NOLA Ghosts

7. The Singing Rain

New Orleans, LA

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In a city known for its often-ferocious tropical weather, there is naturally a haunting which is a wind-blown phenomenon. The Singing Rain of New Orleans occurs whenever a violent tropical system comes blowing in off the Gulf of Mexico. This ghostly funeral procession marks the clandestine burial of a handful of French planters who defied the Spanish governor in 1768. France had ceded New Orleans to the Spanish throne by secret treaty in 1762. Spain would not inform their new citizens, nor even bother sending a governor, until six years later. The French aristocrats would resist this new order, rebelling and sending Governor Ulloa away from the colony. A new governor, Alejandro O' Reilly, would arrive the next year to take control of the rebellious colonists. Quickly earning the nickname "Bloody O'Reilly", the new governor rounds up the leaders of the rebellion, having six of them shot just outside the French Quarter, upon the very spot where Frenchmen Street begins today. He would, as well, refuse them burial, in violation of Catholic dogma, keeping their bodies under guard night and day to prevent a clandestine funeral. Nature would intervene, when a tropical storm of such violence blows in off the Gulf of Mexico that it scared off the Spanish guards, unaccustomed to such weather. The pastor of the St. Louis Cathedral seizes this opening, leading a group of the devout in a funeral procession through that great deluge, making their way, at last, into the garden behind the church. There, their bodies are finally interred in consecrated soil. The very next year, 1770, people began to report that if you stand in Pere Antoine's Alley in the midst of a great downpour, you can clearly hear the strains of a funeral dirge proceeding down the alley, then in to the garden. It is said this singing rain can still be heard today, any time a great storm blows in off the Gulf of Mexico, if one braves the elements to wait and listen for it.