The Most Haunted Hotels in New Orleans (By Someone Who Checked)

Hot take: New Orleans doesn’t need ghost stories. It has actual history, and the actual history is so heavy that “haunted” ends up functioning as a kind of pressure valve — a way of talking about things a city otherwise doesn’t want to say out loud at brunch.

I’ve now stayed in four hotels here that show up on every ghost tour route in the French Quarter and beyond, and the pattern held every time. Scratch the ghost story and you find something that actually happened — a slave-era ballroom, an orphanage, a schoolhouse fire, a child’s death in a grand hotel that’s still run by the family that built it. The ghosts are set dressing. The history underneath is the reason these buildings feel the way they feel at 2am.

This isn’t a “top haunted hotels, book now, spooky season sale” post. It’s four hotels, four different kinds of uncomfortable history, and my honest read on whether staying in any of them is worth your money. We’ve also covered America’s most haunted hotels more broadly if you want the national picture — New Orleans just happens to concentrate more of this per square block than anywhere else in the country.

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Why New Orleans Ghost Stories Hit Different

Every American city with old buildings has a haunted hotel circuit. New Orleans is different because the city buries its dead above ground, in tombs you can walk past on your way to lunch, and because so much of its 18th- and 19th-century history involved slavery, epidemic disease, and institutions built to warehouse the people the city had the least interest in protecting — orphans, the sick, the enslaved, the poor.

That’s the actual reason this city feels the way it feels at night. It isn’t the humidity, though the humidity helps. It’s that a three-block walk in the French Quarter can take you past the site of a slave auction, an orphanage, a yellow fever ward, and a jazz club that’s still open, sometimes in that order, sometimes in the same building at different points in its life.

The four hotels below all sit on ground that did something else first. Two of them — Bourbon Orleans and the Andrew Jackson — sit directly on top of institutions that no modern visitor would recognize as anything other than tragic. The other two carry lighter, more hotel-shaped history. I stayed in all four to see which reputation held up and which one was mostly atmosphere.

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The Hotels — Real Talk on Each One

1. Hotel Monteleone — 214 Royal Street, French Quarter (Est. 1886)

I’ve already written the full review of this one — read the complete Hotel Monteleone review here — so I’ll keep this version short.

Monteleone is the anchor of any New Orleans trip that takes its history seriously. It’s been open since 1886, it’s still owned by the Monteleone family four generations in, and it’s the only hotel in the United States designated a Literary Landmark — Faulkner, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote all have real, documented connections to the place. That’s not marketing embellishment. That’s an actual plaque.

The ghost story that gets repeated most is Maurice Begere, a child reportedly said to have died of a fever in the hotel in the early 1900s, whose presence is most often reported around the 14th floor. I asked a bellman about it on my stay and got a longer, stranger version of the story than anything I’d read online — which tracks with basically every haunted hotel I’ve stayed in. The official tour version is always the trimmed one.

Rooms: ~$220–280/night for a standard room, climbing well past $500 for suites during festival season.

Read the full Hotel Monteleone review →

2. Bourbon Orleans Hotel — 717 Orleans Street, French Quarter (Est. 1817, rebuilt 1964)

This is the one I want to slow down on, because the history here is genuinely heavy and I don’t think it gets treated with enough weight on the ghost tours that walk past it nightly.

The Bourbon Orleans sits on the site of the old Orleans Ballroom, which in the early-to-mid 1800s was the venue for the so-called “Quadroon Balls” — events where free women of color were formally presented to white Creole men, frequently as a precursor to arrangements that were, by any honest modern accounting, coercive and rooted in the racial and economic power structures of antebellum Louisiana. It’s a genuinely fraught piece of the city’s history, and it doesn’t get sanitized well by the word “ball.”

Later in the 19th century, part of the same site became a convent and school run by the Sisters of the Holy Family — one of the first religious orders of Black Catholic nuns in the United States — who used the building to educate and shelter Black children and orphans in a city that offered them very little else. The paranormal reports tied to this hotel mostly trace back to that period: guests and staff describing children’s voices, footsteps in empty hallways, and figures in what’s described as period nun’s habit seen near the upper floors.

I stayed two nights and spent most of the second afternoon in the hotel’s small on-site museum space, reading about the Sisters of the Holy Family rather than waiting around for anything to happen in my room. Nothing did, for what it’s worth. But walking those halls with both histories in mind — the ballroom and the convent, stacked on top of each other in the same physical footprint — was more unsettling than any ghost story a tour guide has told me in this city.

