Old Absinthe House

Jean Lafitte and Andrew Jackson allegedly worked out the pirate's pardon-for-fighters deal upstairs at the Old Absinthe House in 1814, weeks before the Battle of New Orleans. Guests have claimed to see both of them, plus Marie Laveau, Benjamin Butler, and a child running on the third floor.

Jean Lafitte made a deal in the Old Absinthe House that arguably saved New Orleans. The year was 1814, the building was already sixty-two years old, and Lafitte was a pirate with a fleet and a problem. Andrew Jackson needed men. Lafitte needed pardons. Local tradition puts their meeting in a room upstairs, on what's now the second floor of a bar at 240 Bourbon Street, and less than a month later Lafitte's Baratarians were helping Jackson win the Battle of New Orleans. The ghosts here aren't shy about that history. Guests have claimed to see both of them.

The building went up in 1752 as a grocery and import house, burned in the 1788 Great Fire like most of the Quarter, and was rebuilt in 1806 by two Spaniards, Pedro Front and Francisco Juncadella. It didn't become a bar until the 1870s, when a bartender named Cayetano Ferrer started serving the green fairy and gave the place its name. Mark Twain drank here. Oscar Wilde drank here. Walt Whitman drank here. Aleister Crowley drank here, which is either a red flag or a selling point depending on who's listening.

The ghosts reported here are a who's-who of the building's guest list. Jean Lafitte is described as the most active, throwing what bartenders call spectral parties, with bursts of laughter and carousing coming from empty rooms. Visitors have also claimed to see Andrew Jackson himself, Marie Laveau (who was a regular in life), and Benjamin Butler, the Union general who occupied New Orleans during the Civil War and was hated enough locally that one of his ghost-sightings here is treated as a running joke. A woman in a long white dress has been spotted on the main floor. A child has been reported running around the third floor.

The specific phenomena are typical haunted-bar fare made more interesting by context. Doors open by themselves. Bottles and chairs move. Temperatures drop suddenly in specific corners. Whispers come out of rooms that are empty. In a bar this old, in a building this layered, those details could sound generic anywhere else. At the Old Absinthe House they land differently, because the list of people who passed through here reads like a footnote from every history class you took. The building's own tagline, carved somewhere in its marketing, is that everyone you have ever known or will ever know ends up at the Old Absinthe House eventually. The ghosts seem to agree.

The unusual touch is the décor. Business cards and calling cards from over a century of patrons cover the walls, stapled and taped in overlapping layers, and the ceiling has football helmets nailed to it in a pattern that doesn't quite make sense until a bartender explains it. The zinc bar top is the same one Cayetano Ferrer used to slice the sugar for the original New Orleans absinthe frappe. Order one if you're curious about the drink that got banned in the U.S. from 1912 to 2007. The bartenders will mix it correctly, with cold water dripped over a slotted spoon holding a sugar cube, the way Lafitte probably never actually drank it.

The likeliest explanation for the Old Absinthe House being this persistently reported as haunted is that it collects ghosts the way it collects business cards. People have been walking in and out of this building for 274 years, through fires, wars, occupations, prohibitions, and bachelor parties. When the entire floor plan of a city got rebuilt around it twice, it stayed. Longevity like that accumulates things. And when you're leaning against the bar at midnight and someone laughs behind you in an empty room, the building gives you a list of people it could have been.