Beauregard-Keyes House

Three overlapping hauntings at 1113 Chartres: a Confederate general looking for his boots, a 1909 Mafia gunfight, and a mad chess champion.

General P.G.T. Beauregard was buried in stocking feet. That detail, according to the woman who later owned his former home, is why he won't stop looking for his boots.

The Beauregard-Keyes House at 1113 Chartres Street has one of the strangest ghost story layers in the French Quarter. Built in 1826 for a wealthy auctioneer, it was where the Confederate general lived from 1866 to 1868 after he returned from the war, broke and grieving. His second wife Caroline Deslonde had died while he was in the field. Novelist Frances Parkinson Keyes, who bought and restored the place in 1945, wrote that she saw Beauregard's apparition drifting through the rooms at night, still searching for the boots someone forgot to put on him in the coffin.

The other version of the haunting involves a gun battle.

In 1909 the house belonged to Pietro Giacona, a Sicilian grocer and wine importer. On June 17, four members of the Black Hand, New Orleans' Italian Mafia, came to the Giacona home demanding protection money. What happened next depends on which newspaper you read, but the ending is the same: Giacona and his son opened fire on their guests, killed three of them, and wounded the fourth so badly he died later. The Giaconas' young daughters were in a bedroom nearby. The family was never charged. By 1910 the prosecution had quietly dropped the case, and the Giaconas eventually abandoned the house, which sat boarded up "like a fortress," as one reporter described it.

Some visitors report hearing the sounds of that ambush replaying in the formal rooms. A temperature drop in the back parlor, muffled gunfire, the smell of powder. Others describe Civil War soldiers in butternut uniforms, which fits the Beauregard era but not the Giacona one. Author Victor Klein documented sightings of soldiers with mangled limbs reenacting what appear to be battle scenes in the courtyard. Post-World War II accounts mention hearing groans and musket smoke in the rear rooms.

The house has a third ghost story that often gets left out. Chess prodigy Paul Morphy lived here as a teenager. He grew up to become the best chess player in the world by age 20, then spiraled into paranoid delusions, ran naked through Ursulines Street with an axe, and died in a bathtub in 1884 at the age of 47. People who work at the house sometimes describe a young man's voice muttering in the front parlor, though no one has tied that one to a specific event.

The Keyes Foundation operates the property as a museum today. Docents have their own collection of stories that don't make it into the brochures: footsteps on the second floor after close, doors that reset themselves, a piano that occasionally plays one note in the music room. They don't advertise any of it. The house's real reputation is Keyes's research library and the parterre garden she restored.

If you take the tour and linger in the back bedroom where the Giaconas had their bloody night, listen to the silence for a minute. New Orleans has no shortage of ghost stories. This house has three centuries of them, stacked on top of each other, arguing.