The current hotel, a mid-1960s rebuild after fire damaged the earlier structure, doesn’t pretend the site is simple. Staff I talked to were more comfortable discussing the convent period than the ballroom period, which felt telling in its own way — one history is easier to sit with than the other, even decades later. If you take one thing from a stay here, let it be curiosity about the Sisters of the Holy Family rather than the jump-scare version of “haunted nun sightings” that gets repeated on the sidewalk outside.

Rooms: ~$345/night.

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3. Le Pavillon Hotel — 833 Poydras St, Downtown (Est. 1907)

Le Pavillon calls itself “The Belle of New Orleans,” and it’s Downtown rather than French Quarter, which means it’s slightly removed from the ghost-tour foot traffic — you won’t have a group with a lantern stopping outside your window at 10:30pm.

The hotel is genuinely known for something delightful and non-spooky: every night around 10pm, the lobby puts out free peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and cookies for guests. I want to be clear that this is real and I ate three sandwiches over two nights and have no regrets. It’s the kind of small, slightly odd hospitality gesture that a chain hotel would never bother with.

The ghost story attached to Le Pavillon is softer than the others on this list — hotel lore describes a former nanny or servant figure said to still watch over children staying at the hotel, the kind of story that’s more comforting than frightening if you actually think about it. I want to be upfront that I couldn’t find anything beyond hotel lore to back this one up, and the hotel itself presents it as exactly that — a story, not a documented history. Compared to the Bourbon Orleans or the Andrew Jackson, this is the lightest entry on the list, and honestly it reads to me like the kind of ghost story a grand old hotel accumulates just from being old and gracious for over a century.

Rooms: ~$259/night.

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4. Andrew Jackson Hotel — 919 Royal Street, French Quarter (Est. 1800s building, hotel since 1900s)

The Andrew Jackson is a smaller, boutique-scale property a few blocks from Monteleone, and its ghost story is tied directly to what stood on the site before it. In 1794, during the Spanish colonial period, a boys’ boarding school on this site burned down, reportedly killing several of the boys who lived there.

The lore that’s grown up around that fire is specific and consistent across the versions I’ve heard: guests and staff reporting children’s laughter and the sound of running footsteps in the hotel’s courtyard late at night, as though the boys never left. I stayed in a courtyard-facing room specifically to test this, sat out there with a book until close to midnight, and heard nothing but the usual French Quarter ambient noise — live music a few streets over, someone’s argument two balconies up. Make of that what you will; I’m not going to pretend a quiet night disproves 230 years of local memory about a genuine tragedy.

What struck me more than the ghost story was how little the hotel makes of it. There’s no plaque, no framed newspaper clipping in the lobby. The fire and the boys who died in it are treated as something the building carries quietly rather than something to sell tickets on, which I found more respectful than almost anything else on this list.

It’s also, practically speaking, one of the better values in the French Quarter — small enough to feel personal, close enough to Bourbon Street to walk everywhere, and priced well below Monteleone or Bourbon Orleans for a comparable location. If you’re choosing based on budget rather than backstory, this is probably your pick.

Rooms: ~$233/night.

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The Bars — Because You’ll Want One After All This

French Quarter hotels are rarely more than a few steps from a decent drink, and all four of these keep that tradition intact:

• Hotel Monteleone’s Carousel Bar: The actual rotating bar, added in 1949, still turning a full loop roughly every fifteen minutes. Order a Vieux Carré, which was invented there — it’s the single best reason to walk in even if you’re not staying the night.

• Bourbon Orleans’s rooftop pool bar: Small, quiet, and a genuinely good place to sit with the day’s history rattling around in your head before you head back out into the Quarter’s noise.

• Le Pavillon’s lobby, post-sandwich: Not a cocktail bar exactly, but the lobby bar does a solid nightcap, and drinking it while eating a free PB&J at 10pm is a specific New Orleans pleasure I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I did.

• Andrew Jackson’s courtyard: No formal bar, but the hotel will point you toward Royal Street’s wine bars two minutes away, and the courtyard itself is the best place in the city to sit with a bottle and think about 1794.

Things Ghost Tours Never Tell You

• The Quadroon Ball story gets flattened into a punchline on foot tours. Guides on a tight schedule often reduce the Bourbon Orleans history to “scandalous balls” without naming what the arrangement actually meant for the women involved. Read up before you go if you want the real context.

