Description: There are several companies in New Orleans that offer cemetery and ghost tours, so how do you know which one to pick? I asked my concierge, and she recommended New Orleans Spirit Tours.
The cemetery tours run each day at 10:30am and 1:15pm and meet at the Royal Blend Coffee House on Royal Street. I went on the afternoon tour on a beautiful day. The reason I chose a tour is that the cemeteries are pretty dangerous if you go on your own.
This particular tour is called a Cemetary and Voodoo tour. Also note that these are WALKING tours. First stop was St. Louis Cemetery #1, where VooDoo Queen Marie Laveau is thought to be buried. Our guide, Julia, was great. She walked us through the cemetery, explaining why New Orleans cemeteries house their dead in above-ground crypts (dig three feet and you’ll hit the water table), and how so many people can fit into one crypt (the N.O. heat will naturally cremate them, and when a new person is put in the crypt, there are men who work in the cemetery that will sweep the previous occupant to the back of the crypt, where it will fall into a pit, and put the new person in). Believe it or not, this is a pretty interesting way to learn about some of the history of the city while seeing something that you’ve seen in movies like
Double Jeopardy and
Easy Rider (which was filmed without permission in St. Louis #2).
After about an hour and a half in the cemetery, we took a short walk to a voodoo temple and had the chance to hold audience with a voodoo priestess. Now, I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t the only one that felt a little uncomfortable with this. For experience’s sake, I went in cautiously. And I needn’t have worried, as I don’t think I understood a single word she said. Maybe it was from too much incense?
The next evening, I also took a ghost tour with this company and chose to go with the same guide as the day before, Julia. The ghost tour leaves nightly at 8:15pm, also meeting at the Royal Blend Coffee House. The tour lasts two hours and takes you throughout the French Quarter – supposedly one of the most haunted places in the U.S. Taking that fact into account, I thought that the stories – and the number of stories, only four – were lacking. I didn’t find any of them incredibly scary. One of them was admittedly made up, because after Anne Rice’s novels, everyone wanted to hear about vampires. It was a waste of a story. There also wasn’t a lot of history incorporated within the stories.
Each tour cost $18. If you’re a repeat customer, you can get a $2 discount. I think the cemetery tour was more than worth it, and the ghost tour wasn’t worth it at all.
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