New Orleans French Quarter: Adults-Only Uncensored Ghost & Voodoo Tour

4.70

(283 reviews)

What’s the experience like?

I didn’t expect to start the night with a joke about casket girls and end up squinting at someone’s blurry ghost photo outside the Lalaurie Mansion, but that’s New Orleans for you. Our guide, Marcus (he wore this faded Saints cap and had that raspy local laugh), met us near Jackson Square just as the streetlights flickered on. The air was thick — not hot, exactly, just heavy, like it was holding its breath. Someone in our group tried to pronounce “Vieux Carré” and got a few polite giggles from a couple walking past with plastic cups of something neon. I liked that nobody pretended this city was tidy or predictable.

We wound through the French Quarter, stopping at places I’d only seen in tourist books — Pirates Alley, Muriel’s (smelled faintly like old wood and fried shrimp), those voodoo shops with candles burning even though it wasn’t dark yet. Marcus told us about Marie Laveau and real vampires (not the sparkly kind), and he didn’t sugarcoat anything. At one point he paused in front of Ursuline Convent and said, “If you feel cold here, don’t blame me.” I swear I felt something brush my arm — probably just the breeze off the river, but still. We weren’t allowed inside any of these old buildings (makes sense; they’re people’s homes), but honestly, standing outside in that sticky dusk felt right for ghost stories.

The bar stop was more relief than spectacle — my shirt stuck to my back by then. Some folks grabbed hurricanes; I went for a cheap beer. There was this moment where Marcus pulled out his phone and showed us guest photos of what looked like faces in windows or weird streaks of light. Maybe it’s all tricks of shadow and suggestion, but after hearing about murder at Lalaurie Mansion or witchcraft rituals around Hands of Fate, you start to wonder what’s hiding in plain sight here. Li from our group tried to say “gris-gris” in her best attempt at French-Creole and we all cracked up — even Marcus lost it for a second.

I left feeling like I’d seen another side of New Orleans — not just spooky stories for tourists but something rawer, more tangled up with real people who live here. It rained for five minutes near the end; nobody cared much. My shoes are still drying out on the hotel heater as I write this, thinking about how sometimes you need a little darkness to see what makes a place glow.