In Brief
At Arnaud's Restaurant in New Orleans, the founder died in 1948 and, by most accounts, never stopped working the floor. Diners describe a tall man in an old-fashioned tuxedo standing in a corner, watching the room and nudging the silverware back into line.
The Full Story
At Arnaud's Restaurant on Bienville Street in New Orleans, diners keep noticing a tall man in an old-fashioned tuxedo standing off in a corner during dinner, near the beveled glass windows. He looks like a guest who wandered over from another table. He smiles but doesn't speak. He watches the room, sometimes reaches down to straighten a place setting that isn't quite right, and when anyone walks toward him, he's gone.
Staff and diners both report him, and they're fairly sure who he is. Arnaud Cazenave opened the restaurant in 1918, months before Prohibition, a French wine salesman who ran it for thirty years with a fixation on pressed linen and exact table settings. Locals took to calling him "the Count," an honorary nickname he encouraged and never actually held. He died in 1948. The story goes that he stayed to keep working his floor, "resplendent in an old-fashioned tuxedo," still fixing the silverware that doesn't meet his standards. He's almost never seen in the kitchen. He's a front-of-house ghost, watching the floor the way he watched it in life.
He isn't the only one. His daughter Germaine Cazenave Wells took the restaurant over after his death, and reigned as queen of more than 22 Mardi Gras balls between 1937 and 1968, more than any other woman in the history of Carnival. Her gowns hang upstairs now in a museum named for her, opened in 1983, holding 13 of her own queen gowns and four king's costumes the Count himself wore. People report her there too, a misty shape near her dresses, sometimes wearing the oversized hats she was known for.
The strangest sighting is hers. A woman in a hat is seen leaving the ladies' room, crossing the hall, and walking straight into a wall. The story has it that a staircase once stood at that exact spot, where she'd have turned to go up.
Arnaud's has grown into 11 connected buildings taking up nearly a full French Quarter block, the oldest dating to the 18th century. Down in the Richelieu Bar, in one of the oldest of them, staff describe cold spots that arrive out of nowhere. Ghost-tour lore blames old grudges from what the building used to be, but no record backs that up.
The Count is the one who keeps coming back. Nobody can say when he was last seen, only that he's still there at dinner, watching his floor the way he did in life, straightening one more setting before he's gone.
