NOLA Ghosts

5. The Witch of the Opera House

New Orleans, LA

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In the 1860s a young woman, Marguerite, made quite a splash on the scene as a performer at the French Opera House, which stood on the corner of Toulouse and Bourbon. She was no great talent, but was quite fetching, and thus made quite a success of herself. As she aged, however, her career would dry up quickly, as she had little other than looks to fall back on. Just as her hopes for a singing career vanished, tragedy struck: her husband is killed in a carriage accident, leaving Marguerite financially ruined and alone. She turns to an appropriately ladylike occupation, opening a bakery with the meager inheritance from her husband. Not knowing much about baking, however, she sends to Paris to hire the finest pastry chef her money would buy. He arrives, and she finds him a very attractive young man. The chef quickly becomes her lover, and she keeps him in high style. Soon, though, she begins to feel he is drawing away from her. Following him, she discovers he has a new lover, a young woman closer to his age, who he is keeping in a second-floor love nest at St. Ann and Royal. Marguerite waits beneath the apartment's balcony, and hears the young lovers talking. The young woman begs him to marry her. He tells her that he will rid himself of "that old hag" soon enough. Marguerite waits until the apartment grows quiet. She creeps upstairs, tightly closes the windows, and suffocates the lovers by turning on the gas in the apartment's fireplace. She leaves, but not before slipping a note of apology for what she has done, and is about to do, between the bricks of the fireplace. While she had been cheated, she is still in love with the young chef. She tearfully drags her way to the French Opera House, and there hangs herself from the rafters with a length of rope. From that date, in the late 1870s, people experience a disturbing haunting, which they called the "witch" of the French Opera House. A mournful spirit, dressed only in tattered cloth, she is seen dragging along the streets between the Opera House and the apartment where she killed the young lovers, wailing and screaming so loudly as to awaken the slumbering residents of the French Quarter. The Opera House burns in 1919, but still this spirit is reported almost nightly, traipsing between the two locations. In the 1950s, a workman renovating the former apartment of the lovers finds her note of apology, and, upon reading it, tosses it in the fireplace. The Witch of the Opera House is heard to let out one last otherworldly shriek, and never be seen or heard from again. It is believed that the destruction by fire of the two things holding her to this plane � the note and the Opera House � finally freed her spirit. Curiously, though, while Marguerite herself seems to have moved on, young lovers at the corner of St. Ann and Royal still often report the smell of natural gas, though there are no gas lamps or fixtures today visible at that intersection.