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This morning, I’m excited to take the one-hour bus ride to Bratislava, the capital of Slovenia, adding another city and country to my growing list of 26 visited countries that I wasn’t even aware when we booked the tour that we would be going to. Although I’m so exhausted in Bratislava after days of sub-six hour sleep, I still truly feel richer having visited so many new places on this trip.

Continue reading “A surprise trip to Bratislava”

I’m so exhausted today that I’m feeling kind of loopy, chasing Mike around the grounds of Parliament at our tour around 7:30 a.m. Getting into Parliament, though, is no joke – you have to bring your passport and go through a security check just like at the airport to get in.

Continue reading “Schnitzel, sausage and sauerkraut from Budapest to Vienna”

Although New Orleans is probably one of the most jovial stretches of 350 square miles around, there is a peculiar air of miscreant, a slight itch of a strange mix of beings that expands beyond the jumbling of psychics, artists, tour guides and alcoholics. It’s the undeniable stir of the living joined with the dead.

My favorite part about the haunted background of New Orleans, a city that dates back to 1753 and has, and is, riddled with convicts, prostitutes, voodoo and disaster, is that much of it relies on myth. You’ll hear various stories from various locals about that ghost, this voodoo queen, or that cursed home but nobody has so much as the written word to back it up – only word of mouth. To those who have seen the haunts in action, this is more than enough.

It’s evident when walking through the Garden District, riddled with historical homes and anxious ghosts. It’s clear when strolling through the French Quarter, the site of two fires which literally destroyed the entire city. It’s even obvious when speaking to battered locals, who have the sense of what’s it’s like to have survived more than they bargained for.

According to one tour guide, New Orleans holds this air because it has seen more than its fair share of disaster in a very short amount of time. Hurricane Katrina, The Great Fire of 1788, The Great Fire of 1794 and the Battle of New Orleans, just to name a few. Regardless of the reasoning behind it, it is clear – New Orleans is one haunted city.

Haunts are definitely not limited to Orleans locals, either. Even celebrities are not immune.

Nicholas Cage bought the LaLaurie Mansion, located on the corner of Royal Street and Governor Nicholls Street, in 2007 for $3.45 million. It was sold at auction a mere two years later. Why? According to popular myth, the place is cursed.

Marie Delphine LaLaurie, a Louisiana-born socialite, was a pretty popular person in New Orleans throughout all three of her marriages – that is, until April 10, 1834. Married to Leonard Louis Nicolas LaLaurie, a doctor, the couple threw frequent parties until on one ordinary day, a fire broke out. The party continued, flooding into the streets, and firemen rushed into the LaLaurie mansion to put out the blaze.

First, they came across an elderly African American slave who was chained to the stove. In hysterics, the woman admitted that she started the fire in a suicide attempt because she was told she was going to an upstairs room, in which no slave ever returned. She said the firemen could do anything they wanted to her – kill her, throw her in jail – but she was not going back to Delphine LaLaurie. Baffled, the firemen stormed the rest of the house to find the mysterious room, and what they found brought many to rushing out the door in a vomited panic.

Behind a deadbolted door, they found slaves tortured and bound in otherworldly ways. One slave had an inch of skin scraped in a circular motion around her entire body – the long strip of skin found in a jar in the room as well. Another had all of her long bones broken, only to be reset facing opposite directions so that she could fit inside a tiny box. It is said that as many as 100 slaves died in LaLaurie’s warped ‘care.’

Apparently, this didn’t bother Cage – until five years had passed, the same amount of time that the LaLaurie’s lived in their mansion. After that, his marriage fell apart, his assistant stole all his money, he went bankrupt, and his movie gigs abruptly stopped. He claims it was the house.

Cage went to a medium, who told him that to stop the curse from following him into the afterlife, he needed to build a pyramid-shaped tomb in the center of the St. Louis Cemetery at certain dimensions with the words ‘Omnia Ab Uno’ (Everything From One) in scripted on it and be buried there upon his death. Cage wasted no time.

New Orleans also apparently houses vampires. John and Wayne Carter, two average brothers who worked at the docks, lived at the 800 block of Royal Street. On one 1932 night, an 11-year-old girl with cut wrists fled their apartment to the authorities, where she informed them that she had been ‘fed on’ after being abducted by the men. Upon entering the apartment, authorities found four others bound and cut, one already dead. When the Carters returned, it took eight men just to restrain the two, which were of average height and build and had been working manual labor all day long. Upon being put to death, the Carters were buried and in New Orleans tradition, the coffins were taken back after one year. However, both coffins were already empty.

I wish I could say that the victims went on to lead happy lives, but they certainly did not. Directly proportionate to how many times they claimed to have been fed on, the situations of the victims got worse and worse. The adult male went on to murder 442 people, dissolving his own victims’ bodies in sulfuric acid. The adult female voluntarily committed herself to a psychiatric hospital for life. Remember – this is a psychiatric hospital. In the 1930s. Committed voluntarily. Not pretty.

Then, there is the infamous voodoo queen Marie Laveau, who’s name rings loudly throughout New Orleans on everything from hot sauce bottles to voodoo museums. Many attest to seeing her in the flesh, leading rituals with naked followers dancing and chanting, as well as seeing her walking the streets of the French Quarter.

One place that Orleans goers can get a taste of Laveau is at her tomb at the St. Louis Cemetery, where she is laid to rest among thousands of offerings of makeup, candy, mirrors and money placed there every single day. She isn’t without desecration – just a few weeks ago, someone covered the entire tomb with pink acrylic paint which took the Catholic Church quite some time to scrub off.

New Orleans may be pretty, but within the pleasant, pink mansions and colorful flowerbeds lies things much more sinister – the mark of uneasy souls.