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Our First Stop Our Next Stop There Are Vampires Inside! Vampire-Haunted Flat Interview With The Vampire Elvis Slept Here |
The Vampire Tour
At 8:30pm that first night we were in town the five of us took the Vampire Tour. It was put on by the Vampire Street Theatre and we started our adventure at LaFitte's Blacksmith Shop on the corner of Bourbon Street and St. Philip. We purchased tasty beverages in the Blacksmith Shoppe and then waited for the tour to begin while being bombarded by termites, which were out in droves. The termites looked like moths flapping around all of the streetlights and both Michele and Sydelle had troubles with them getting a little too familiar and had to fish them out of their shirts! When the tour began, our guide, Randy, first took us to the building you see in "Our First Stop". There he told us the story of a man who took in two servant girls and then began to drink the blood of the younger one during the night while she slept. She would have dreams about the man standing over her in the room, but the older girl had not believed her until the younger became very pale and sickly. They went to see a local doctor who recognized the symptoms and what the girl was describing, especially upon seeing the incision mark on her back that the man had apparently made with his fingernail and from which he drank her blood. The man fled town after the two girls disappeared from his home. Randy then proceeded to explain how the description of this man met the exact description of another man who had disappeared in the same manner from another town a number of years earlier, and yet another man who turned up and then disappeared from a different town some years later. Essentially, over the course of seventy years or so, they could trace this man from town to town, and in each town he was described as looking to be in his 30s, with the same physical descriptions. Eerie. Randy was a good storyteller, and really played up the creepy aspects of the tale. He was very entertaining. The next stop was in front of the door shown in "Our Next Stop", and there Randy described another blood drinker who could be traced back at least 200 years, again with the exact same physical descriptions, until he disappeared after a would-be victim escaped him and notified the police about the attack. Another interesting tale well told. One of the better tales we heard that evening revolved around the early years of New Orleans where it was filled with all the rif-raf that was rejected by France and sent over here as a way of avoiding jail time. Apparently the death rate in those fledgling years was so high in the male-dominant population that the founders felt that if they didn't bring in more females to bear some children that the city would die out completely. So they made an arrangement and a boatload of women were brought over to keep the city going. The men in New Orleans' joy was tempered by the crates that the women brought with them: wooden crates in the exact shape of coffins. And the death rate in the city doubled the first year that these women were there. The way the information was presented, it really made us think about the story. I enjoyed it, because I'm into things like that. It was creepy hearing the tale of these women allegedly bringing vampires with them to the New Country. It got weirder still, however. The building pictured in "There Are Vampires Inside!" belongs to the Catholic church, and Randy told us that the shutters on the top windows, which you can just make out on the building, had all been nailed shut from the outside using hundreds of blessed nails. Why? Apparently to keep in whatever it is that the Catholic church has tucked away in there. He led us to believe that all of the coffins brought over by those women were gathered up and locked away in that attic to keep New Orleans safe from the vampires that were preying on the people there. However, late at night when the streets are all but empty, one or two of those shuttered windows will occasionally be seen open, releasing whatever horrors are trapped behind them. And then they are found shut once again as the sun rises over the city and the next day begins. And from there Randy took us to get more tasty beverages at a bar that used to be the first mortuary in the city. I had the Vampire's Kiss, the house specialty and a fairly tasty drink. It was, of course, blood red and thick. The last couple of stops on the trip included a "Vampire-Haunted Flat", wherein the Carter brothers allegedly drank the blood of their hostages, and one of the buildings used in the movie Interview With the Vampire. During our walk to these sights Michele asked Randy if he likes the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. His response: "I love that show! I give tours every night except Tuesday, because then I'm home watching Buffy!" Not quite what I might have expected. The tour wrapped up in an occult bookstore. I thought they were just dropping us off there to try to drum up some business, but Randy led us through the shop and out into the alley behind wherein they had set up an altar with various occult and voodoo talismans. Randy concluded the evening by telling us about what happened to the survivors of the Carter brothers, which ended up being one of the creepiest parts of the tour. Definitely a must for anyone traveling to New Orleans, if you have any interest at all in the occult or arcane. |