In the northern hemisphere, the season has just turned. All the leaves are brown and the sky is (sometimes) grey. Spooky season is coming and, to take one look at social media, the girlies are ready for Gilmore Girl rewatches, Buffy The Vampire Slayer PJ parties, autumnal candles, and pumpkin served in all ways. We’ve explored the party side of town; what better time to explore the spooky city of New Orleans?
I fell in love with the idea of exploring New Orleans from a vampiric angle thanks to AMC’s Interview with the Vampire. This deeply atmospheric, sexy, and spooky TV show launched in 2022 and spookily, filming on Season 3 started the week after I was in town. The Southern Gothic has always been a source of fascination intensifying when bingeing True Blood in the noughties.
While True Blood’s Bon Temps is a fictional Louisiana town; New Orleans is stranger than fiction and home to many of Anne Rice’s books — as well as her home for much of her life, and her final resting place. Whether you are a diehard vampire fan, part of the ever-growing Rice fandom, or simply looking for some spooky joy, you’ll find New Orleans a welcoming, fun, and macabre destination — this is the birthplace of the ‘jazz funeral’ after all.
New Orleans: The Ultimate Destination for Vampire Hunters and Gothic Dreamers
New Orleans is a city that blurs the line between the living and the dead in the most intoxicating way possible. From the gas-lit streets of the French Quarter to the moss-draped mausoleums of Lafayette Cemetery, every corner carries the weight of history, folklore, and macabre beauty. As the lifelong home and final resting place of Anne Rice, the city is a living backdrop for her vampire and witch fiction, and the growing fandom around AMC’s Interview with the Vampire has only deepened the appeal. Whether you arrive as a diehard Rice fan or simply curious about the city’s supernatural soul, New Orleans will pull you in immediately.
Spooky Season in the City That Never Sleeps, or Dies
A 90-minute New Orleans Vampire Tour through a rain-soaked French Quarter, cocktail in hand, is one of the most atmospheric ways to experience the city’s darker history. From the chilling tale of the Casket Girls at the Old Ursuline Convent to filming locations for AMC’s Interview with the Vampire, the stories blur fact and fiction in a way that feels entirely appropriate for this improbable city. Beyond the tour, the Gallier House, the Garden District’s tree-lined streets, and a Fangria cocktail at the Vampire Café each offer their own version of the macabre magic that makes New Orleans a destination unlike anywhere else on earth.
Arriving in New Orleans
It was my first time in the South, and the warmth of the night air took my breath away as I stepped out of the Louis Armstrong New Orleans Airport terminal, after a smooth direct British Airways flight and a cheerful passage through immigration, soundtracked by friendly airport staff and big band jazz over the speakers. Arriving in the French Quarter to the perfectly located and luxurious Bourbon Hotel on the (in)famous Bourbon Street, my face was pressed to the window of the car.
I glimpsed pop-up tarot readers holding space for the evening with tie-dyed cloths on camping tables, pimped out quad bikes driving past blasting R&B, fighting to be heard despite their volume with the cacophony of partygoers on a bar crawl — to-go cups in hand — and live music spilling from bars such as Fritzel’s Jazz Club. The atmosphere in the French Quarter is intoxicating. It is an improbable place. A place that holds its layers of history close to its partygoing but macabre soul.
History and tragedy intermingle with hopes and dreams and fears down in New Orleans. Religions and occult spiritual practices co-exist with hedonist excess — with Voodoo shops next to novelty bars. It is a hauntingly enticing place, and a great place to start my hunt for vampires.
The French Quarter
Vampire Hunting on a Walking Tour
On an atmospherically rainy evening, a group of us mere mortals gathered around a man in a flowing black cloak, armed with a wooden stake. Jackson Square shone from the pavements with gas lamps reflected in puddles and shadowy figures huddled under balconies and in dark doorways. The New Orleans Vampire Tour runs nightly proving the fascination with the fanged beings who cannot be photographed and their deep connection to the city.
Over the 90-minute tour, our host vampire hunter spun tales from fact and fiction that cut through the unsettling weather, with an open cocktail policy, of course. I’ve never been on a tour that encourages you to bring an oversized cocktail along — and even included a drink stop at Laffite’s Blacksmith Shop Bar. This only enhanced the surreal nature of the evening. The stories blurred fact and fiction from two redheaded men thought to be draining the partygoers of the French Quarter through to recent filming locations for AMC’s Interview with the Vampire and The Originals (Vampire Diaries spin-off).
