In Brief
At the Place d'Armes Hotel beside Jackson Square in New Orleans, guests strike up easy conversations with a bearded man in old-fashioned clothes on the next balcony over, then find out the room beside theirs has nobody in it.
The Full Story
The Place d'Armes Hotel sits at 625 St. Ann Street in the New Orleans French Quarter, half a block off Jackson Square, and the man guests meet on the next balcony over is one of the reasons people keep telling stories about it. He's bearded, dressed in old period clothes, and he's friendly. A guest steps out for air and falls into a long, easy conversation with him across the balcony rail, the kind you have with a stranger you'll never see again. Later, mentioning the nice fellow next door at the front desk, they're told the room beside theirs is empty, with nobody staying in it.
He turns up inside rooms, too. One guest in 2000 reported a tall man standing just inside their door in late-1700s schoolboy attire, gone within seconds. He's not alone. The hotel's other recurring apparition is a small girl in old-fashioned dress, described variously as a small child or a girl of about twelve, who asks visitors whether they've seen her grandmother and then vanishes. Guests and staff report music, voices, footsteps, children's laughter, and furniture moving in unoccupied rooms. In 2011 a guest heard children running down a hallway and felt unseen hands tuck the covers around her in the dark.
The story behind them goes back to a school. Father Raphael de Luxembourg, a Capuchin priest, founded the first school for boys in colonial New Orleans in 1725, and the site at 617-619 St. Ann once held it. Ghost-tour accounts tie the bearded man to the school's headmaster and the children to his students, all of them said to have died when the Great New Orleans Fire of 1788 swept the Quarter. The fire came on Good Friday, March 21, and the priests refused to ring the church bells as an alarm because of the holy day; by the time it burned out about five hours later, 856 of the city's roughly 1,100 buildings were gone.
It's a clean story, the kind a ghost tour can hang a whole night on. It also may not be true. The 1725 school lasted only five or six years by the state's own history, which puts it closed nearly six decades before the fire. The fire began at a home on Chartres Street, and the record of what burned doesn't mention a school at all. The headmaster and his pupils who supposedly died there may never have been there to die. The man on the balcony keeps talking anyway.
