In the Big Easy, it’s always spooky season. New Orleans is a city steeped in history and ghostly tales just waiting to be shared with the world. New Orleans Magazine editor Ashley McLellan, along with digital media editor and podcast producer Kelly Massicot, bring you a yearly season of stories from Beyond the Grave.
We hope you enjoy the inaugural season that begins with the story of the Girod Street Cemetery and its potential curse over the New Orleans Superdome.
Season 1
Legend says the New Orleans Superdome was built atop the former Girod Street Cemetery, which was established in 1822 and housed 1,100 tombs. Is this the reason why, at their inception, the Saints never had a winning season? Was the curse ever broken? Do the living and the dead chant “Who Dat” in harmony on game days?
Though made famous by author Anne Rice with tales of vampires and witches, her noteworthy New Orleans home at 1239 First Street in the Garden District has a much longer and more ominous past. The Greek Revival-style house was built in the 1850s and spans a sizable 9,000 square feet of living space, perfect for the dead that still inhabit the property amongst the living.
In 1927, a gruesome and murderous scene was found as police entered 715 Ursuline Street in the heart of the French Quarter and found two young women, expertly butchered and placed into traveling trunks. The suspects? The women’s husbands, brothers named Henry and Joseph Moity. This week’s story includes murder, “lady fingers,” a prison escape and more!
In December 2015, Lisa Walley Staggs posted on her Facebook page that a “tree” had been lit on a random floor of the abandoned Charity Hospital. Abandoned since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the typically dark building sported holiday cheer, but why? Who or what was in there?
As if 1930s Depression Era New Orleans wasn’t stressful enough, two brothers terrified New Orleanians as they fed their way through the French Quarter. Though caught, hanged and buried; years later the bodies of John and Wayne Carter mysteriously disappeared. Were they really the Vampire Brothers after all? And if so, where are they now?
On this Halloween, our friend Poppy Tooker shares all of her ghostly encounters at the popular Tujaque’s Restaurant. From drag queens to child ghosts, Poppy has a story for everyone!
