Hotel Monteleone

Antonio Monteleone, a Sicilian shoemaker, arrived in New Orleans around 1880, opened what became the city’s first shoe factory, and in 1886 bought the small Hotel Victor at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets. He enlarged it into the Commercial Hotel and, after a 1908 rebuilding with a Beaux-Arts façade, renamed it the Hotel Monteleone. Successive generations kept adding floors and wings – fourteen storeys in the 1920s, more in the 1950s and ’60s – and it remains the only high-rise in the interior of the French Quarter, still owned by the Monteleone family after four generations.

The hotel is woven into the city’s cultural life. The Carousel Bar, installed in 1949, revolves once every fifteen minutes and is home to the Vieux Carré cocktail, created there in 1938. Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner are among the writers associated with the hotel, which was designated a National Literary Landmark in 1999, and in the 1950s and ’60s its Swan Room nightclub hosted stars such as Liberace and Louis Prima.

The Monteleone also embraces its ghosts. Staff and guests describe doors opening by themselves, elevators stopping at floors no one selected, and the shadows of children in the halls. In March 2003 the International Society for Paranormal Research spent several days in the hotel and reported making contact with more than a dozen entities, including former employees and a toddler named Maurice Begere. According to the hotel’s own telling, Maurice died at the hotel, his grieving parents returned there often in hope of seeing him, and he appeared to his mother to comfort her. The hotel has not published records identifying the boy, and his story rests on psychic investigation and family lore.

Reported activity includes a small boy seen in hallways and near the room associated with Maurice, children’s shadows and laughter, doors opening and closing, elevators stopping on the wrong floors, and former staff seen going about their work. Many accounts come from housekeeping and night staff.

Upper-floor corridors and guest rooms, the elevators, and the restaurant and bar areas. The hotel does not identify specific haunted room numbers publicly.

The Monteleone is a National Literary Landmark that appears in several literary works, as well as in films including Double Jeopardy (1999) and Girls Trip (2017). It features on lists of America’s most haunted hotels and on French Quarter ghost tours, and hosts the annual Tales of the Cocktail festival.