Hotel Monteleone

Three-year-old Maurice Begere died at the Hotel Monteleone in the 1890s. His mother kept coming back, hoping to hear from him. She eventually did.

The Hotel Monteleone has one line its ghost has been repeating for more than a century: "Mommy, don't cry. I'm fine." According to the hotel's own ghost-stories archive, that's what Maurice Begere said to his mother on the fourteenth floor sometime in the 1890s, decades after he'd died in one of its rooms. Josephine Begere came back to the hotel every year with her husband Jacques, hoping to hear from her son. According to the legend she eventually did, once, and those four words are what she got.

Maurice was three. His parents were season-ticket theatergoers who'd leave him at the hotel with a nurse when they went to the French Opera House on Bourbon Street. One night while they were gone, he spiked a fever, convulsed, and died. The Begeres kept booking the same hotel because the alternative was never seeing him again. The apparition appeared on the fourteenth floor, which the Hotel Monteleone labels the fourteenth but which is actually the thirteenth, with the number skipped for the usual reason. The floor has kept its reputation.

In 2014, a family staying in the hotel noticed something odd about the elevator. When the two school-aged daughters rode it by themselves or with a parent, it stopped at the fourteenth floor regardless of which button they pressed. When only adults were in the car, it behaved normally. The parents eventually asked the front desk about it. The concierge didn't seem surprised. The fourteenth floor is the one children find, or that finds them.

The Monteleone has been hosting guests since 1886, when a Sicilian cobbler named Antonio Monteleone bought a small hotel on Royal Street and expanded it room by room. It's now seventeen stories and Beaux-Arts throughout, with a slowly rotating Carousel Bar downstairs that completes one revolution every fifteen minutes. The hotel has hosted Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Anne Rice for extended stays. Williams set scenes from The Rose Tattoo and Orpheus Descending here, Hemingway mentioned it in Night Before Battle, and the American Library Association designated it a Literary Landmark in 1999.

In 2003, the International Society of Paranormal Research ran an overnight investigation and claimed contact with more than a dozen entities still on the property. Most were former guests. Some were employees. William "Red" Wildemere, who died of natural causes in the hotel and whose appearances staff have documented for decades, gets cited most often. Staff and guests have reported a phantom child reaching for visitors' hands on the upper floors, the sound of jazz singers in the lobby when no music is playing, and the face of a ghostly clockmaker that occasionally appears inside the lobby's grandfather clock.

Kent Wasmuth, the hotel's Director of Sales and Marketing, has repeatedly told investigators that none of the resident spirits seem hostile. He's comfortable calling them friendly, which is not a word most paranormal teams throw around lightly. The hotel doesn't pretend the haunting isn't there. The official website carries a ghost-stories section. Ghost tours stop out front. The staff will answer questions.

The Monteleone stands apart from the French Quarter's other haunted hotels because of the density of the stories. Most places have one headline ghost. The Monteleone has a named list: Maurice, Red, the jazz singers, the clockmaker, the children on the fourteenth floor. Each one comes with its own specific phenomenon and a chain of guest reports going back decades. That's closer to a small boarding house of the dead than to a single-ghost hotel.

The Carousel Bar turns ninety-six times a day. Somewhere above it, an elevator is deciding which floor to stop at based on whether there's a kid inside.