French Quarter Ghost Tours — The Haunted City

New Orleans has more documented ghost stories per block than any city in America. The good tours are college-level history lectures delivered by lantern light — the LaLaurie mansion, yellow fever epidemics, the Axeman of 1918–1919. Licensed guides, required by city ordinance to lead French Quarter tours, turn the ghost story into a teaching tool: what happened, who it happened to, what it meant. The city sits where the Mississippi deposited silt starting around 2200 BCE. Native Americans built mounds and earthworks here for 1300 years. The French founded La Nouvelle-Orléans in 1718 on relatively high ground along a sharp bend in the flood-prone river — a natural levee at the site of an abandoned Quinipissa village. Bienville chose the spot because it controlled access to the entire Mississippi River Valley and offered a portage route to Lake Pontchartrain via Bayou St. John, connecting to the Gulf without the hundred-mile run downriver. The city was intended to be an important colonial city from the start. It became the largest port in the Southern United States throughout the 19th century, exporting most of the nation's cotton and other farm products to Western Europe and New England. Union forces captured it early in the Civil War — it was the largest city in the South. Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of it in 2005; it rebuilt in the years after, though it never recovered its original population. The ghost tour industry generates an estimated $30+ million annually in New Orleans. Tours typically depart nightly from Jackson Square. Book in advance during peak season.