A self-guided audio tour with offline listening, optional directions between chapters, and free on-location listening: all stops are free for now during our founding period.
Download before you go. Works offline with no signal and no roaming needed.
Photo (cropped and styled for display): Front View Ursuline Convent New Orleans Postcard by Mother Marie de la St. Croix · Public domain
Free sample + on-location start
Try a web audio sample before your trip. In the app, every stop in New Orleans is free for now during our founding period. Founding users keep a year of Pro when pricing returns.
The Orleans Ballroom's chandelier has hung since 1817, and guests still report a woman dancing alone beneath it. The city says this room hosted the Quadroon Balls, where free women of color were placed with white men under plaçage. Historians who searched the archives have never found a single contract. What happened under this chandelier is the fight.
Web preview is capped at this single free stop. On-location free stops, offline listening, and route guidance stay inside the app.
City context
New Orleans tells ghost stories to avoid telling the harder ones. This self-guided audio walking tour goes behind the LaLaurie mansion legend to the slavery underneath it, into Congo Square and St. Louis Cemetery where Marie Laveau really operated, through the bulldozed Storyville district, the hotels built on slave auctions, and the jazz that began with Buddy Bolden. We separate the documented history from the tourist folklore.
Tour chapters
29 min audio | 6 stops
LaLaurie's torture attic, the casket girls of Ursulines, a cathedral priest who sang the king's men to shame, a card game frozen in a haunted dining room, Homer Plessy's choreographed arrest at Press and Royal, and the 1811 German Coast uprising remembered at Whitney Plantation. Six stops where the Quarter's legends meet planned resistance.
New Orleans calls 1140 Royal Street the most haunted house in the French Quarter, and the city means it. Behind the shutters: the 1834 fire, the attic the New Orleans Bee described the next morning, a girl said to have fallen from this roof, and a copper coffin plate that gives the wrong year for Delphine LaLaurie's death.
LaLaurie Mansion
The third-floor shutters of the Old Ursuline Convent are sealed, the city says, with nails blessed by the archbishop to keep something in. Beneath the most famous vampire story in America sits a documented shipment of French girls with dowry chests, a timeline that refuses to line up, and a floor the girls may never have touched.
Old Ursuline Convent Museum
Before dawn, in the rain, a voice sings the Latin requiem in Père Antoine Alley. The city says it is Père Dagobert, the priest who defied a Spanish governor in 1769 to give five executed French rebels a secret burial. No surviving document confirms the burial ever happened. The city has never needed one.
St. Louis Cathedral
Muriel's restaurant on Jackson Square sets a table every night for Pierre Antoine Lepardi Jourdan, who owned the building in 1788, lost it in a card game, and according to the restaurant's own version of the story, hanged himself on the second floor. The restaurant openly admits the story. The candle stays lit.
Muriel's Jackson Square
Homer Plessy did not stumble into history. The arrest at the corner of Press and Royal on June 7, 1892 was a planned act of civil disobedience by a New Orleans Creole-of-color committee that picked the date, the train, the conductor, and the detective in advance, and lost the case anyway, for fifty-eight years.
Homer Plessy Historical Marker
On January 8, 1811, the largest slave uprising in United States history rose from a sugar plantation on the German Coast and marched down the River Road toward New Orleans, with an enslaved overseer named Charles Deslondes remembered as its chief. Within four days the revolt had been crushed, the men tried at Destrehan Plantation, and severed heads, sixty by some counts and near a hundred by others, placed on poles along sixty miles of River Road as a warning. The revolt was written out of American textbooks for one hundred and seventy years, and who truly led it is still argued.
Whitney Plantation Museum (1811 German Coast Memorial)
24 min audio | 5 stops
Bras-Coupe at Jackson Square, Louis Congo's terrible bargain at Congo Square, Marie Laveau's information network, Buddy Bolden's First Street house where jazz began without a recording, and Hunter's Field, where Black Masking Indians keep the tradition alive. Five stops on survival without permission.
In the 1830s New Orleans told itself that bullets could not touch Bras-Coupé, the one-armed maroon in the cypress swamps. The court records call him Squire. The only account of his death comes from the one man who collected the reward, and even that account concedes no bullet ever brought him down. His body was displayed on this square for two days in 1837 and buried somewhere no one recorded.
St. Louis Cathedral
On this ground inside Louis Armstrong Park, enslaved and free Africans gathered for two centuries to drum and dance, a taproot of Voodoo and of jazz. The name Congo carries two threads: the Kongo nation whose children danced here, and an enslaved man named Louis Congo, freed in 1725 into the colony's cruelest office and then erased. The city renamed the square for a Confederate general in 1893. The name came back in 2011. The drums never fully stopped.
