In Brief
At the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans, the ghost everyone tells you about is a small boy named Maurice Begere, who died in the hotel while his parents were at the opera. The story says he came back with four words for his mother.
The Full Story
At the Hotel Monteleone on Royal Street in New Orleans, the ghost everyone tells you about is a small boy. They call him Maurice Begere. The story goes that he died here in the late 1800s, struck down by a sudden fever and convulsions while a nurse watched over him and his parents, Jacques and Josephine, were out at the French Opera House on Bourbon Street.
His mother could not let him go. Year after year she came back to the hotel, hoping for some sign of him. And the legend says she got one. The apparition of her son is said to have appeared to her and spoken four words: "Mommy, don't cry. I'm fine."
None of it is in any record. There's no death certificate, no period newspaper, no documented room. The boy lives entirely in the stories the hotel and the ghost-tour guides tell, and they don't all agree on the small facts. Some say he was three; the hotel's own pages just call him a toddler. He's said to appear on the fourteenth floor, which is really the thirteenth, the number skipped the way old buildings skip it. One guest account has him passing the foot of a bed early in the morning, gone before anyone is fully awake.
He has company up there. Guests describe a lost child who asks to hold their hand and then vanishes, and a young boy seen playing hide-and-seek with another small spirit, two children at a game no one can join.
The adults stay too. Staff and guests have long reported a man named William "Red" Wildemere, who died of natural causes in the building. A clockmaker is said to work the lobby clock at night. People hear jazz singers in the lobby when no music is playing. And there's a restaurant door, locked with a push-button mechanism, that has been seen to open on its own. Investigators put it down to a dead chef and a busboy still working the room.
In March 2003, a team led by Dr. Larry Montz spent days inside and reported contact with more than a dozen entities, Maurice among them. The Monteleone doesn't shy from any of this. It names its dead.
Most of the building gives no hint. The Carousel Bar in the lobby has turned slowly on 2,000 steel rollers since 1949, one full revolution every fifteen minutes, and writers have always loved the place. Capote, Hemingway, and Williams have suites named for them; Faulkner stayed while collecting the French Legion of Honor.
The hotel has been in the Monteleone family for five generations since 1886. They've kept the place, kept the stories, kept a floor numbered fourteen that everyone knows is thirteen. And somewhere up there, a boy who keeps telling his mother not to cry.
