When you and----- make that much-talked-of visit to New Orleans, by all
means see early whatever evidences of progress and aggrandizement her
hospitable citizens wish to show you; New Orleans belongs to the living
present, and has serious practical relations with these United States and
this great living world and age. And yet I want the first morning walk
that you two take together and alone to be in the old French Quarter. Go
down Royal street.
You shall not have taken many steps in it when, far down on the right-hand
side, where the narrow street almost shuts its converging lines together
in the distance, there will begin to rise above the extravagant confusion
of intervening roofs and to stand out against the dazzling sky a square,
latticed remnant of a belvedere. You can see that the house it surmounts
is a large, solid, rectangular pile, and that it stands directly on the
street at what residents call the "upper, river corner," though the river
is several squares away on the right. There are fifty people in this old
rue Royale who can tell you their wild versions of this house's strange
true story against any one who can do this present writer the honor to
point out the former residence of 'Sieur George, Madame Délicieuse, or
Doctor Mossy, or the unrecognizably restored dwelling of Madame Delphine.
I fancy you already there. The neighborhood is very still. The streets are
almost empty of life, and the cleanness of their stone pavements is
largely the cleanness of disuse. The house you are looking at is of brick,
covered with stucco, which somebody may be lime-washing white, or painting
yellow or brown, while I am saying it is gray. An uncovered balcony as
wide as the sidewalk makes a deep arcade around its two street sides. The
last time I saw it it was for rent, and looked as if it had been so for a
long time; but that proves nothing. Every one of its big window-shutters
was closed, and by the very intensity of their rusty silence spoke a
hostile impenetrability. Just now it is occupied.
They say that Louis Philippe, afterwards king of the French, once slept in
one of its chambers. That would have been in 1798; but in 1798 they were
not building such tall buildings as this in New Orleans--did not believe
the 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; and
this house is taller than 'Sieur George's. I should like to know if the
rumor is true. Lafayette, too, they say, occupied the same room. Maybe
so. That would have been in 1824-25. But we know he had elegant
apartments, 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 the
Pontalbas, a noble Franco-Spanish family; and I have mentioned these
points, which have no close bearing upon our present story, mainly to
clear the field of all mere they-says, and leave the ground for what we
know to be authenticated fact, however strange.
The entrance, under the balcony, is in Royal street. Within a deep, white
portal, 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 of
open, ornamental iron-work with gilded tops, rise to the white door. This
also 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 on
the floor even with the balcony. These are very large. The various doors
that let into them, and the folding door between them, have carved panels.
A deep frieze covered with raised work--white angels with palm branches
and folded wings, stars, and wreaths--runs all around, interrupted only by
high, wide windows that let out between fluted Corinthian pilasters upon
the broad open balcony. The lofty ceilings, too, are beautiful with raised
garlandry.
[Illustration: THE ENTRANCE OF THE HAUNTED HOUSE. From a Photograph.]
Measure one of the windows--eight feet across. Each of its shutters is
four feet wide. Look at those old crystal chandeliers. And already here is
something uncanny--at the bottom of one of these rooms, a little door in
the wall. It is barely a woman's height, yet big hinges jut out from the
jamb, and when you open it and look in you see only a small dark place
without steps or anything to let you down to its floor below, a leap of
several feet. It is hardly noteworthy; only neither you nor----can make
out what it ever was for.
The house is very still. As you stand a moment in the middle of the
drawing-room looking at each other you hear the walls and floors saying
those soft nothings to one another that they so often say when left to
themselves. While you are looking straight at one of the large doors that
lead into the hall its lock gives a whispered click and the door slowly
swings open. No cat, no draft, you and----exchange a silent smile and
rather like the mystery; but do you know? That is an old trick of those
doors, 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 only
at 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 said
the landlord had requested her not to allow visitors; that over three
hundred had called last winter, and had been refused for that reason. I
thought of the three thousand who would call if they knew its story."
Another writes: "The landlord's orders are positive that no photographer
of any kind shall come into his house."
