Beauregard-Keyes House

The story

From the curb on Chartres Street, this 1826 raised center-hall mansion looks like a picture-perfect artifact of classical Creole elegance. But don't let the grand portico fool you: the house sits on one of the stranger, bloodier, and more haunted pieces of land in the French Quarter. After the Civil War, defeated Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard rented rooms here while trying to scrape together a living in a changing city. Decades later, novelist Frances Parkinson Keyes rescued the property from near-ruin, but not before reporting regular encounters with Beauregard's ghost pacing the halls at night in full uniform.

The house's most violent chapter hit in 1908, when it belonged to the Giaconas, a family of Sicilian wine merchants caught up in New Orleans' early 'Black Hand' extortion troubles. Local extortionists demanded money under threat of violence, leading to a late-night trap on the mansion's rear loggia. When the shooting stopped, three extortionists lay dead on the gallery floor. The Giaconas walked away without charges, but the gunfight etched a cold spot into the back porch that decades of careful restoration haven't managed to warm up.

Unlike the half-dozen famous French Quarter haunted houses where you're forced to stare at closed shutters from the sidewalk, this is one of the very few legendary spots that actually lets you walk through the front door. Step inside and you get the whole bizarre timeline under one roof: Civil War postscripts, early mob bloodshed, and mid-century literary ghost stories.