• The convent history is arguably the more remarkable story at Bourbon Orleans. The Sisters of the Holy Family were pioneers — one of the first Black Catholic orders in the country — and their work with orphaned children in that same building deserves more airtime than it gets on a 45-minute tour built around jump-scares.

• “Haunted” hotel lore is often kindest to the worst history. A fire that kills schoolboys becomes “footsteps in the courtyard.” A convent orphanage becomes “figures in the hallway.” The softening is understandable but it does quietly launder some genuinely hard history into something more like entertainment.

• Le Pavillon’s PB&J tradition gets less attention than any ghost story, and it’s the best thing about the hotel. Go at 10pm even if you’re not staying there — ask at the front desk first.

• French Quarter noise is a bigger nightly disruption than any ghost. Royal Street and Bourbon Street do not go quiet before 2am. If you’re a light sleeper, that’s a far more reliable source of a bad night than anything supernatural.

The Catch

• You’re paying a French Quarter premium regardless of the ghost angle. Location, not haunting, is what drives these room rates. The history is a bonus, not the reason the rooms cost what they cost.

• Some of this history is genuinely heavy, not spooky-fun. The Bourbon Orleans site carries the weight of the Quadroon Balls and, separately, an orphanage for Black children in a segregated 19th-century city. Treat it accordingly rather than as Halloween content.

• Old French Quarter buildings have old French Quarter building problems. Humidity, narrow stairwells, street noise, uneven floors. This is the tax you pay for staying somewhere with 100+ years of continuous history.

• Not every “ghost story” here is documented history — some is just hotel lore. Le Pavillon’s nanny story in particular is presented by the hotel itself as folklore, not fact. Don’t confuse atmosphere with evidence.

Is It Worth It?

The honest answer: these four hotels are worth staying in for the history, not the hauntings. Nothing I experienced in any of them would convince a true skeptic of anything supernatural. What will stay with you is the Quadroon Ballroom history at Bourbon Orleans, the Sisters of the Holy Family who ran a school in the same building, and a Literary Landmark hotel that’s been in one family since 1886.

If you only have time for one, make it Monteleone for the literary weight or Bourbon Orleans for the history that actually matters. The other two are excellent supporting choices, not compromises.

Practical Info

• Booking: All four hotels are bookable through Booking.com — search “New Orleans” and filter by French Quarter or Downtown
• Best months: Late October through February for weather; avoid peak Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest weeks if you want normal pricing
• Getting around: All four hotels are walkable from each other — Monteleone, Bourbon Orleans, and Andrew Jackson are all within a five-minute walk in the French Quarter; Le Pavillon is a 15–20 minute walk or short rideshare Downtown
• Ghost tours: Widely available nightly through the Quarter (~$25–30/person); worth doing once for context, but read the real history yourself first
• What to pack: Earplugs, comfortable shoes for uneven French Quarter sidewalks, and patience for humidity regardless of season
• Nearest airport: Louis Armstrong New Orleans International (MSY), roughly 25–30 minutes by taxi or rideshare to any of the four hotels
• When to skip the Quarter hotels entirely: If you’re traveling with young kids who need quiet, consistent sleep, Le Pavillon’s Downtown location is the gentler pick of the four — it’s a few blocks removed from the nightly Bourbon Street noise

Final Verdict

New Orleans doesn’t need embellished ghost stories, because its real history is already unsettling enough — a ballroom built around the exploitation of free women of color, a convent school for Black orphans in a segregated century, a boarding school fire that killed children, and a grand hotel that’s quietly kept one family’s name on the door since 1886. Four hotels, four different weights of history, and the ghosts are mostly just how the city talks about things it hasn’t fully processed.

Go for Monteleone’s literary pedigree, stay at Bourbon Orleans if you want the heaviest and most important history on this list, pick Le Pavillon if you want gentler lore and free sandwiches, and choose the Andrew Jackson if you want something small, quiet, and quietly respectful of what happened on its ground.

None of these hotels need the word “haunted” to be worth a night. It’s the word the city reaches for when the real story is too uncomfortable to put on a brochure, and once you know the real story, the ghost tours start to feel almost beside the point.

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Prices start at roughly $233/€215/£184 per night at the Andrew Jackson Hotel, up to $345+/€318+/£272+ at Bourbon Orleans. Rates spike hard during Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest — book well ahead if your trip overlaps either.

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Written by

Thomas Waverly

Travel Correspondent

Thomas covers East Coast, Southern, and Western grand hotels. He has personally stayed in over 80 historic properties and considers a properly aged lobby bar essential to any review.