The French Quarter Vampire Tour Route: Every Stop on the Classic Walk
The New Orleans vampire tour route stops at seven addresses across roughly a mile of French Quarter cobblestone, starting at Jackson Square and ending at Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop. We've walked this route more nights than we can count, and every stop below is a real address you can find with or without a guide: the Old Ursuline Convent, the LaLaurie Mansion, Jacques St. Germain's former house, and the rest. What varies is which tour visits which stop, when the group arrives, and how you should behave once you're standing outside someone's actual home. This guide lays out the walking order, an exact map, the story told at each address, and what to know before you photograph private property after dark, so you know exactly what you're looking at wherever you land on one of these New Orleans dark-history walking tours.
Quick answer
Every French Quarter vampire tour route runs the same seven stops in roughly the same order: Jackson Square, the Old Ursuline Convent, the LaLaurie Mansion and Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop appear on every walk, while Jacques St. Germain's house, the Pharmacy Museum and Gallier House vary by tour. The whole route covers under a mile of flat, uneven cobblestone at a slow pace.
Key takeaways
- Jackson Square opens the walk and Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop closes it, on every route
- The LaLaurie Mansion and the Old Ursuline Convent are stops on every route
- The Pharmacy Museum only appears on the original night walk's route
- Every house on the route is private property or a museum viewed from the street, never entered
- Book the original night walk for the fullest route, or the award-winning $22 walk for the briskest version of it
- The real story behind each address is in the real stories behind each stop
The Stops at a Glance
Seven addresses make up nearly the entire French Quarter vampire tour route, in the order most walks cover them. A few stops only appear on certain tours, noted in the last column.
| Stop | Address | The story told there | Which tours stop |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jackson Square | Decatur & Chartres, at St. Louis Cathedral | Where nearly every route begins, under the floodlit cathedral facade | Every tour |
| New Orleans Pharmacy Museum | 514 Chartres Street | 19th-century apothecary tools, leeches and bloodletting instruments | Original walk only |
| Old Ursuline Convent | 1112 Chartres Street | The Casket Girls legend, and the sealed third-floor shutters | Every tour |
| Jacques St. Germain's house | 1039 Royal Street | The 1903 window incident and his disappearance | Tours 1 & 3 |
| Gallier House | 1132 Royal Street | Anne Rice's model for Louis and Lestat's townhouse | Some tours |
| LaLaurie Mansion | 1140 Royal Street | Delphine LaLaurie's 1830s crimes, told from the street | Every tour |
| Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop | 941 Bourbon Street | A working bar since the 1770s, where routes end | Every tour |
Four of the seven, Jackson Square, the Ursuline Convent, the LaLaurie Mansion and Lafitte's, appear on every route running tonight. The Pharmacy Museum and Jacques St. Germain's house depend on which route you book, and Gallier House is the least consistent stop of the seven. If a specific address matters to you, check the tour's own stop list before booking rather than assuming.
Map of the Classic Route
All seven stops, in walking order from Jackson Square to Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop.
The Stops
Walking the full route on your own takes about forty-five minutes at a relaxed pace without stopping to listen to a guide at each address; a guided tour stretches the same distance to ninety minutes or two hours because groups pause for five to ten minutes at every stop for the storytelling. Either way the order below is fixed by geography rather than preference: Jackson Square sits at the southeastern edge of the route, Chartres Street carries you northwest past the Pharmacy Museum and the Convent, Royal Street picks up the middle stretch with St. Germain's house, Gallier House and the LaLaurie Mansion, and Bourbon Street closes the loop at Lafitte's. Following the stops in this order means you're never doubling back on yourself.
1. Jackson Square
Most walks start here, under the floodlit facade of St. Louis Cathedral with the square's iron fence and street performers still winding down for the night. Guides use the open space to lay out the evening ahead before turning up Chartres Street toward the older stops. There's nothing to photograph or protect here beyond the ordinary courtesy of a busy public square: it's the one stop on the route that isn't a private residence.
Practical note: this is also where most groups gather before departure, so arrive a few minutes early if you're meeting a tour rather than walking the route on your own.
2. New Orleans Pharmacy Museum
At 514 Chartres Street, this is the only stop on the original night walk with no equivalent on the other two walks. By day it's a working museum of 19th-century medicine, leeches, apothecary jars and bloodletting instruments behind glass. At night, tours pause outside rather than going in, and guides use the building's real medical history, the era when bleeding a patient was standard treatment, to bridge into the era's fascination with blood more broadly.
It sets up the Casket Girls stop that usually follows within a block or two. Practical note: the museum itself is closed by tour hours, so this stop is street-viewing only regardless of which tour you're on.
3. Old Ursuline Convent
The Old Ursuline Convent at 1112 Chartres Street is the oldest surviving French colonial building in the Mississippi Valley, completed in 1751, and every route on this list stops here. Guides point up at the third-floor shutters, said to be nailed shut with nails blessed by the Pope to keep in whatever the Casket Girls carried across the Atlantic in their small trunks. It's genuinely one of the best photo opportunities on the route: the building's pale facade catches gas light well, and the shutters read clearly from the street.
Practical note: this is private, consecrated property still in religious use, and tours keep their distance from the entrance out of respect.
4. Jacques St. Germain's House
At 1039 Royal Street, on the corner of Ursulines Avenue, this stop belongs to tours 1 and 3, not tour 2. It's here that guides tell the story of the December night in 1903 when a woman leapt from the second-story window claiming St. Germain had bitten her, and of his disappearance before police could question him. The corner position makes it easy to see both the window in question and the street he vanished into.
