Bourbon Orleans Hotel

Room 644 is the most-requested and most-abandoned room at the Bourbon Orleans, where a nun of the Sisters of the Holy Family reportedly took her own life in the late 1800s. The hotel sits on ground that has been a theater, a ballroom, a convent, an orphanage, and a yellow-fever hospital, and the staff count more than twenty ghosts. Orphan children tug shirts in the lobby, and a woman in a gown dances in the old ballroom with a partner no one else can see.

Room 644 at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel is the one people ask for and the one people try to leave. Century-old rumors place a nun of the Sisters of the Holy Family taking her own life there sometime in the late 1800s, and guests who stay in the room describe waking up to see a woman in a habit standing next to the bed, looking down at them with an expression somewhere between curiosity and sorrow.

The Bourbon Orleans Hotel has at least twenty ghosts, according to the staff count. That's a lot, but the building has earned them. The site at 717 Orleans Street has been a theater, a ballroom where the Quadroon Balls of 1820s New Orleans took place, a Catholic convent, an orphanage, a hospital during the yellow fever outbreaks, and finally a hotel. Each of those chapters left behind its own dead.

The orphans are the most-reported spirits, and they turn up all over the building. Guests and staff describe children running through the lobby, tugging shirts and pulling at bus carts, and then vanishing before anyone can catch up. The Sisters of the Holy Family, the first African-American Catholic religious order in America, ran the orphanage here from 1881 to the 1960s, caring for girls orphaned by yellow fever. Many of the girls died at the convent during epidemics. So did some of the nuns.

The ballroom has its own regular. Guests describe a woman in a 19th-century gown dancing under the chandeliers, her dress lifting and her body turning as if she's with a partner no one else can see. When she's not dancing, staff say she hides behind the drapes and occasionally shakes them to get attention. The ballroom also has a bloodstain that reappears on the carpet every time it's cleaned. The usual explanation involves a duel fought over a woman, though records for any specific incident haven't surfaced.

Room 225 is the Confederate soldier. He limps through hallways in a tattered uniform, dragging a sword that scrapes the flooring, his footsteps uneven. Guests describe hearing him pass their door at odd hours. By the time they open it, the hall is empty.

The building's bones are older than most people realize. The original Orleans Theatre opened in 1815 and burned down in 1816. Its replacement became the Orleans Ballroom, which hosted the Quadroon Balls where wealthy white men met free women of color under a system called plaçage. When the Sisters of the Holy Family bought the property in 1881, they stripped out the ballroom fixtures and turned the place into a convent. The hotel didn't open until 1966, after developers reacquired the property and started excavating the history underneath.

Some of what gets dug up never quite leaves. Staff on the third floor hear children playing in empty hallways. Banquet servers watch table skirts move as if something is running underneath them. Guests on the sixth floor end up at the front desk at 2 a.m. asking to change rooms. The hotel doesn't pretend any of it isn't happening. They lean into the reputation, host ghost tours through the ballroom, and keep 644 bookable for anyone who wants the full experience.

Most people who stay there don't sleep much. That's not a marketing line, that's just what the reviews say.