1891 Castle Inn – New Orleans
In the Garden District of New Orleans, on a quiet side street off of St. Charles Avenue, lies the 1891 Castle Inn, a Gilded-Age mansion that seems plucked out of history. About a hundred years out of history to be exact. Walking through its halls shows visitors what the wealthy lived like in the 19th centuryâa time when children were seen and not heard, when your servants took care of all your needs and whims, and when you would promenade down St. Charles Avenue and only had horses, carriages, and other walkers to contend with. The mansion is so welcoming that some people who lived and worked in the house and around the property never left it…not even after they died.
Inside the 1891 Castle Inn, the 13-foot ceilings, hardwood floors, and general dĂ©cor take you back to another era. The 9,500-squarefoot mansion has 38 rooms (including vestibules and bathrooms), a century-old piano for guests to play, and restored furniture, but it also hosts two more relics from a bygone eraâtwo spirits seen and experienced frequently in the house by staff members and many of the innâs guests.
The guest rooms have names like The Jazz Emporium, Napoleon, Miss Blancheâs Streetcar, The Gothic Sanctuary, The Crawfish Den, and The Bordello Room. The Castle Innâs ghostly guests are encountered all over the house; however, according to co-owner Andrew Craig, the third floor seems to have the most activity.
The Castle Inn stands on land that was once a plantation in the 1800s. Before the current mansion was built, a long, wood-framed, two-story house was constructed sometime during the early to mid1800s. The house was narrow in the front because, at the time, you were taxed on the amount of frontage facing the street. The house went back into the lot, with servantsâ quarters in the rear of the building. Sometime around 1891, a very prominent local man, Alva Schnitt, who was in charge of the New Orleans School District as well as a leader of a group called âThe White Manâs Leagueââa group with ideals and an agenda very similar to the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction timesâbought the wooden house and tore it down. As a gift to his new wife, he built a three-story mansion. This community leader also died of failing health in the house.
In the 1920s, as the Great Depression was creeping into America, these New Orleans mansions were becoming too much of a financial burden for the owners. Like many others, the mansion that was to become the Castle Inn was converted to a transient rooming house. The place changed ownership several times, until the 1950s, when the Allison family took over. It would stay in the Allison family until 1998, when George Allison sold it to Andrew Craig and Karen Bacharach. The new owners renamed the mansion the 1891 Castle Inn and began extensive cosmetic work on the property.
Craig recalls the state of the mansion when they took ownership. He said, âIt was disgusting. Some of the rooms he [George Allison] hadnât been into in years. Some of the rooms were lovely, some were disgusting. Fixing it up has been a labor of love.â Craig said Allison didnât mention anything about ghosts, and the new owners didnât notice any activity until they began to work on the place. Once the work began, the presence of at least two human spirits, and possibly even one ghost of a dog, became evident.
The first spirit to be seen and heard was that of a young girl who, legend has, drowned in a nearby pond that was on the plantation before the urbanization of New Orleans. Craig said, âShe fell in the pond in the classic sort of petticoat, it swelled up with water, and down she went like a rock and drowned. She was wearing a pretty white dress, she was anywhere from 6 to 10 years of age, a little blond girl, and she sadly roams not just our place, but the neighbourhood. Several people have told us sheâs looking for her mother.â
The second spirit who reportedly wanders the house is that of a dashing, light-skinned black man, who was a paid servant. This gentleman was known to speak several languages, be quite fond of the ladies, and also be a bit of a drunkard. He died in his bedâhe was either smoking in bed or he knocked over a heating pot and started a fire.
No matter the cause, he was supposedly too drunk to escape and suffocated from the smoke. Some psychics who have visited the house believe this man haunts the inn because he feels he should be in the mansion and not the servantsâ quarters. One psychic woman even reported getting a ghostly kiss on the cheek from the man.
A psychic who visited the inn told Craig that thereâs a ghostly dog in the basement. According to Craig, âShe said, âYou have a little Yorkshire Terrier ghost in your basement.â I said, âWhat?!â It explains why we can hear a slight barking noise coming through the air shaft and the heating ducts in the building. We also had one of our workers claim one day that they went downstairs and heard a dog or some animal rustling around down there.â
Craig told me about some of the most common occurrences in the 1891 Castle Inn. Room keys are reported missing all of the time. Craig said, âWe lose more keys…we lose more stuff in this house than youâd believe!â Craig said some guests will check in, go to their rooms, and come back a few minutes later saying they donât know how, but theyâve already lost their room key.
Guestsâ wallets will end up in strange places, such as the microwave, drinking glasses will mysteriously change locations within a room when a guest goes to the bathroom, and one female guest actually had a game going with one of the ghosts. The guest told Craig that every time she put her hairbrush down on the right side of a table, as soon as she left the room and came back, it would be on the left. This went on dozens of times in only a few days.
