Strange True Stories of Louisiana

by George Washington Cable

  THE "HAUNTED HOUSE" IN ROYAL STREET.

  1831-82.

  I.

  AS IT STANDS NOW.

  When you and----- make that much-talked-of visit to New Orleans, by allmeans see early whatever evidences of progress and aggrandizement herhospitable citizens wish to show you; New Orleans belongs to the livingpresent, and has serious practical relations with these United States andthis great living world and age. And yet I want the first morning walkthat you two take together and alone to be in the old French Quarter. Godown Royal street.

  You shall not have taken many steps in it when, far down on the right-handside, where the narrow street almost shuts its converging lines togetherin the distance, there will begin to rise above the extravagant confusionof intervening roofs and to stand out against the dazzling sky a square,latticed remnant of a belvedere. You can see that the house it surmountsis a large, solid, rectangular pile, and that it stands directly on thestreet at what residents call the "upper, river corner," though the riveris several squares away on the right. There are fifty people in this oldrue Royale who can tell you their wild versions of this house's strangetrue story against any one who can do this present writer the honor topoint out the former residence of 'Sieur George, Madame Delicieuse, orDoctor Mossy, or the unrecognizably restored dwelling of Madame Delphine.

  I fancy you already there. The neighborhood is very still. The streets arealmost empty of life, and the cleanness of their stone pavements islargely the cleanness of disuse. The house you are looking at is of brick,covered with stucco, which somebody may be lime-washing white, or paintingyellow or brown, while I am saying it is gray. An uncovered balcony aswide as the sidewalk makes a deep arcade around its two street sides. Thelast time I saw it it was for rent, and looked as if it had been so for along time; but that proves nothing. Every one of its big window-shutterswas closed, and by the very intensity of their rusty silence spoke ahostile impenetrability. Just now it is occupied.

  They say that Louis Philippe, afterwards king of the French, once slept inone of its chambers. That would have been in 1798; but in 1798 they werenot building such tall buildings as this in New Orleans--did not believethe soil would uphold them. As late as 1806, when 'Sieur George's house,upon the St. Peter street corner, was begun, people shook their heads; andthis house is taller than 'Sieur George's. I should like to know if therumor is true. Lafayette, too, they say, occupied the same room. Maybeso. That would have been in 1824-25. But we know he had elegantapartments, fitted up for him at the city's charge, in the old Cabildo.Still--

  It was, they say, in those, its bright, early days, the property of thePontalbas, a noble Franco-Spanish family; and I have mentioned thesepoints, which have no close bearing upon our present story, mainly toclear the field of all mere they-says, and leave the ground for what weknow to be authenticated fact, however strange.

  The entrance, under the balcony, is in Royal street. Within a deep, whiteportal, the walls and ceiling of which are covered with ornamentations,two or three steps, shut off from the sidewalk by a pair of great gates ofopen, ornamental iron-work with gilded tops, rise to the white door. Thisalso is loaded with a raised work of urns and flowers, birds and fonts,and Phoebus in his chariot. Inside, from a marble floor, an iron-railed,winding stair ("said the spider to the fly") leads to the drawing-rooms onthe floor even with the balcony. These are very large. The various doorsthat let into them, and the folding door between them, have carved panels.A deep frieze covered with raised work--white angels with palm branchesand folded wings, stars, and wreaths--runs all around, interrupted only byhigh, wide windows that let out between fluted Corinthian pilasters uponthe broad open balcony. The lofty ceilings, too, are beautiful with raisedgarlandry.

  THE ENTRANCE OF THE HAUNTED HOUSE. From a Photograph.]Measure one of the windows--eight feet across. Each of its shutters isfour feet wide. Look at those old crystal chandeliers. And already here issomething uncanny--at the bottom of one of these rooms, a little door inthe wall. It is barely a woman's height, yet big hinges jut out from thejamb, and when you open it and look in you see only a small dark placewithout steps or anything to let you down to its floor below, a leap ofseveral feet. It is hardly noteworthy; only neither you nor----can makeout what it ever was for.

  The house is very still. As you stand a moment in the middle of thedrawing-room looking at each other you hear the walls and floors sayingthose soft nothings to one another that they so often say when left tothemselves. While you are looking straight at one of the large doors thatlead into the hall its lock gives a whispered click and the door slowlyswings open. No cat, no draft, you and----exchange a silent smile andrather like the mystery; but do you know? That is an old trick of thosedoors, and has made many an emotional girl smile less instead of more;although I doubt not any carpenter could explain it.

  I assume, you see, that you visit the house when it is vacant. It is onlyat such times that you are likely to get in. A friend wrote me lately:"Miss ---- and I tried to get permission to see the interior. Madame saidthe landlord had requested her not to allow visitors; that over threehundred had called last winter, and had been refused for that reason. Ithought of the three thousand who would call if they knew its story."Another writes: "The landlord's orders are positive that no photographerof any kind shall come into his house."

