Dauphine Orleans Hotel

The Dauphine Orleans Hotel sits on the site of May Baily's, the first legally licensed brothel in New Orleans (1857), and the ladies haven't quite left. Millie Baily still paces the courtyard in the wedding dress she never got to wear, waiting for a fiancé killed in a gambling dispute on their wedding day. Glasses fly off shelves in the bar, televisions click on by themselves, and a ghost called the Worried General paces the outer courtyard.

Guests at the Dauphine Orleans Hotel describe a woman in a lace wedding gown pacing the courtyard near May Baily's Place bar, waiting for a fiancé who was shot dead on their wedding day in the 1860s. The bride's name, according to hotel lore, is Millie Baily. Her dress was handmade and never worn to the altar.

May Baily's Place is the hotel's bar, and it used to be the hotel's original purpose. In 1857 Madam May Baily obtained the first legal brothel license in New Orleans and ran the operation out of the building that's now the courtyard bar. Her sister Millie lived there too, trying to escape the life her family had built. The fiancé was supposed to be her way out. After he died, Millie stayed.

The bar has its own long list of phenomena that aren't tied to a named ghost. Glasses fly off shelves and break on the floor with no one standing near them. Barstools get reported levitating or sliding across the floor during closing. Doors that staff have just locked come open on their own. The bartenders have a practiced shrug by the time they've worked there a month.

Millie is the ghost that guests remember. She wears her wedding dress, she doesn't acknowledge anyone, and she keeps to the courtyard and the bar. Several visitors have described watching her pass through a wall where a door used to be before a 20th-century renovation. The Dauphine Orleans stitched together a row of French Quarter buildings over the years, including Samuel Hermann's 1831 home and the original May Baily's brothel, and the floor plan has changed enough that the ghosts occasionally take paths that no longer exist on the map.

The second named spirit is the Worried General. Dr. Larry Montz of the International Society for Paranormal Research investigated the hotel and came out with the name "Eldridge," describing a male figure seen pacing the outer courtyard, looking anxious, sometimes in period military dress. The Eldridge identification is a psychic reading, not a historical record, and the name hasn't been tied to any specific occupant of the property. But the figure itself has been reported by staff and guests across decades.

There's a recurring report on the second floor of televisions switching on by themselves, usually between 2 and 4 a.m., tuned to static. Phone calls that come from inside rooms with no one in them. Guests who wake up at the foot of their bed instead of the head.

If you're staying in the Dauphine Orleans, ask about the rooms that back onto the May Baily's courtyard. Those are the ones with the most reports. And if you're at the bar at last call and you catch a woman in white out of the corner of your eye by the fountain, don't try to introduce yourself. She isn't looking for new company.