Faulkner House Books

Pipe tobacco smoke drifts through Faulkner House Books on Pirates Alley, where William Faulkner wrote his first novel in 1925. A handful of visitors have reported seeing him at his writing desk. Female staff report a less welcome presence that the bookshop doesn't publicize.

Every time a pretty young woman has worked the register at Faulkner House Books, she's reported the same thing: an inappropriate caress from something she couldn't see. That's the part the bookstore doesn't put on its website. The part it does acknowledge is the pipe smoke. Visitors walk into the two-room shop at 624 Pirates Alley, catch a strong whiff of tobacco, and turn to see who lit up. Nobody ever has.

William Faulkner rented the ground-floor apartment here in 1925, sharing the space with silversmith William Spratling for about six months. He was twenty-seven, unpublished, and broke. He finished his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, in these rooms, wrote essays for the local literary magazine The Double Dealer, and co-wrote a satirical book with Spratling called Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles. By the time he left New Orleans for Oxford, Mississippi, he had the voice that would eventually win him the Nobel Prize. He also, by most accounts, had a pipe in his teeth during almost every waking hour.

That habit is what tips guests off. The pipe tobacco shows up most often on quiet afternoons, strongest near the desk where Faulkner is believed to have written. A visitor named Joan Williams described catching the scent with no smoker in sight. A handful of people have gone further, claiming to see the author himself seated at that desk, bent over a page, then gone when they looked twice. The staff have stopped being startled by any of it.

Joseph J. DeSalvo Jr. and Rosemary James bought the 1837 townhouse in 1988 and opened Faulkner House Books two years later. It was designated a National Literary Landmark in 1993, one of a small group of U.S. sites officially recognized for its connection to an author. Today the shop stocks rare Southern literature under mahogany bookcases, and the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society, which DeSalvo and James also founded, runs the annual Words & Music festival out of the same address.

Pirates Alley itself has a reputation that predates Faulkner by a century. The cobblestoned passage between St. Louis Cathedral and the Cabildo was laid down around 1831, but the ground underneath was used as a Spanish colonial prison and a French guard house long before that. A 1924 newspaper story claimed bullet holes were still visible in the courtyard wall where Spanish guards supposedly executed pirates and prisoners. Most of that is more legend than documented fact, but the alley absorbed it anyway. Locals talk about a Capuchin priest named Father Dagobert, who secretly buried French rebels executed by Spanish Governor Alejandro O'Reilly in 1769, and who's said to walk the passage singing. A pirate named Reginald Hicks supposedly married a local woman at an iron gate on the alley, then died in battle shortly after. Phantom wedding bells are the usual evidence for that one.

It's a lot of ghost stories for a three-hundred-foot stretch of pavement. The Faulkner one has the advantage of being recent, specific, and tied to a person whose habits are well documented. Nobody needs to invent a reason why a man who smoked a pipe for fifty years would leave that smell behind in a room where he spent six of his most productive months. The wall-grope story, which the shop itself doesn't publicize, is the one that says something else is going on. Faulkner had a reputation, but not that one. Whatever caresses the new female employees isn't necessarily the novelist.

The shop closes at 5:30 most days. The smell usually shows up before then.