  The house has three stories and an attic. The windows farthest from thestreet are masked by long, green latticed balconies or "galleries," one toeach story, which communicate with one another by staircases behind thelattices and partly overhang a small, damp, paved court which is quitehidden from outer view save from one or two neighboring windows. On yourright as you look down into this court a long, narrow wing stands out atright angles from the main house, four stories high, with the latticedgalleries continuing along the entire length of each floor. It bounds thiscourt on the southern side. Each story is a row of small square rooms, andeach room has a single high window in the southern wall and a single dooron the hither side opening upon the latticed gallery of that floor. Wingsof that sort were once very common in New Orleans in the residences of therich; they were the house's slave quarters. But certainly some of thefeatures you see here never were common--locks seven inches across;several windows without sashes, but with sturdy iron gratings and solidiron shutters. On the fourth floor the doorway communicating with the mainhouse is entirely closed twice over, by two pairs of full length battenshutters held in on the side of the main house by iron hooks eighteeninches long, two to each shutter. And yet it was through this doorway thatthe ghosts--figuratively speaking, of course, for we are dealing withplain fact and history--got into this house.

  Will you go to the belvedere? I went there once. Unless the cramped stairthat reaches it has been repaired you will find it something rickety. Thenewspapers, writing fifty-five years ago in the heat and haste of themoment, must have erred as to heavy pieces of furniture being carried upthis last cramped flight of steps to be cast out of the windows into thestreet far below. Besides, the third-story windows are high enough for themost thorough smashing of anything dropped from them for that purpose.

  The attic is cut up into little closets. Lying in one of them close upunder the roof maybe you will still find, as I did, all the big iron keysof those big iron locks down-stairs. The day I stepped up into thisbelvedere it was shaking visibly in a squall of wind. An electric stormwas coming out of the north and west. Yet overhead the sun still shonevehemently through the rolling white clouds. It was grand to watch these.They were sailing majestically hither and thither southward across theblue, leaning now this way and now that like a fleet of great ships of theline manoeuvring for position against the dark northern enemy's alreadyflashing and thundering onset. I was much above any neighboring roof. Farto the south and south-west the newer New Orleans spread away over theflat land. North-eastward, but near at hand, were the masts of ships andsteamers, with glimpses here and there of the water, and farther away theopen breadth of the great yellow river sweeping aroun
d SlaughterhousePoint under an air heavy with the falling black smoke and white steam ofhurrying tugs. Closer by, there was a strange confusion of roofs, trees,walls, vines, tiled roofs, brown and pink, and stuccoed walls, pink,white, yellow, red, and every sort of gray. The old convent of theUrsulines stood in the midst, and against it the old chapel of St. Marywith a great sycamore on one side and a willow on the other. Almost underme I noticed some of the semicircular arches of rotten red brick that wereonce a part of the Spanish barracks. In the north the "Old Third" (thirdcity district) lay, as though I looked down upon it from a cliff--atempestuous gray sea of slate roofs dotted with tossing green tree-tops.Beyond it, not far away, the deep green, ragged line of cypress swamp halfencircled it and gleamed weirdly under a sky packed with dark clouds thatflashed and growled and boomed and growled again. You could see rainfalling from one cloud over Lake Pontchartrain; the strong gale broughtthe sweet smell of it. Westward, yonder, you may still descry the oldcalaboose just peeping over the tops of some lofty trees; and that bunch alittle at the left is Congo Square; but the _old_, old calaboose--the oneto which this house was once strangely related--is hiding behind thecathedral here on the south. The street that crosses Royal here and makesthe corner on which the house stands is Hospital street; and yonder,westward, where it bends a little to the right and runs away so bright,clean, and empty between two long lines of groves and flower gardens, itis the old Bayou Road to the lake. It was down that road that the mistressof this house fled in her carriage from its door with the howling mob ather heels. Before you descend from the belvedere turn and note how theroof drops away in eight different slopes; and think--from whichever oneof these slopes it was--of the little fluttering, befrocked lump ofterrified childhood that leaped from there and fell clean to the pavedyard below. A last word while we are still here: there are otherreasons--one, at least, besides tragedy and crime--that make peoplebelieve this place is haunted. This particular spot is hardly one where aperson would prefer to see a ghost, even if one knew it was but an opticalillusion; but one evening, some years ago, when a bright moon was mountinghigh and swinging well around to the south, a young girl who lived near byand who had a proper skepticism for the marvels of the gossips passed thishouse. She was approaching it from an opposite sidewalk, when, glancing upat this belvedere outlined so loftily on the night sky, she saw withstartling clearness, although pale and misty in the deep shadow of thecupola,--"It made me shudder," she says, "until I reasoned the matterout,"--a single, silent, motionless object; the figure of a woman leaningagainst its lattice. By careful scrutiny she made it out to be only asorcery of moonbeams that fell aslant from the farther side through theskylight of the belvedere's roof and sifted through the lattice. Wouldthat there were no more reality to the story before us.