Fantastic tours – especially the Haunted FQ Tour w/ Rebecca
We took two tours with them because they were the only tour group recommended by Frommer’s. We’re glad we chose them over all the others b/c the tours were great! And such a great value, too. Our first tour was the Garden District @ 1:45pm on a Saturday with Dave. He’s a bona fide local and he’s got a lot of love for his hometown. If you are definitely wanting to enter the cemetery on your tour, you need to know that not only does Layfayette Cemetery No. 1 close on Sundays (as stated on the tour company’s website), it also closes at noon on Saturdays (NOT specified on the website). So be sure to book the 11am tour if you are going on a Saturday. Weekdays the cemetery gates should be open. If you happen to book a tour when the gates are closed (like us), you will still be able to see some of the tombs thru the gate and the guide will still stop in front and give a detailed account of the history and interesting facts about the cemetery and specific tombs. Dave was a great guide and we got to see all the Garden District homes owned by celebrities, as well as several other beautiful houses. He explains about the different types of architecture used, history of the area, fluctuating real estate trends, and interesting tidbits of info. I was sooo excited to see the house once owned by Anne Rice because I had read her Mayfair Witches trilogy and the house was featured so prominently in the plot it was almost a main character in the books! Very neat to see it in person. The best way to get there is to ride the St. Charles streetcar (only $1.25 per fare) and get off @ Washington Ave. Then all you have to do is walk one block to Prytania, turn left, and you’re at the bookshop where the tour meets. It was sooo easy to find. We ate brunch at Commander’s Palace before the tour because the location was so convenient to combine the two. It’s on the very same block, directly across from the cemetery on Washington. Worked out perfect. I highly recommend the restaurant. Our second tour with this same company was a 7:30pm Haunted French Quarter tour given by Rebecca. She was an AMAZING storyteller!!! She has a strong passion for what she does and it really shows in her enthusiastic storytelling. She’s sooo good at what she does; all of her ghost tales gave me chills! What I really loved about her is that she told us she’d been been doing the tours about 6 or 8 years (sorry, I can’t remember which exactly) but to me it felt completely genuine and unrehearsed. She didn’t sound at all like she’d told these same stories over and over and over……although she did know them very well, it didn’t sound tired. She truly loves these tales, and they are all based on historical facts and not sensational legends. Even though I didn’t personally encounter any ghosts while on the tour, it was SUCH a superfun way to spend an evening in New Orleans. In addition to telling us the history of what happened at each site, she would tell us personal stories of sightings that had occured to people she had in her tour groups over the years. Those tales were even scarier than the original hauntings!!!” – noeloni, Sarasota, Florida https://www.tourneworleans.com/walking-tours/garden-district/
