House History

So if I’m gonna tell you stories about different sites around the city, I guess there’s no place like home to start, right?

This is home:

Built in the 1880s, we went through major renovations when we bought it. This is what it used to be:

We literally bought the house from a crackhead in 2002. It seems he’d decided that coke was much more important than the mortgage company. (You’ll be shocked to find that the mortgage company had a different opinion.)

Just the process of buying the house could be a book- the hooker/stripper upstairs, the shed that smelled of dead bodies, crackwhores ringing the bell at 2am, hoping to score a quick $10 in exchange for ’services’- but for today we’ll stick with the house itself.

Charlie and I had mumbled vaguely about digging up the house’s history at some point. I still eventually want to do that, but as it happens, the house’s recent past fell into our laps.

I was home alone one Saturday afternoon when we were really in the thick of the project. As the parlor was the only room in the house with actual walls- and the only working electrical outlet- that’s where I was.

An old, gnomish guy stuck his head inside the door, took one look at me, and pulled back, shutting the door. After a shocked second, I went after him, and learned some odd but interesting things about the house.

Turns out his family had owned the place for about 30 years, through the mid-sixties. He made a habit of passing by the place when he came into town, and when he saw renovations he stopped to see what we were doing.

His grandparents lived on Charlie’s side, his aunt and uncle on mine. The small upstairs apartment (camelback in NOLA-speak) had been rented for years by a little old lady. He couldn’t remember is she was Irish or Italian, but he remembered her being devoutly Catholic, trundling down the street every day, dressed in all black, to go to Mass.

Every Sunday the entire clan would come here for supper. There was a little pool in the side yard,* and across the street a bakery.

When they arrived each weekend, he said, you could smell the baking bread for blocks. The kids’d go with their nickels and buy rolls right out of the oven. The place burned down years ago, and now there’s a nondescript white shoebox of a house there.

The hard thing, he said, was keeping the noise down with all those kids. They were always lectured that they couldn’t disturb the tenant because that would be disrespectful. He never really spoke to the woman other than pleasantries.

“I was young, she was old,” he shrugged. I couldn’t help but wonder how old she’d been. Likely close to his age now.

While he’s telling me all this, I’m following behind him like a puppydog as he takes a self-guided tour of the place, but by now we’d made a full round of the place and were back in the front parlor. I asked why his family’d sold the place.

“Everybody died.”

I just about choked. “At once?”

He looked at me like a damn fool. “Over a couple years.” He gestured toward my fireplace. “Died at home, all of ‘em, and laid out right here.”

“Everybody died,” I echoed, looking at my desk and imagining a succession of coffins superimposed over it. Somehow it wasn’t hard to do.

“Well, except the tenant. She was already gone by then.”

“To a home?”

Again with the damn fool expression. “I told you they didn’t used to do things like that. People died at home, mostly.” He paused, thoughtfully. “She died, and no one ever went upstairs again.”

Then, quickly as he’d come, he was gone, the gruesome Lone Ranger, riding in with messy historical tidbits and heading back into the sunset, never to be seen again.

I told Charlie the bizarre story over wine that evening. When I got to the end, he looked horrified. “You know what that means, don’t you? ‘we never went up there again’? She died up there- alone- and nobody knew until…uh…until…” He really didn’t need or want to spell out how someone would discover such a thing.

In the New Orleans heat.

And damp.

And…oh, uck.

So we think this could be the cause of various bumps and thumps in the night here. Good churchgoing Catholic or no, she’s a racist, our invisible tenant.

A good friend of ours who often housesits and happens to be black swears there’s stomping back and forth in the upstairs hallway when she’s in the house alone. In fact, the first time it happened, she ran out to her car and grabbed her gun, thinking someone had broken in.

But you know us New Orleanians, we love a good tale. I don’t know if the house is haunted- I do know it’s a helluva good story, and that’s what really counts around here.

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