St. Louis Cemetery No. 3

Built on a former leper colony and opened in 1854 after yellow fever killed roughly 10 percent of New Orleans. The ghost stories are quieter than Cemetery No. 1's, but the ground underneath has buried people twice.

St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 sits on ground that killed people twice. Before a single tomb went up on Esplanade Avenue, Governor Bernardo de Galvez had banished leprosy patients to this stretch of land near Bayou St. John in the late 1700s, a colony that failed slowly against the mosquitoes and isolation. Then came the summer of 1853, when yellow fever killed roughly 10 percent of New Orleans in a matter of months. The city needed somewhere to put 8,000 new bodies. The Cathedral wardens had already purchased this tract in 1849 for $15,000. After the epidemic, they cleared it and opened the cemetery in 1854.

Every aboveground tomb you see at 3421 Esplanade is standing on soil that was already a graveyard of sorts. Most ghost stories need a building and a witness; this place has a foundation story grim enough that the atmosphere does the work on its own.

Cemetery No. 3 is architecturally the most elegant of the three St. Louis cemeteries. Surveyor Jules A. D'Hémécourt redesigned it in 1865, widening the central aisle by ten feet and adding cross-aisles named for bishops and archbishops. The original plan had three main aisles honoring Saint Louis, Saint Peter, and Saint Paul, with four smaller ones dedicated to saints including Mary, Joseph, Magdalene, and Philomene. Walking through it feels like a scaled-down city, rows of white mausolea stretching in every direction, roughly 10,000 burial sites packed into five and a half squares.

The most famous tomb belongs to architect James Gallier Sr., who designed much of antebellum New Orleans. He and his wife Elizabeth never made it home to see it. They drowned in 1866 when the steamship Evening Star went down off the coast of Georgia during a hurricane. Their son, James Gallier Jr., designed the tomb as a cenotaph, since their bodies were lost at sea. It's one of the more ornate structures in the cemetery, and guides will tell you the grief behind it if you ask.

Ernest "Dutch" Morial, the first Black mayor of New Orleans, was reinterred here in 2014 after originally being buried at St. Louis No. 1. His family moved him quietly to a family tomb along the main aisle. Other residents include Storyville photographer E.J. Bellocq, who documented the city's red-light district around 1912, along with chefs Leah Chase of Dooky Chase's and Paul Prudhomme of K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen. It's the cemetery where New Orleans buries the people who fed it and photographed it and designed it.

The ghost stories are quieter than the ones at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, which has Marie Laveau's tomb and a cottage industry of named specters. Cemetery No. 3 doesn't have a marquee ghost. What it has is the steady low-grade unease of a place where tourists walk between graves of yellow fever dead whose names nobody recorded. Visitors report the temperature dropping in the narrow lanes between tall mausolea, the feeling of being watched from the row behind them, and occasional glimpses of figures that vanish when you turn your head. Nothing a skeptic couldn't explain away.

What gives the place its weight is what's under it. The leper colony victims are in the ground somewhere. The yellow fever poor went into unmarked trenches when the formal tombs filled up. If ghosts cling to the land, Cemetery No. 3 has more reason than most.

Save Our Cemeteries runs daytime tours, and the grounds are open to the public 9 to 5. The cemetery has a heaviness that No. 1 lost to tourism a long time ago. Part of it is the architecture. Most of it is the ground.