Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop Bar

A 1722 bar on Bourbon Street with red eyes reported inside the fireplace, said to be guarding Jean Lafitte's buried treasure. Jean himself is the most commonly sighted ghost, standing silently near the fireplace before walking through the wall. One of the few surviving French colonial brick-between-posts buildings in New Orleans.

The fireplace at Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop has been looked at more carefully than any fireplace in New Orleans. People keep reporting the same thing: a pair of red eyes staring back out of the grate. Locals will tell you that's Jean Lafitte's buried treasure down in the brickwork, guarded by something that doesn't want you looking. Whether you believe the treasure story or the eyes is up to you. The bar has been there since around 1722, and a surprising number of people who sit at the piano near that fireplace find themselves not wanting to sit there alone.

This is the building at Bourbon and St. Philip, a rare surviving example of French colonial briquette-entre-poteaux construction, meaning brick-between-posts. Most of the French Quarter was rebuilt in Spanish style after the fires of 1788 and 1794. Lafitte's somehow survived both. It is one of the oldest structures not just in New Orleans but in the entire Mississippi Valley, and it has been a bar almost the entire time.

Pierre Lafitte was a blacksmith by trade, which is where the name came from, though historians debate whether the Lafitte brothers actually owned this specific building or whether it belonged to their associate Renato Beluche. What's not debated is that Jean and Pierre ran a privateering operation out of Barataria Bay south of the city in the early 1800s, selling goods taken from Spanish ships, and that Jean made himself useful to Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, which earned him a federal pardon.

Jean is the most commonly reported ghost at the bar that bears his name. The sightings follow a pattern. He stands in the corner near the fireplace on the first floor, or upstairs near the second-floor bar. He's solid enough that guests sometimes mistake him for another patron. He doesn't speak. He watches until someone notices, then he's gone. One piano player described looking up mid-song and locking eyes with a man in early 1800s clothes for a full three seconds before the man walked through the wall.

A second figure haunts the upstairs: a woman whose identity has never been pinned down. Local guides tell a story that she lived in the building in the 1890s and took her own life, but no documentation supports that, so take it as legend. Visitors upstairs describe a feminine presence and sometimes the smell of roses in rooms where nothing is blooming.

There's almost no electric light inside. The bar runs on candles, which is partly historical preservation and partly mood, and it works. Brick is exposed. Floorboards creak. The shutters hang at wrong angles. In a building this old, the sounds that come from nowhere and the drafts without a source blur together with the ordinary complaints of a 300-year-old structure. That might be the honest explanation for a lot of what happens here. It also might not be.

Lafitte's was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1970. The fireplace is still there. So are the red eyes, if you believe the people who've seen them.