St. Louis Cemetery No. 2

Pirate Dominique You, right-hand man to Jean Lafitte and hero of the Battle of New Orleans, rests under a Masonic tomb at St. Louis Cemetery No. 2, the 1823 yellow-fever overflow burial ground. A phantom bride hitches rides from cab drivers on Iberville and Claiborne, and faint jazz is heard drifting near the tombs of Dutch Morial and Danny Barker at dusk.

Taxi drivers working the edge of St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 have picked up the same phantom bride for decades. She flags them down on Iberville and Claiborne, asks to be taken to the same address, and somewhere during the ride she disappears from the back seat. When the driver looks, the seat is empty. The address she asks for is a house that no longer exists. The wayward bride is the most-repeated story about the cemetery, and it's probably the least interesting one. The better stories sit closer to the tombs.

The cemetery opened in 1823, built to extend the overflowing St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 a few blocks north. Yellow fever had been hollowing out the French Quarter for decades, and the city needed the ground. It runs three square blocks along Claiborne Avenue, separated by Bienville and Conti Streets, and the layout and scale are similar to No. 1. The residents are different. This is where New Orleans buried its free people of color, its privateers, its musicians, and its Creoles of class. It holds about 25,000 burials.

Dominique You, the pirate, lieutenant to Jean Lafitte, and hero of the Battle of New Orleans, is buried here in a simple Masonic tomb marked with a square and compass on the main aisle. He died in 1830. His funeral was given full military honors by the city that once considered him a criminal. The French inscription on his tomb calls him a new Bayard, without reproach or fear, who could have defeated the fiercest corsairs and now sleeps the sleep of the forgotten hero. Visitors have reported a heaviness at the tomb and occasionally the faint smell of gunpowder. Some ghost tour guides place You walking this section of the cemetery, though the accounts are thinner than the ones around Marie Laveau next door.

Andre Cailloux, the Civil War Union captain, is the other named resident worth stopping for. Cailloux, born into slavery and freed before the war, commanded a company of the 1st Louisiana Native Guard and was killed leading the charge at Port Hudson on May 27, 1863. His funeral in New Orleans drew tens of thousands of mourners, and he was interred in Square 3. Danny Barker, the jazz banjoist and historian, was laid to rest in 1994 in the Paul Barbarin family tomb, his uncle's tomb, which is one of the few here that gets flowers from tourists who were not related to the deceased. Tour guides who have worked No. 2 report visitors hearing faint jazz near the Barker tomb at dusk, a distant club sound drifting across a walled cemetery.

The wayward bride is the story that shows up in every feature about the cemetery. Sources disagree on the exact intersection. Some put her on Iberville and Claiborne, others on Conti and Basin, and the details of her backstory vary. The common version has her as a young woman who died on her wedding day, either from yellow fever or from a sudden illness, and whose body was rushed to No. 2 before her groom even knew she was gone. Taxi drivers who pick her up describe her as quiet, beautifully dressed, and specific about where she wants to go. The destinations are always houses that have since been demolished.

Yellow fever drove the building of this cemetery, and the fever victims are the largest category of burial here. Unnamed spirits turn up in the back sections where the plague dead were packed into wall vaults, usually described as figures in early 19th-century dress who vanish when approached. A ghost of a little boy has been reported near the fence along Iberville Street, kicking a rock that never actually moves.

The cemetery is managed by the Archdiocese of New Orleans and remains open to the public for a few hours each day, unlike No. 1 next door. Vandalism and tomb damage are ongoing problems, which is part of why the walls along Claiborne have been repaired multiple times since Hurricane Katrina. Visitors who do the quick-read version of the cemetery look for Dominique You and leave. Visitors who stay for the music, or who come near closing time when the light goes flat and the wall vaults cool, sometimes come back with a story about the bride, or the jazz at the Barker tomb, or a row of free people of color whose names most tour guides skip.