New Orleans Pharmacy Museum

The New Orleans Pharmacy Museum's burglar alarm goes off in the middle of the night with no one inside. Staff blame Dr. James Dupas, the 19th-century pharmacist who allegedly experimented on enslaved women, and whose remains of missing patients were found in the courtyard after he died in 1867.

The New Orleans Pharmacy Museum has a burglar alarm problem. It goes off in the middle of the night with no one inside the building, and when police arrive to check the locks, they find the front door still bolted and the cabinets on the second floor rearranged. The staff have stopped being surprised. They blame Dr. James Dupas, and they have been blaming him for a long time.

Dupas bought the pharmacy at 514 Chartres Street in 1855 for $18,000. The previous owner was Louis J. Dufilho Jr., the first licensed pharmacist in American history, who'd opened the shop in 1823 after passing the country's first pharmacy licensing exam in 1816. Dufilho was meticulous. Dupas was something else entirely. Within a few years, neighbors noticed that patients went in and didn't come out, and when anyone asked where Mrs. So-and-so had gone, Dupas would say she'd moved back to France. He was, according to the museum's own accounts, experimenting on enslaved women, using voodoo-adjacent concoctions and unknown drugs to see what happened during pregnancy. The allegations include miscarriages, birth defects, and the deaths of both mothers and infants. When Dupas died in 1867 from syphilis complications, remains were found buried in the courtyard.

That's the backstory everyone tells. What the staff will tell you, if you catch them on a slow afternoon, is what Dupas is like as a roommate. Witness accounts match across decades: short, stocky, mid-sixties, mustache, brown suit, brown top hat, white lab coat over it. He's been seen most often on the curving staircase that connects the ground floor to the second, which is where the really unpleasant activity happens. Pregnant visitors to the second floor have reported sudden nausea and abdominal cramps, which is the floor the old operating room is on, which is the floor where the experiments happened.

The cabinets get opened. Books get thrown. Small objects move. Locked display cases are found rearranged, their contents shuffled like someone has been browsing. Two children's ghosts, a boy and a girl, have been spotted in the courtyard and inside the building, and the most likely identifications are Delphine and Jules Dufilho, children of the original pharmacist, who died in 1824 and 1832. The tone of the Dufilho children's appearances is completely different from Dupas's. They're curious. He's not.

What's striking about the Pharmacy Museum as a haunting is how well the architecture of the place supports the story. The display cases still hold the actual implements of 19th-century medicine: leech jars, amputation saws, colored-glass show globes full of tinctures, a pharmacist's marble prescription counter that's been in continuous use since 1823. You don't need atmospheric lighting to feel queasy on the second floor. The tools themselves do the work.

The Pharmacy Museum has been a pharmacy, a private home, and a museum, and the one constant across two centuries is that the second floor is where nobody lingers. Paranormal groups have filmed here. Tours stop at the stairway. Pregnant women get warned before going up, not because the staff think anything supernatural is going to hurt them, but because enough of them have come back down looking shaken that it's become a courtesy. The alarm keeps going off. The cabinets keep opening. Of every 19th-century figure who could have picked up squatter's rights in the French Quarter, it fits grimly that this one got the shop where he buried the evidence.