St. Louis Cemetery No. 2

Opened in 1823 as the original St. Louis Cemetery reached capacity, this "City of the Dead" contains elaborate above-ground tombs of prominent New Orleans families and victims of yellow fever epidemics.

St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 was established in 1823 as an extension of the already overflowing St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, built to push the mounting corpses of yellow fever victims further from the French Quarter. Between 1817 and 1905, more than forty-one thousand people died in New Orleans from yellow fever alone, and the city's cemeteries could not keep pace with the dead. Unlike its predecessor with its obtuse alleyways and overcrowded corridors, Cemetery No. 2 was designed with an organized layout featuring a central continuous alleyway running through its center. The cemetery originally stretched four blocks from Canal Street to St. Louis Street, though the Canal block was sold to the city in 1847 as Canal Street was being developed. That section became the first official African American cemetery in New Orleans.

The cemetery's above-ground tombs follow the distinctive New Orleans tradition born of necessity. The city's proximity to the Mississippi River and its high water table made underground burial impractical. Family tombs here are large enough to hold sixty to one hundred bodies, functioning as what Catholic authorities accepted as slow-working cremation furnaces, since God rather than man performed the cremation. Wall vaults, sealed into the cemetery's perimeter walls, were sometimes reused with as many as ten bodies interred in a single vault over the years.

Among the notable burials is jazz drummer Paul Barbarin, who was laid to rest here in 1969 after collapsing during a Mardi Gras parade. Barbarin was a pioneer of modern drumming who performed with King Oliver's band and later with Louis Armstrong. His cousin Danny Barker, renowned for setting standards in New Orleans banjo playing on both four-string and six-string instruments, followed him to their family tomb in 1990. The cemetery holds generations of New Orleans musical heritage within its walls.

The most persistent ghost story involves the Voodoo connection to this cemetery. Marie Laveau II, born Marie Philomene Glapion in 1837, was the daughter of the legendary Voodoo Queen who inherited her mother's position as the city's leading Voodoo practitioner. While officially buried in the Glapion family tomb at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, some accounts claim her body was quietly moved to St. Louis No. 2 after her death in 1897 and placed in a wall vault in Section 3, the original African American section. Followers reportedly leave coins in a wall vault believed to be hers, and some say her spirit lingers near the cemetery, a presence described by some as watchful and by others as malicious.

The most chilling ghost story was documented in Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folk Tales of Louisiana, compiled from interviews conducted in the 1930s. According to the account, a taxi driver picked up a young woman in a white wedding gown standing outside the cemetery at the corner of Iberville and Claiborne. She asked for a ride home and upon arriving at the destination, requested that the driver ring the bell at the gallery door. The man who answered told the stunned driver that the woman had been dead for some years and was buried in her wedding dress. The story became so widely known that taxi drivers reportedly avoided picking up passengers near St. Louis Cemetery No. 2, particularly at night. Visitors to the cemetery today continue to report unexplained cold spots, figures in period dress walking between the tombs who vanish when approached, and an overwhelming sense of sadness that settles without warning in certain sections of the grounds.