Hermann-Grima House

Marie Grima died October 15, 1850. Every October, fireplaces at her French Quarter mansion light themselves before staff arrive.

Staff at the Hermann-Grima House have walked into rooms on cold October mornings to find the fireplaces already lit. Nobody on the schedule lit them. No guest admitted to it. The museum staff long ago gave up trying to find an explanation and accepted it as Marie Grima's way of welcoming the season.

Anne Marie Filiosa Grima, the Widow Grima in museum shorthand, was the matriarch of the Grima family and the mother of Judge Felix Grima, who bought the mansion in 1844 after its original owners lost it to bankruptcy. She died in the house on October 15, 1850, and according to the staff and the regular visitors, she comes back most often in the weeks around the anniversary of her death. She's described as warm rather than frightening. Guests have reported finding rose petals and loose lavender strewn across rooms that were empty a moment earlier. The scent of roses and lavender, both in and out of season, turns up on tours often enough to be a running joke among the docents.

The first floor belongs to the Widow. The rest of the house gets busier.

The mansion was built in 1831 for Samuel Hermann, a German-Jewish immigrant who made a fortune in the cotton trade, then lost it during the Panic of 1837. The Grimas bought it out of bankruptcy and raised nine children there across three generations. The kitchen, the servant quarters, and the carriage house are all still on the property, restored and open to the public. The house was operated as a museum starting in 1971 and is now owned by the Woman's Exchange of New Orleans, with its sister property the Gallier House, now part of a shared organization called Hermann-Grima + Gallier Historic Houses.

Visitors sometimes mistake the Widow for a costumed docent, which has led to a standard follow-up question at the front desk: was anyone in 1840s mourning dress in the upstairs bedroom just now? The answer is usually no. She has engaged visitors in conversation, then vanished mid-sentence in front of them.

Less welcome spirits come with the history. During the Civil War, the Grima family fled to France, and Union officers used the mansion as a residence during the occupation of New Orleans. Some of those soldiers apparently stuck around, and visitors describe encounters that are rougher than the Widow Grima's. Heavier footsteps, a cold pressure in certain rooms, the sense that whoever's there is not in a hospitable mood. The Grima family wouldn't have welcomed those particular guests in life, and the house seems to hold the same feeling about them now.

The mansion has also had a second career as a film set. American Horror Story: Coven used Hermann-Grima as a stand-in for the notorious Madame LaLaurie mansion a few blocks away, after the LaLaurie house refused to allow filming. That connection put Hermann-Grima in front of a much larger audience than its daily tour traffic, and the ghost reports spiked during and after the show aired.

This place stands apart from most haunted houses in the French Quarter because the stories line up. The Widow Grima isn't a mystery. She's been given a name, a death date, and a pattern. She shows up in October. She likes flowers. She lights fires when the weather turns. The scent of roses in a room that hasn't had fresh flowers in a week is the quiet part of the haunting, the one the docents mention almost in passing. The Union officers are the part nobody particularly wants to discuss.

Marie Grima died on October 15. The fireplaces tend to start lighting themselves around then.