Gardette-LePrêtre House (the Sultan’s Palace)

In the French Quarter stands a Creole townhouse with wrought-iron galleries that is among the most photographed buildings in the old city. The record is plain: it was built in 1836 for Joseph Coulon Gardette, a Philadelphia dentist, and sold in 1839 to the wealthy Creole businessman Jean Baptiste LePrêtre. LePrêtre’s finances collapsed near the end of the Civil War, after which he rented out the house. In 1940 it became the New Orleans Academy of Art, and later it served as a boarding house before being converted to apartments. It is a private residence today and can be seen only from the street.

The ghost-tour story of the “Sultan’s Palace” runs differently. A mysterious foreigner, said to be a deposed eastern ruler or the brother of a Turkish sultan, rents the house with a large retinue, bars the windows and posts guards. After a night of lavish entertainment the neighbours notice an unnatural quiet, the police break in, and the household has been slaughtered. Pirates, burglars or assassins sent by his relatives are suspected, and no killer is found. The tale appears in printed form as a story from 1792 in Helen Pitkin Schertz’s Legends of Louisiana (1922) and in other versions set in 1836.

The history refuses to fit. The house did not exist in 1792, and no record of such a massacre, or of any Ottoman royalty in New Orleans, has been found. One researcher suspects that the story grew from a different tale in Charles Gayarré’s History of Louisiana, published in the 1860s, about a Turkish-dressed stranger held in a small house with a garden in 1727, whose grave bore an Arabic inscription and a date tree known as the Tree of the Dead. Gayarré never named the Gardette house; later writers appear to have moved the tale there. One modern writer notes that the Sultan’s harem and guards read like Orientalist caricature rather than any documented event.

The ghostly side followed the legend. Tenants, neighbours and tour guides have reported shadow figures, screams in the night, the sound of a party in an empty house, Eastern-sounding music, and a fair-haired man appearing in lodgers’ rooms. Others report only the creaks and squeaks expected of a house nearly two centuries old. None of these reports has been tied to any real death in the building. It is a clear example of a haunting built on fiction: the stories of the building are better understood as literature than as history.

Reported apparitions of figures in Eastern dress and of a fair-haired “sultan”, shadow figures, screams, music and party noises from an empty house, and ordinary creaks. The accounts come from residents, lodgers and tour guides over the twentieth century and cannot be traced to a real tragedy.

The house on the corner in the French Quarter, including its courtyard and upper galleries as described in the tours; the building is private and is seen from the street.

The Sultan’s Palace is a regular stop on French Quarter ghost tours and in ghost-lore round-ups, and a standard case study in how a literary tale becomes a “true” haunting. The house was also photographed in the 1930s for the Historic American Buildings Survey and by Frances Benjamin Johnston, who knew it as the House of the Turk.