New Orleans Vacation (June 2005)

Towards of the end of June in 2005 my mother and I took a little trip down to New Orleans, Louisiana. This trip was really special for my mom, because when she was a young woman, she took a trip to New Orleans with her father who passed away in 1993. She wanted to experience certain things again and do some things that she never got to do the first time around. I wanted to go just because I love traveling and had never been to this legendary destination. 

My mom left the planning of the trip to me. This was really one of the first trips I planned on my own, still in my early 20s at the time. I wasn't sure what all to do at first and there was a veritable panoply of options for tourists from tour buses to guided walks and the like. As it turns out, though, and as I have learned over the years with other trips I have arranged, I have a certain knack for travel-planning and I just relied on instincts or gut feeling to choose our various destinations and activities. 

We went to the Destrehan Plantation where some scenes from Interview with the Vampire were filmed. We sampled the delights of the Cafe du Monde. We even fit in a cemetery tour at the Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1. Most of what we did kept us in the French Quarter. But the places above did not solidify the creepy memories of this much adored city of like three other locations did.

My first paranormal experience occurred at the hotel we were staying at: the Alexa Hotel - now permanently closed. This happened our first night in the hotel. I awoke in the middle of the night and saw, in the corner of the room, near the foot of my mom's bed, a full body apparition that looked surprisingly similar to my Grandpa Fritz (my mother's father who originally brought her to New Orleans). He was a very tall figure, wearing blue and white pin-striped pajamas-- the shirt open to reveal a white T-shirt. The entity had an ethereal quality to it, right down to a blue-tinted aura, yet it was solid enough to block out the lamp and chair behind it. I don't remember feeling scared, but I do remember falling back asleep quickly. There were no feelings of a threat and I didn't feel uncomfortable with having seen the spirit. I also don't know if my mind simply couldn't process the event and it retreating back to sleep was mere reflex. My Grandpa Fritz used to live with us before he passed on, so perhaps my mind even registered the incident as a mundane visit from grandpa. It's easy to dismiss the encounter as a trick of a sleep-addled mind. I know it was not, however, and future happenings would only harden my resolve as to the authenticity of moment. 

I didn't even remember the next morning to tell my mom about the incident. Maybe I was still processing. When it came up later, though, she wasn't happy that I had not immediately told her of the incident. More disappointed, than anything, that she had missed it.

I haven't forgotten this experience since and as I combed through pictures from that time, I found it interesting that the one and only picture I have of the hotel also is the one and only picture from this trip that features an orb of some sort. I, myself, am highly skeptical of "orbs" in paranormal contexts. Nevertheless, I find it an interesting coincidence. And this is what I consider my first official ghost experience, at least that I can recall. There may have been incidents in my youth, but if so, they have not remained with me. This event was perspective-altering, though. Moreso with the events that unfold for me in the summer of 2005. 

My second experience occurred while we were shopping. My mom wanted to go into a voodoo shop, so we found one to explore. Upon entering, passing through a beaded curtain at the store's threshold, I was hit with an inexplicable and gigantic wave of emotion and unease. I began to cry seemingly without reason. I told my mom I'd wait outside and when I left, I started to feel better. There was so much palpable energy in that shop that it just caught me off-guard. The shop owner said that sort of reaction did not happen often, but to those for whom it does, it means they are very sensitive people and can easily interact with the spiritual realm. That was cool to hear, though I took the comment with a grain of salt. That said, I'd been labeled as sensitive by psychics I had visited prior to this trip. This time came with a reaction I simply couldn't explain, though. I shook the event off and we continued on our day.

My final experience was at a house on the fringe of the city that was being renovated. I had wanted to do a ghost hunt and I looked through options before we arrived in the city and I settled on this location. We would get to use equipment provided by the tour company-- a new and exciting prospect for me. We were really looking forward to that night. 

There was a small group of us who showed up to poke around the property. I snapped off some pictures and followed the group, trying to feel something there. The man leading our group said activity had really picked up in the last week or so, almost as if something big was coming. What an ominous thing to say, but he talked about how sometimes paranormal activity can drastically increase before a tragedy. As we looked around, two people started to overreact to things that only they were seeing in the building. When we got to the second floor, this one girl and her boyfriend started freaking out. They'd been told that a woman had killed herself in the bathtub there and they claimed to be seeing her. According to them, there was blood everywhere, and all the other people on the tour were caught up in their experience. My mom and I took this moment to break away from the group and find our own little corner to seek out a paranormal experience. 

Together we went to the front foyer of the house and the person who was running the event gave us divining rods. I was getting goosebumps and feeling emotional again, so we started to ask questions. I'm not going to pretend to remember the questions I asked 17 years ago, but I can remember enough of the responses to say the entity we wound up communicating with was a man who was not from New Orleans. We asked the person who was running the event if there were spirits in this area who matched the information that we received and he said no. He said there was not usually any activity in the area we had been in.  We decided to leave it at that. Shortly after, we left the event and caught a cab back to our hotel.

My mother and I came to the conclusion that it was Grandpa Fritz who had followed us to the haunted house and that he was probably also the person who made me cry in the Voodoo shop. We were purely operating under intuition in that moment and using the information I had already shared about seeing Grandpa Fritz earlier. 

Overall, it was a trip that sparked a thirst for knowledge that would span the next 17 years, including more interactions with this spirit I believe to be my grandfather. It is always a place I remember, even more due to our cynical tour bus driver we had at one point. He was explaining the sites of New Orleans to us and drew our attentions to the levees. "One of these days a super storm is going to come through and break those levees and New Orleans will be leveled." Two months later, Katrina hit. The spirits had been right. Tragedy had been on the horizon.

I haven't been back to New Orleans since, but I would love to go back now with all the knowledge that I have accumulated about the paranormal. I'd like to go on some proper-- less touristy-- ghost hunts, because the prospect of what might happen if I was actually looking for something is exciting considering what I experienced in 2005 just by showing up.

Next up in My Ghost Stories: More Grandpa Fritz and activity at my mom's house.