Craig described one encounter with the ghost of the little girl that two of his guests experienced. He said, âShe was seen by two women simultaneously floating in the middle of the room and trying to pull the chain on the ceiling fan. One woman turned to the other and said, âAre you looking at what Iâm looking at?â And the other woman said, âYes, Iâm looking at the upper half of a little girl whoâs reaching for the chain but canât seem to quite grasp it. And the bottom half of her is cut and thereâs kind of misty vapors drifting down where her feet
should be.â And they both watched this little girl for close to a minute floating in the middle of the room, and then she just disappeared. And they came charging downstairs saying, âWe just saw a ghost!ââ
Craig himself had quite an experience with the ghost in Room 10, The Gothic Sanctuary, on the top floor. He said, âThe guests tend to overpull the chain on the ceiling fan. They yank it so hard that the thing jams or the chain snaps. So Iâve got to change the thing. I get the ladder and I go upstairs with my little fishing tackle box, with my spare pieces and tools in it. I get on the ladder and I take the bottom part of the fan off so I can get inside the guts where the little clicker switch is, and Iâm annoyed at myself because I didnât have the right part with me. Just out of habit, because we have such horrendous electric bills, I turn off the power to the light switch, and I kick my toolbox shut and lean the ladder up against the wall. The door locks itself behind you. I went downstairs, said âhiâ to the one front desk girl who is working there, went down to the basement, found the part I needed, went back upstairs no more than 7 or 8 minutes later and unlocked the door, opened it, and every single electric item that can be turned on in this three-room suite is on. The TV, the radio, the air conditioner, the two bed lamps that are independently switched, the ceiling lights, the microwave, the coffee pot, the exhaust fan, the heater, the fan in the other room, and all of the lights. So I had to go around and click them all off. I said, âOkay, ghost. You got me on that one.ââ
The ghosts at the Castle Inn are more than just pranksters. Sometimes the occurrences are a little more startling. Witnesses have reported their beds shaking, being touched by invisible hands, footprints of little invisible feet walking and jumping on the bed, and the smell of tobacco smoke.
Nicholas Franklin, the innâs former manager, told me about the only unexplained personal experience he had there: âI was staying in Room 10, and around 11:30 at night, some friends and I were watching TV, and the shower came on by itself. And not just a little bitâit was coming out full force. When we went in to check on it, the faucet was turned off. That was the only experience that Iâve had personally.â
Franklin told me that many people do come to the Castle Inn looking for a ghostly encounter, and some get a little more than they bargained for. âI had one lady call me at 2 in the morning in tears, asking if I could come walk her out. She was staying in Room 11 [The Crawfish Den], and she said she looked over and there was a man in
her bed, smoking. She was hysterically crying and said âI donât want anything but for you to walk me out.ââ
New Orleans has long been a focus of supernatural activity, and a browse through the Castle Innâs guest book proves that this bed-and-breakfast is no exception. John and Aly Brothers stayed in Room 9, Jean Lafitteâs Tradewinds Hideaway, and experienced the dashing servant and little girl ghosts during their stay on July 27, 2001. An excerpt from their guest book entry reads:
The ghosts kept us up two nights in a row! The first day our TV kept coming unplugged. Weâd leave and it would be unplugged when we returned. This happened a total of three times. The second night was amazing and frightening at the same time. We saw this little girl by the stairway. My wife also saw the male black ghost once or twice that night. So we finally got to sleep around 5 a.m. Oh yeah, we also heard steps running up and down our stairsâand no one else was staying on our side of the mansion that night. Around 5 a.m., the last thing we heard was a little girl giggling.
On Wednesday, September 25, 2002, Kelly Pursley of Seattle, Washington reported her experiences in Room 5, the Napoleon Room:
The hurricane was starting to move in, and we were the only ones in the house that night. Around 10:30 p.m., I heard what sounded like furniture moving. At 11:30 p.m., I heard the distinct sound of a small childâs music box playing in the hall. It lasted over a minute. As soon as I laid my head down to go to sleep, I had the sensation again of a soft caress on my foot and up my leg. Sometime during the middle of the night, I woke in a daze to feel the bed moving up and down, as if someone was gently jumping on it. Quite a strange feeling! When leaving the house at 4 a.m. to catch a taxi for an early flight, my friend turned around to look up at the balcony of our room and saw a dark figure in the window watching us leave. Maybe he/she was sad to see us go?
The 1891 Castle Inn transports its visitors to another time and mindset. For the ghosts who wander its rooms and hallways, the familiarity may be why they came in the first place, but itâs the energy and excitement of fresh new faces coming in and out that keeps them there. The dashing manservant, no doubt, is still looking for another lovely lady to court, while the young girl wonders if the next female guest may just be her mother.
SOURCE:
The worldâs most haunted places : from the secret files of ghostvillage.com –Â Written by Jeff Belanger.