’s is, as one reviewer dubbed it, a “mammoth temple of burger worship.” Inside are reclaimed-wood bars, low-wattage vintage lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling, and jars of pickled vegetables lining the wall. And, of course, burgers. “As Gourmet as a Burger Gets” is Charcoal’s tagline, and this seems fairly accurate: you can get your choice of not only beef, chicken, and veggie burgers but also antelope, elk, buffalo, venison, shrimp, and salmon. In short, anything you could possibly want in a burger.

The restaurant’s opening did not go well: a brand-new meat grinder failed, water lines inexplicably broke, and other strange mishaps troubled the place. Charcoal’s struggled to get a foothold in the community, and business was slow. The idea that the place was haunted started as a joke among employees, a way to explain the problems, but about a year after it opened, the restaurant’s owners, Craig Walker, Jr., and Blaine Prestenbach, announced that the problems were in fact due to the ghost of Vera Smith, who’d died on that corner eight years before, at the height of the storm.

No one knows for sure what happened to Vera Smith. The sixty-five-year-old went out on August 29, the night after Katrina made landfall. According to her common-law husband, C. N. “Max” Keene, she went out to find cigarettes and beer; the next morning her body was found at the intersection of Jackson and Magazine. Most likely she was hit by a drunk driver who fled the scene, but what is beyond doubt is that by then Katrina had begun its decimation of the city, and as the crisis escalated and emergency response focused exclusively on the living, Smith’s body was left unattended and abandoned. Keene, himself also elderly and not in great health, laid a sheet over Vera’s body, unsure of what else to do in those days of nightmare and chaos.

“I saw a bloodied corpse weeping body fluids onto the street,” resident John R. Lee later told reporters. Aghast at finding Vera’s body in such a horrific state, seemingly ignored even as it started to rot in the heat and humidity, Lee went to the police, begging them to take care of the body. The cops refused, claiming that their priority was the living, and when Lee asked if he could move the body himself, they told him this was illegal. The only thing the cops were prepared to do, they told Lee, was to let Vera Smith’s body rot on the street until they got around to dealing with it.

Lee refused to accept this answer, and finally, after enough badgering, the police allowed him to bury her, so long as he didn’t move the body. So he set about building a makeshift grave for her, right there on the corner of Jackson and Magazine.

A few other neighbors joined in to help and managed to cover her body with a white tarp, which they then weighted down with bricks. Another neighbor, artist Maggie McEleney, painted on top of the tarp a cross and a few stark words: HERE LIES VERA. GOD HELP US.

Vera’s body was ultimately recovered and cremated; her remains were sent to relatives in Texas, where she was given, finally, a proper burial. She has not been forgotten in New Orleans, though. The neighbors who knew Smith later made a more lasting memorial for her at the site of her death: built by the local artist Simon Hardeveld, the memorial was a simple iron cross at the center of which was a clock face wound in barbed wire. Above the clock were the words VERA, DIED AUG 29, ’05.

It might have been then that the stories of Vera’s ghost began to appear. At one point the property owner, who’d been having difficulty finding someone to take the lot off his hands, became convinced that Hardeveld’s memorial was some kind of voodoo charm preventing him from selling the lot and took a sledgehammer to the memorial, almost completely destroying it.

Vera’s spirit would not depart so easily. In a city filled with tragedies, Vera Smith’s death became emblematic of the horror of Katrina, what a local shopkeeper referred to as “symbol of the quiet suffering people endured.” In part because her death remains a mystery—the official autopsy noted her injuries were not consistent with being hit by a car, and left the cause of her death as undetermined. In part because she was loved.

Many assumed, given the situation and the fact that she’d struggled sometimes with alcohol, that she had been homeless, a drifter, a no one. But she had two daughters in Texas and a network of friends and loved ones in the community. Known for her costume jewelry, her brightly colored wigs, and her elaborate dresses, she lived with two small dogs and her common-law husband. “She was not a sad woman. She had a very good life. In the neighborhood, everyone knew her and loved her,” Hardeveld said.

A woman like Vera deserved much more—more assistance during the storm, more dignity in death. The work of Lee and the other neighbors who gathered to help became a defiant gesture in the face of the storm and the ineptitude, poverty, and failures of the city. Even in the depths of such anguish and despair, this much could be done.

When Abraham Lincoln addressed the dead at Gettysburg, he made plain that it was the bodies of the fallen that consecrated the burial ground, not words. So, too, with New Orleans, whose ground was consecrated by the bodies of men and women like Vera Smith. The corner of Jackson and Magazine is a haunt, a place we must always come back to. To be haunted by Vera is to return to this place, to remember.

Because of stories like Vera’s, the ghost of Père Dagobert has become increasingly important to New Orleans, leading this phantasmal funeral procession through the night rains, singing, “Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison”—Lord, have mercy, God help us—promising to bury the bodies that have been left to rot, offering rites for all those that have been abandoned. His legacy is a reminder that, no matter what else happens, we must care for our dead.

As for Charcoal’s: after a year the owners commissioned Hardeveld—the artist who’d built the original memorial for Vera—to create a second memorial honoring her, this one attached to the restaurant, in hopes that it would quiet her spirit. One neighbor told me there were those who felt that the ghost story was likely fictitious and that Charcoal’s used Vera’s death as a marketing ploy to raise interest and business. But this is what New Orleans has always done, and this may just be the next stage of mythmaking for a city that manages to remain the same even as it’s constantly reborn. When co-owner Walker told reporters, “Our message to Vera is our heart and soul is in this restaurant. We want you to support us,” it may not matter whether or not he was speaking to a paranormal entity or simply through Vera to the people who remembered her and wanted her honored.

One way or another, regardless of motives, regardless of what you believe, Vera has returned to her corner. On the side of the building facing Jackson Avenue is a small fountain adorned with a cross and flanked by two wings: one that reads VERA, DIED AUG 29 ’05, and the other, a sly play on words, that reads QUI VERA SERA—“Who is Vera, will be.”