The house has three stories and an attic. The windows farthest from the
street are masked by long, green latticed balconies or "galleries," one to
each story, which communicate with one another by staircases behind the
lattices and partly overhang a small, damp, paved court which is quite
hidden from outer view save from one or two neighboring windows. On your
right as you look down into this court a long, narrow wing stands out at
right angles from the main house, four stories high, with the latticed
galleries continuing along the entire length of each floor. It bounds this
court on the southern side. Each story is a row of small square rooms, and
each room has a single high window in the southern wall and a single door
on the hither side opening upon the latticed gallery of that floor. Wings
of that sort were once very common in New Orleans in the residences of the
rich; they were the house's slave quarters. But certainly some of the
features you see here never were common--locks seven inches across;
several windows without sashes, but with sturdy iron gratings and solid
iron shutters. On the fourth floor the doorway communicating with the main
house is entirely closed twice over, by two pairs of full length batten
shutters held in on the side of the main house by iron hooks eighteen
inches long, two to each shutter. And yet it was through this doorway that
the ghosts--figuratively speaking, of course, for we are dealing with
plain fact and history--got into this house.
Will you go to the belvedere? I went there once. Unless the cramped stair
that reaches it has been repaired you will find it something rickety. The
newspapers, writing fifty-five years ago in the heat and haste of the
moment, must have erred as to heavy pieces of furniture being carried up
this last cramped flight of steps to be cast out of the windows into the
street far below. Besides, the third-story windows are high enough for the
most thorough smashing of anything dropped from them for that purpose.
The attic is cut up into little closets. Lying in one of them close up
under the roof maybe you will still find, as I did, all the big iron keys
of those big iron locks down-stairs. The day I stepped up into this
belvedere it was shaking visibly in a squall of wind. An electric storm
was coming out of the north and west. Yet overhead the sun still shone
vehemently through the rolling white clouds. It was grand to watch these.
They were sailing majestically hither and thither southward across the
blue, leaning now this way and now that like a fleet of great ships of the
line manoeuvring for position against the dark northern enemy's already
flashing and thundering onset. I was much above any neighboring roof. Far
to the south and south-west the newer New Orleans spread away over the
flat land. North-eastward, but near at hand, were the masts of ships and
steamers, with glimpses here and there of the water, and farther away the
open breadth of the great yellow river sweeping around Slaughterhouse
Point under an air heavy with the falling black smoke and white steam of
hurrying 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 the
Ursulines stood in the midst, and against it the old chapel of St. Mary
with a great sycamore on one side and a willow on the other. Almost under
me I noticed some of the semicircular arches of rotten red brick that were
once a part of the Spanish barracks. In the north the "Old Third" (third
city district) lay, as though I looked down upon it from a cliff--a
tempestuous gray sea of slate roofs dotted with tossing green tree-tops.
Beyond it, not far away, the deep green, ragged line of cypress swamp half
encircled it and gleamed weirdly under a sky packed with dark clouds that
flashed and growled and boomed and growled again. You could see rain
falling from one cloud over Lake Pontchartrain; the strong gale brought
the sweet smell of it. Westward, yonder, you may still descry the old
calaboose just peeping over the tops of some lofty trees; and that bunch a
little at the left is Congo Square; but the _old_, old calaboose--the one
to which this house was once strangely related--is hiding behind the
cathedral here on the south. The street that crosses Royal here and makes
the 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, it
is the old Bayou Road to the lake. It was down that road that the mistress
of this house fled in her carriage from its door with the howling mob at
her heels. Before you descend from the belvedere turn and note how the
roof drops away in eight different slopes; and think--from whichever one
of these slopes it was--of the little fluttering, befrocked lump of
terrified childhood that leaped from there and fell clean to the paved
yard below. A last word while we are still here: there are other
reasons--one, at least, besides tragedy and crime--that make people
believe this place is haunted. This particular spot is hardly one where a
person would prefer to see a ghost, even if one knew it was but an optical
illusion; but one evening, some years ago, when a bright moon was mounting
high and swinging well around to the south, a young girl who lived near by
and who had a proper skepticism for the marvels of the gossips passed this
house. She was approaching it from an opposite sidewalk, when, glancing up
at this belvedere outlined so loftily on the night sky, she saw with
startling clearness, although pale and misty in the deep shadow of the
cupola,--"It made me shudder," she says, "until I reasoned the matter
out,"--a single, silent, motionless object; the figure of a woman leaning
against its lattice. By careful scrutiny she made it out to be only a
sorcery of moonbeams that fell aslant from the farther side through the
skylight of the belvedere's roof and sifted through the lattice. Would
that there were no more reality to the story before us.