Ghostbusted!: What we found on the 14th floor of New Orleans’ most haunted hotel

The Hotel Monteleone is supposed to be the most famous haunted hotel in New Orleans. It’s been documented by the International Society of Paranormal Research as having the most ghost occurrences per square meter in the French Quarter. The society apparently came into contact with more than a dozen “earthbound entities” while visiting the hotel for several days in 2003, including spirits of former (deceased) employees, a man who died there from natural causes, and a 10-year-old boy who has long been looking for his dead parents there. 

So what was I doing riding an elevator alone, at 11 p.m., up to the hotel’s allegedly haunted 14th floor?

Kicks, baby.

I was there in New Orleans to watch the play Chicago before it comes to Manila. Staying in town with me were noted ghostbuster Pam Pastor from the Inquirer’s Super section, Emmie Velarde from its Entertainment section, and Oliver Oliveros from BroadwayWorld.com. Actually, I was a little slow to figure out the place was haunted. My initial research had just tipped me off that the Monteleone was a a famous writers’ hangout, drawing the likes of Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote and Eudora Welty to its classy 19th century digs and unique Carousel Bar (also said to be haunted).

It was the hotel’s website that tipped me off to its ghostly reputation. Boasting that it’s “one of the premier haunted hotels in North America” (take that, Overlook Hotel!), the website notes that “Generations of hotel guests and staff have regularly experienced haunted events that would cause even the staunchest skeptic to take pause. This haunted hotel has an elevator that stops on the wrong floor, leading a curious couple down a hallway that grows chilly and reveals the ghostly images of children playing.”

Okay, that does sound a bit creepy. As did the YouTube video I watched at the Dallas airport while waiting for our connecting flight to New Orleans: it said the hotel’s breakfast restaurant has French doors that mysteriously — and regularly — open and close on their own between 7 and 8 p.m. It also said the 14th floor was the scariest spot, because guests regularly report sightings of ghost children running down the halls.

It should be said, in the spirit of full disclosure, that this was not the first time I’d been plunked down in a ghost-ridden locale. There was that trip to Phuket several years back, a year after a tsunami took over 100,000 lives and local cab drivers and beach-goers were reporting ghostly figures in the backs of their cabs or splashing around in the surf — only to vanish moments later. Were all these people completely full of shit? Or did they possess a mysterious “third eye” that allowed them to glimpse things that “rational” folks dismiss out of hand?

As I have reported before, I did have an occurrence at a Phuket hotel that I couldn’t fully explain: a certain carry-on bag that thumped its way off my bedroom dresser, which no amount of investigation — Earthquake tremor? Ground shifting? Badly placed bag? — could completely dismiss.

And coincidentally, it was on that trip that I learned Pam Pastor had also heard of ghostly encounters from the other journalists — a claim she largely dismissed until a friend pointed out a certain ghostly figure in one of the photos she had taken on the Phuket trip (a photo she now rues having erased from her files. Too bad! That would have made a hell of a post).

Now, Pam is not particularly ghost-struck, and neither are Emmie or Oliver, as far as I can tell — but they were pretty reluctant to visit the 14th floor at night. This they told me repeatedly. On the second night, after having many cocktails in one too many Bourbon Street establishments, I did decide to visit the dreaded 14th… on my own, unbeknownst to the others in my party. I considered it a recon mission: I would take a peek around, see if the coast was clear. Report back.

The thing I noticed, as I was heading up the elevator, was a mounting sense of dread. Is this really a good idea? I wondered. I had my cell phone out, took photos inside the elevator, and when the doors opened, I immediately noticed something: the lights were flickering in the hallway. Erratic pulses. Weird. There was an industrial hum which I chalked up to the hotel’s aging air conditioning system (it’s hot down in New Orleans) and a perceptible drop in temperature when I stepped out of the elevator.

But that was about it. I took a long, hard look at the hallway, then started walking down it. I expected confirmation at any moment. Ghost children. Shrieking banshees. Anything.

Instead, it was a fairly mundane hallway — with, admittedly, shades of the Overlook Hotel — and behind certain doors I could hear… television sets. Someone watching Comedy Central. Married With Children, it sounded like.

So, not too scary. I spent only a few minutes up there alone, before deciding the recon mission was officially over. I called it a night.

And I slept like a baby.