Congo Square
The most-visited tomb in New Orleans belongs to Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen, whose power the whole city felt and whose devotees still work her rite at the gates. The record deepens her: a multilingual hairdresser inside the households of the elite, an ageless queen who may have been two women, and a set of 1881 obituaries that could not agree on who she was.
St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 Official Tour
Charles Buddy Bolden, the cornetist most jazz historians credit with the first jazz band, lived at 2309 First Street in Central City. He was committed to the Louisiana State Insane Asylum at Jackson on June 5, 1907 and died there twenty-four years later. He is buried in an unmarked grave at Holt Cemetery, the city's pauper field, under a monument that was only placed in 1996. No recordings of his playing have ever been found.
Buddy Bolden's House
Every March, on the Sunday nearest St. Joseph's Day, the Black Masking Indians of New Orleans gather at A. L. Davis Park in Central City, the field locals call Hunter's Field, in suits that took six to twelve months to bead, cost between five and twenty thousand dollars, and honor a tradition that ran on knives and razors well into the nineteen-fifties. Big Chief Monk Boudreaux of the Golden Eagles, born in this neighborhood in 1941, has been masking for over fifty years.
A. L. Davis Park / Hunter's Field
36 min audio | 7 stops
A hotel built over a slave exchange, the quadroon balls' contested ballroom, Storyville's erased blocks, the 1891 parish prison lynching, the Dew Drop Inn, Robert Charles's 1900 standoff, and the Axeman's first attack on Magnolia Street. Seven stops where New Orleans remembers violence unevenly.
The St. Louis Hotel rotunda was, for two decades, the most theatrical slave-auction floor in the American South. Solomon Northup was sold a few blocks away in 1841. The building was demolished after the 1915 hurricane. The Omni Royal Orleans now stands on the site, with no marker on the lobby tile.
Omni Royal Orleans
The Orleans Ballroom's chandelier has hung since 1817, and guests still report a woman dancing alone beneath it. The city says this room hosted the Quadroon Balls, where free women of color were placed with white men under plaçage. Historians who searched the archives have never found a single contract. What happened under this chandelier is the fight.
Bourbon Orleans Hotel
The world says jazz was born on this block, and the world may be right. From 1897 to 1917 the 200 block of Basin Street fronted Storyville, the only legally sanctioned red-light district in American history: Mahogany Hall, the blue books, Jelly Roll Morton at the professor's piano, a teenage Louis Armstrong delivering coal. The district was erased twice, and the most intimate record it left behind survives with the women's faces scratched off the negatives. No one knows whose hand held the blade.
200 Basin St
On March 14, 1891, a mob of some eight thousand stormed the Parish Prison in New Orleans and killed eleven Italian immigrants after a jury the city swore had been bought failed to convict them of the police chief's murder. The city took a hundred and twenty-eight years to apologize.
Municipal Auditorium
The story goes that rock and roll caught fire during a lunch break in this building, when a stalled September 1955 session sent Little Richard to the Dew Drop's piano and out came Tutti Frutti. For thirty-three years this unmarked address in Central City was the center of Black touring music in the South: Ray Charles lived here, James Brown slept here, Patsy Vidalia ran the South's most famous Gay Ball in the showroom, and the barber who owned it all, Frank Painia, took the city of New Orleans to federal court in 1964.
Dew Drop Inn Hotel & Lounge - Historic Boutique Hotel in New Orleans LA
On the night of July 23, 1900, a Black laborer named Robert Charles was beaten on a Central City stoop by three New Orleans police officers. He drew a gun, fled, and over the next four days killed four officers and wounded more, while a white mob killed at least twenty-eight other Black New Orleanians in retaliation. The standoff ended when his hideout at 1208 Saratoga was set on fire. He was thirty-five. His story did not appear in a New Orleans school textbook for eighty years.
Robert Charles Site, 2023 Fourth Street
The Axeman of New Orleans attacked Italian-American grocers from May 1918 through October 1919, beginning here at 4901 Magnolia. In March 1919 a letter postmarked Hell, its writer calling himself a demon, promised to spare any house playing jazz, and the whole city played. The letter was never authenticated, the case was never solved, and the most famous ending, a widow's revolver on a Los Angeles sidewalk in 1921, settles nothing.