A pause by the eerie Old Ursuline Convent — the oldest building in the Mississippi Valley — unravelled the tale of the Casket Girls: young women sourced from convents and orphanages in France in the 1700s and brought over to be suitable wives for the bachelors of New Orleans. They were found to be abnormally pale, and later paranormal happenings led to the shutters — and the entire third floor of the convent — being sealed off, still to this day, some say with nails blessed by the Pope to keep the evil inside…
Huddling by another dark snicket, the vampire hunter shared tales of the Quarter’s vampire bars of the past and the dark souls who frequented them. You’ll still find a secret Vampire Speakeasy in the French Quarter (Potions), and it’s invite-only. Of course, they must make sure only the best blood types enter. Thankfully, a visit to the fang-favourite Vampire Café and a friendly chat with an undead server will procure you the nod — a formally presented business card, à la Théâtre des Vampires of Rice’s world.
The Vampire Café is somehow kitschy and novel and cool at the same time. A Fangria cocktail in a blood bag is a must for the photo opportunity and is refreshingly delicious and not the novelty rip-off I was fearing. The perfect place to shelter from the midday sun, once the rain has passed, and enjoy a Vampire Burger. If the café is shut and you have a thirst to get up close and personal with a fanged being, you can head to the adjoining Boutique du Vampyre and see if you can charm a speakeasy invite from the masters and mistresses of the night there.
Lestat’s Townhouse – The Gallier House
The starting point for most screen travel is hunting down the filming locations and getting the shot. While this can seem vapid and a little strange, it’s a form of souvenir and a way of taking in the genius loci (sense of place), especially when the location is a living historic location. A visit to the Gallier House is a must as it was not only the inspiration for Lestat’s townhouse in Anne Rice’s books, but the exterior was used in Season 1 of AMC’s Interview with the Vampire.
Take the guided tour, which brings you through the gorgeous interiors of the home. The parlour used in the AMC show was built on a set, but it takes nods from the painstakingly restored Gallier House parlour. The best way to visit the Gallier House is through a combined ticket to tour here and the Hermann-Grima House, or the humbling and eye-opening Urban Enslavement tour, which explores how the city’s enslaved people lived, were treated, and their stories past freedom. For spooky season, the house is also running a Creole Death and Mourning tour, where the home will be “dressed” for mourning with covered mirrors and frozen clocks.
Back at Lestat’s townhouse, the Gallier House, there’s an additional Interview with the Vampire filming location accessible only on the tour. Upon leaving the property through the back courtyard, our guide showed us where the infamous incinerator was built for filming. This is how Louis and Lestat get rid of the bodies when the child vampire Claudia goes on a rampage. With a laugh, the tour leader shared how tours were still being run between filming, and how the guides had to make up tales about what it was used for to put visitors off the scent of the secret vampiric filming!
The changing face of the French Quarter
Like Anne Rice’s vampires, whose features change depending on their mood and hunger, the French Quarter is an ever-changing beast. From the morning strolls from a haunted hotel (Bourbon Orleans was my perfect base) to pick up beignets and a café au lait (local consensus is Loretta’s are the best), to the streets, shiny after being hosed down from the night-before’s depravity and soundtracked by haunting calliope tunes from the steamboats, to the dark, warm evenings where every shop front hums with an electric-like glow. The French Quarter will entrance you for days, but if you didn’t leave this area, you’d be missing out on more spooky explorations.
Anne Rice’s Garden District
Cemeteries and PR stunt funerals
From the French Quarter, jump on the delightfully old-fashioned, swamp-green St. Charles Street streetcar, daydreaming all the way to St. Charles at Washington, next to Lafayette Cemetery No. 1. It’s an atmospheric cemetery in the way only a New Orleans cemetery can be with a tightly packed mix of family mausoleums and above-ground vault tombs, cement cracking in the blazing summer sun.
While not an Anne Rice-fanged being, Dracula 2000 was filmed in the cemetery. There are two strong connections to the fandom: the fictional tomb of the Mayfair Witch being nestled in this atmospheric plot, and Rice herself (in life) holding a jazz funeral for her book Memnoch the Devil — being carried in a glass-topped coffin down the central row of the cemetery.
