St. Louis Cemetery No. 1

Marie Laveau's tomb at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 draws more visitors than any burial site in Louisiana, marked with thousands of Xs scratched into the plaster by wish-seekers. The 1789 cemetery's 700 above-ground tombs hold over 100,000 burials, including the sailor Henry Vignes who asks visitors where his family tomb is.

Visitors to Marie Laveau's tomb at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 have left offerings there for over a century. Coins. Candles. Flowers. Three small Xs scratched into the plaster with a stone, which was the old ritual people used when they wanted her to grant a wish. The Archdiocese of New Orleans spent 10,000 dollars on Christmas Eve 2013, cleaning pink latex paint off the tomb after a vandal coated it in a single night, and the marks came back within days. People still do the Xs. They just pay the price of cemetery admission now.

A fire and successive yellow fever epidemics in the late 1780s forced New Orleans to abandon the old churchyard at the St. Louis Church, and Spanish royal decree established this ground as the replacement cemetery on August 14, 1789. This corner of the Vieux Carré sits below sea level. Early burials in shallow graves kept floating during storms, and bodies were known to wash onto streets in the French Quarter. The city started building above-ground tombs out of necessity, and the cemetery's single block of compacted oven vaults now holds over 100,000 burials in roughly 700 tombs.

Marie Laveau was born in 1801, freed before age fifteen, and rose to become the most famous voodoo practitioner in American history. She died in 1881. Her tomb is the Glapion family crypt on the main central aisle, marked by a small plaque and the endless graffiti of Xs. Longtime French Quarter Phantoms guides name her as the apparition tourists describe to them after they leave the cemetery. The accounts line up across decades: a tall woman in a long dress walking the aisles at dusk, muttering in what sounds like Creole French, occasionally pausing at a tomb as if to bless it before she is gone. Staff and tour guides have described her independent of each other.

Henry Vignes is the other named ghost, and his story is specific. He was a 19th-century sailor who spent long stretches at sea, and before one voyage he handed his family burial papers to a boarding house owner for safekeeping. The boarding house owner sold the tomb out from under him. When Vignes died in 1841, he was placed in the pauper's section of the cemetery in an unmarked grave. He walks the Protestant section asking anyone he meets whether they know where his tomb is. Tall. Sailor's clothing. Polite enough that visitors sometimes answer him before realizing they're talking to a ghost. Haunted History Tours and Ghost City Tours both document the same encounter pattern going back decades.

The tomb of Delphine LaLaurie is disputed, but she is almost certainly here. She fled New Orleans for Paris in 1834 after firefighters found enslaved people mutilated and chained in her attic. She died in Paris on December 7, 1849, and was buried at the Cimetière de Montmartre. On January 7, 1851, her body was exhumed and quietly shipped back to New Orleans, where her Macarty and Blanque relatives interred her in the family plot at St. Louis No. 1. Sexton Eugene Backes found a copper plate in Alley 4 in the late 1930s engraved with her name. The exact tomb is not marked for tourists, and several ghost tour companies point to different vaults as hers, which is the dispute. The remains are here. The question is which alley.

Civil War dead and yellow fever victims fill in the older wall vaults, and a ghost dog has been reported on the paths after sunset, usually barking at visitors before disappearing into a row. For anything more specific than that the research thins out fast. What doesn't thin out is the Laveau tomb. Tour guides report visitors who feel dizzy at the Glapion crypt, a flutter of pressure around the chest that several have described as warm rather than cold, and the faint smell of tobacco and rum. Marie Laveau is said to have favored both in life.

The Archdiocese closed the cemetery to the general public in March 2015 after ongoing vandalism, and access is now limited to licensed tour companies and family members of the buried. That restriction has made the Laveau tomb less accessible but has not slowed the stories. It remains the single most visited burial site in Louisiana, ahead of every governor, general, and musician buried in the state.