That wasn’t the end of it, of course. We spent several days investigating New Orleans and realized that trading in the supernatural comes pretty, well, natural down in The Big Easy. Voodoo shops and psychic reading places abound. Cemeteries are must-see destinations. We got a kick out of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, with its marked-up gravesites said to entomb voodoo priestesses such as Marie LaVeau, a Creole practitioner who, according to Wikipedia, “appeared to excel at obtaining inside information on her wealthy patrons by instilling fear in their servants whom she either paid or cured of mysterious ailments.” You can spot the voodoo priestess tombs because they’re adorned with scores of scrawled X’es. Visitors supposedly still seek favors from LaVeau from beyond the grave by writing an X on the tomb, turning around three times and circling the X; or,  alternately, drawing three X’es and making a wish (we saw the “XXX” version a lot).
You can also check out Nicolas Cage’s weird pyramid tomb in this particular cemetery, which the actor — who lives in the city — has already set up for when his day comes.

As if New Orleans isn’t weird enough as it is.

Later, walking around the other cemeteries with our tour guide Henry, we began to piece together why so many old tombstones from the 1800s were for kids who died before they reached age four: apparently yellow fever was a citywide epidemic back then. As he explained it, the walls of cemeteries were built very high, not to keep out trespassers, not to keep the ghosts inside, but to stop yellow fever from spreading outside the cemetery. Sometimes spooky things are just plain practical.

In truth, New Orleans is haunted in the way Manila and Phuket — two other places besieged by devastating floods — are haunted. It’s haunted by memories. It’s haunted by history. That’s quite enough haunting, actually. No need to get all American Horror Story about it.

We took another shot at getting spooked. Nobody was able to see the restaurant doors at the Monteleone open and close at 7 p.m. because we were always out, eating or getting loaded, during those hours. Of course, my group staunchly refused to go up to the 14th floor during our last night staying there; they preferred a quick visit the next day, around noon, after we checked out. Pam had squeezed some info out of a helpful Filipina working the front desk: she said there was supposedly a photo of the 14th floor ghost “on file” somewhere with the hotel. But that seemed unlikely; the Monteleone wasn’t exactly shy about publicizing its ghosts, so they probably wouldn’t hesitate to put the photo up on their website, if it actually existed.

No, what we required was real, concrete, first-person proof. The next day, at breakfast, each in our party reported weird stuff happening while they were packing or preparing to check out. Emmie said she pressed the elevator button, watched the elevator go up to “14” first, then come down to her floor — with nobody inside the elevator! Oliver reported hearing a mother chastising a child outside his doorway while packing, then quickly investigated the hallway — and found nobody there! Our mother hen on the trip, Bambi Rivera-Verzo from Concertus Manila, said she put a jacket on her bed — and it fell off by itself! (I forget what Pam saw or heard.)

I joked that you didn’t have to go up to the 14th floor at Monteleone; the ghosts were available for room service, 24/7.

At noon, after checking out, Pam, Oliver and I climbed onto the elevator and I pressed “14.” My prognosis for this visit was not too good. It was daylight, after all. But our cell phones were out. We stepped into the hallway. The lights were no longer flickering. We started exploring, realizing that this was what about 98 percent of the Monteleone’s guests did for kicks. The only “activity” we noticed on the floor was maids with carts, cleaning out rooms. We came to Room 1462, which was said to be particularly haunted. Pam and Oliver spent a lot of time hovering around this door, taking pictures and commenting on the “PRIVACY PLEASE” sign hanging from the door handle. I wish I had had my camera open and ready when the door to Room 1462 suddenly flew open… and two elderly women popped out and briskly walked off down the hallway. I’m sure Pam and Oliver’s facial expressions were priceless.

Instead, we clowned around a little more on the 14th floor. I came upon a vacant maid’s cart, and while my companions’ backs were turned, I grabbed a fresh white bathrobe and threw it over my head. “Ooooooooh!” I said spookily, feeling kind of like a dick, because I was showing absolutely no respect for the dead. If I were a ghost at the moment, I would have kicked me right in the balls. Still, it was kind of funny.

We never really had a bona fide ghost encounter in New Orleans, though the spirit for such things obviously runs high there. People’s expectations are primed. If you live there, you can’t not believe. Even all the tourist trappings are built on genuine belief, because these people actually live there; they know more than any tourist.

But we never dug deep into the voodoo, never really tried to find out what all the alligator feet and pinned dolls and psychics were actually about. In the end, we were just parachute journalists. Amateur ghostbusters. The worst kind of tourists, really. Suckers.