Photographic evidence of this bizarrely hilarious PR stunt can be found at The Garden District Bookshop in the Coffin of Terror section. This creepy corner hosts a selection of Anne Rice’s books, including rare and signed editions, as well as proof that Anne Rice was the kook they all say she was.
Rice spent years living within the green and atmospheric Garden District, and she didn’t have to look too far for inspiration in her books. Lestat and Claudia spend evenings stalking the tree-lined streets, peering into the extravagant antebellum mansions. It was at 1239 First Street, in 1990, that she wrote The Witching Hour, the first of the Mayfair Witches trilogy, while the recent TV show was filmed at the nearby Soria-Creel House at 3102 Prytania Street.
Mayfair Witches House
Her First Street home sits on the corner of Chestnut Street with a beautiful ornate veranda. You can easily imagine how it was the inspiration for the beguiling home in the Mayfair Witches trilogy. Standing on the sidewalk, you can almost glimpse the old lady sat on the porch, with the family’s jewelled necklace around her neck, and the mysterious man standing in the garden. The entire neighbourhood is stunning and easy to get lost in.
I joined a small and extremely knowledgeable walking tour with Two Chicks Walking Tours, which was perfect to get a lay of the district and the history behind the homes. In addition to the Anne Rice locations, we experienced more set-jetting joy with a stop outside of the Buckner Mansion used as Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies in American Horror Story: Coven. The Garden District certainly has a beguiling, witchy feel, especially when we passed one of the most celebrated screen witches’ homes — Sandra Bullock, aka Sally Owens in Practical Magic.
After leaving the Garden District following the tour, I couldn’t stop thinking about the houses, the mysteries within, the greenness of the area compared to the more traditional city layout of the French Quarter along the Mississippi River. So, I snuck in another visit.
After visiting the Rice family mausoleum in Metairie Cemetery, and following a trip to the cemetery-surrounded coffee shop Sacred Grinds (my macabre order? A graveyard flowers floral latte), I headed back to the intriguing district, called by its magic. Like Rice’s characters in The Witching Hour, I was drawn to wander around the cracked pavements, peering into the lawns and smelling the lush trees, as people watered their lawns in the morning before the growing heat of the day steamed all their hard work away.
New Orleans and its main-character energy
It’s often a challenge when travelling solo to get out of your phone, away from the plans and pins in Google Maps and let intuition — or divine intervention — guide your steps. For my last morning in New Orleans, before hopping on the Amtrak to Chicago, I put my faith in the city and called in its main-character energy to lead me to the unexpected. I followed the sight of houses that looked intriguing, of street names that called to me, and found myself in front of an estate sale sign of a jam-packed, once-glamorous Garden District home.
The thunder rumbled outside, and a sudden downpour streaked down the windows of the double-height parlour room. Other curious souls, picking through the items of the assumedly recently departed, shared stories and titbits about the home. When a man entered the property and excitedly hopped on the phone to a friend, saying, “Do you remember that old lady’s house we used to pass as kids…?”, I felt like New Orleans’ unusual magic was starting to take over.
While hunting the vampires and witches of the city may be your hook to visit New Orleans, I hope that you too will get lost in this improbable city that blurs the lines between present day, the past, and the afterlife. Take a back alleyway. Listen to the stories. Have a chat to a neighbour at a dark, luxurious bar, and share a Sazerac cocktail toast. Dream a little daydream on a streetcar to Cemetery Junction.
Just try not to get bitten or hexed, okay? Unless that’s what you were hoping for, of course.
What you need to know
- Plan your visit to New Orleans with New Orleans & Co for more ideas and itineraries.
- Stay in the centre of the vampire-laden French Quarter at haunted Bourbon Orleans Hotel.
- Fly direct to Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport from London Heathrow with British Airways.
- Slow travel around the gothic Deep South has gotten even bigger and easier with the launch of Amtrak’s Mardi Gras Service, connecting New Orleans with Mobile, Alabama — the first time these cities have been connected by rail in two decades. The City of New Orleans train also connects New Orleans to Chicago. Head to the Amtrak site for more.