Maggio Grocery Site, 4901 Magnolia Street
34 min audio | 7 stops
New Orleans sells its cemeteries as ironwork and angels, but the saddest ground has no walls. The colonial dead paved under St. Peter Street, the sold-off rear of St. Louis No. 1 where the Protestants and people of color lay, the yellow fever poor under Champions Square, and the indigent of Locust Grove under a children's school. With them, the Mechanics Institute massacre, Doctor John's Bayou Road, and the Voodoo Spiritual Temple. The dead and the erased the postcards skip.
The last block of St. Peter before Rampart sits on the city's first cemetery, in use from about 1725 to 1788. The dead were ordered moved to St. Louis No. 1. No surviving record shows it ever happened. In 2011 archaeologist D. Ryan Gray found fifteen coffined burials four to five feet down, still in rows.
Old St. Peter Street Cemetery
On July 30, 1866, a meeting of Black freedmen and white Republican allies at the Mechanics Institute was attacked by a white mob and the New Orleans police. Dozens of Black men were killed. The site is now the Roosevelt Hotel. The plaque acknowledging what happened was installed in 2016, a hundred and fifty years late.
The Roosevelt New Orleans, A Waldorf Astoria Hotel
Marie Laveau was not the only Voodoo practitioner in nineteenth-century New Orleans. She was not even the most expensive one. Jean Montanet, doctor John, Bayou John, was a Senegalese-born former enslaved man who bought a square block of Bayou Road between Prieur and Roman, ran a healing and conjure practice that out-charged Laveau two-to-one, and was profiled by Lafcadio Hearn in Harper's Weekly the year he died. The gift-shop version has room for one Voodoo Queen. The actual record had at least sixteen practitioners. He was the loudest of them.
Bayou Road & N. Prieur, doctor John's Square
New Orleans spent most of a century telling visitors that Voodoo died with Marie Laveau. Behind this door on North Rampart, it is a working religion: readings, healings, weddings, spirits served, thirty-six years and counting under Priestess Miriam Chamani. In 2016 the old temple burned to the ground. Nobody was hurt, the temple serpent came through the fire, the money to rebuild arrived in days, and the practice moved three blocks up the same street without missing a service. Whether anything here was ever interrupted at all is the question the whole city sits on.
Voodoo Spiritual Temple
Every guidebook calls St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 the oldest in New Orleans, and tourists line up for Marie Laveau's tomb. They are standing in the half that survived. The rear third of the ground, the Protestant section and the section for people of African descent, was bisected by a new street in the 1830s, emptied, sold off as building lots in 1840, and paved. The Protestant dead were moved to Girod Street, which was itself erased in 1957. The poor and the people of color simply went under the city.
St. Louis Cemetery No. 1
The Saints went thirty-four years without a playoff win, and the city always knew why: the Dome went up on the ground of the old Girod Street Cemetery, the yellow fever burial ground deconsecrated in 1957, its dead moved out on segregated lines and never fully moved at all. Bones surfaced in 1971 and again in 1987. In 2000 the team brought a voodoo priestess to midfield. That afternoon they won.
Girod Street Cemetery site, LaSalle Street
The Locust Grove cemeteries took the city's indigent dead, overwhelmingly poor and Black New Orleanians whose families could not pay for a marked grave, from the 1860s until they closed around 1880. In 1905 the city built the Thomy Lafon School for Black children directly on top of them, and in 1915 opened a playground for African American children recorded as the first in New Orleans. The bodies were never moved. When the school was finally demolished in 2011, archaeologists watching the dig brought up caskets, skulls, and bone.
Locust Grove cemeteries site, Thomy Lafon School
FAQ
Yes. You can hear a free web sample before you go, and if you are standing in New Orleans, the first 2 stops are free in the app before the subscription wall.
Yes. Download it before you go and it plays with no signal, no roaming charges, and no network connection required for playback.
Yes. You walk at your own pace and the tour gives you optional directions between stops only when you want them.
It covers French Quarter Secrets, Slavery and Resistance, Violence and Vice, Forgotten Graves, The LaLaurie Mansion: The House That Never Stopped Answering, Jackson Square, The Omni Royal Orleans, and St. Peter Street Cemetery: The Dead Who Were Never Moved.
25 chapters, about 2h 3m total. You can do them in any order.
We keep history honest. Instead of blending myth and fact, we separate what is documented, what is legend, and what nobody actually knows.
185 episodes | 14h 21m
Photo (cropped and styled for display): Athens — Mask of Agamemnon by Gleb Simonov · Public domain
126 episodes | 8h 41m
73 episodes | 7h 9m
Photo (cropped and styled for display): Sacsayhuamán walls by Esoltas · Public domain