Practical note: the building is a private residence today, occupied and lived in, so this stop is a brief pause on the sidewalk rather than a lingering one.
5. Gallier House
1132 Royal Street is the least consistent stop on the route, included on some walks and skipped on others depending on the night's pacing. This 1857 townhouse, designed by architect James Gallier Jr., is the building Anne Rice herself said matched what she pictured for Louis and Lestat's Rue Royale home, and it operates today as a small museum. When a route includes it, guides use the stop to bridge from the older historical legends into the fiction that made the whole city read as vampire territory.
Practical note: as a museum, it's the one stop on this list that occasionally offers interior access during daytime hours, though never on the night walks.
6. LaLaurie Mansion
At 1140 Royal Street, on the corner of Governor Nicholls, the LaLaurie Mansion is the emotional center of nearly every route and every tour stops here. This is where Delphine LaLaurie's crimes against enslaved people in her household came to light in the 1830s, a case with far more documentation than most of the other legends on this walk. The building is privately owned and has never been open to visitors; every tour views it from the street.
Practical note: this stop tends to draw the largest crowd on the block, so guides keep groups compact and moving rather than lingering directly outside the gate.
7. Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop
941 Bourbon Street is where every route ends, at a working bar operating inside the same 1770s building, one of the oldest structures in America still in continuous commercial use. Lit by candles rather than electric light, it's a natural place for a group to decompress after ninety minutes to two hours of dark storytelling. The Anne Rice connection to the building comes up here too, since it's appeared in more than one New Orleans vampire production over the years.
Practical note: it's a functioning bar, so expect a cover of noise and other patrons; this is the one stop on the route you can actually walk into.
Photographing the Quarter at Night
Every stop on this route is genuinely photogenic after dark, and every phone in your pocket can handle it if you set it up right. Switch to night mode before you reach the Ursuline Convent, since the app usually needs a second or two to lock focus in low light and you don't want to be fumbling with settings while your group moves on. Never use flash toward a lit window: it startles residents behind the glass and it flattens every bit of the gas-lantern atmosphere you're there to capture in the first place.
The lanterns themselves are your actual light source, so let the exposure run a beat longer and brace against something solid, an iron post, a doorframe, a fence rail, rather than trying to hold perfectly still freehand.
| Shot | Where | Settings that work |
|---|---|---|
| Convent facade with sealed shutters | Old Ursuline Convent, 1112 Chartres | Night mode, brace on the sidewalk railing, no flash |
| Corner window | Jacques St. Germain's house, 1039 Royal | Wide frame to catch both the window and the street corner |
| Wrought-iron gate detail | LaLaurie Mansion, 1140 Royal | Step back across the street for the full facade, avoid flash into windows |
| Candlelit interior | Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, 941 Bourbon | Raise ISO instead of flash; the candles do the work |
One practical brace point worth knowing: the iron hitching posts and lamp posts along Royal and Chartres are sturdy and exactly the right height for a two-second night exposure on a phone. Use them rather than carrying a tripod, which slows the group down and isn't practical on a moving walking tour anyway.
Private Property and Street Etiquette
Every legend house on this route, the Ursuline Convent, St. Germain's former home, Gallier House, the LaLaurie Mansion, is either private property or a museum, and every one of them is viewed from the street only. None of the drama in these stories happens on the inside for a paying visitor; it happens in the telling, standing on the banquette, the local word for sidewalk, looking up at a building where residents actually live above the shops and courtyards below.
- Keep voices down once the group reaches a residential block, especially after 9 pm
- Never step into a courtyard or through a gate, even one left ajar
- Groups stay on the banquette, never blocking a resident's doorway or driveway
- A closed shutter or a lit window upstairs means someone is home; treat it that way
- If a resident asks a group to move along, the guide complies immediately, no exceptions
This isn't a formality. The French Quarter is a living neighborhood layered on top of a tourist attraction, and the same street that draws a crowd every night is also where people raise families, run small businesses, and try to sleep. A good tour treats every stop with that in mind, and a good visitor, tour or no tour, does the same.
If cobblestones and evening humidity are new to you, our guide on what to wear for the cobblestones covers the practical side of walking this route comfortably.
Guides also keep an eye on group size at the tighter corners of the route, particularly outside St. Germain's house on Royal Street, where the sidewalk narrows and a group of fifteen or more can genuinely block foot traffic for residents heading home. Smaller groups, the kind that book the quieter January-through-March season, tend to move through these stops with less friction than a peak-October crowd squeezed onto the same stretch of banquette. If you're weighing whether the walk is worth building an evening around at all, we've laid out the honest case in is the walk worth it.
Which Tours Cover Which Stops
If a specific stop matters to you, here's how the routes actually split. The original $33 night walk covers the fullest classic route: Jackson Square, the Pharmacy Museum, the Ursuline Convent, Jacques St. Germain's house and the LaLaurie Mansion across its two hours. The award-winning $22 walk runs the briskest version, 1 hour 45 minutes past the LaLaurie Mansion, St. Germain's house and the Quarter's darkest blocks, with a Hurricane cocktail voucher built in. The adults-only HELLVISION route trades the Pharmacy Museum and St. Germain's house for a true-crime-heavy telling and a stop near Marie Laveau's house on St. Ann Street, alongside the LaLaurie Mansion and Lafitte's. Every tour ends at Lafitte's, and every tour offers free cancellation up to 24 hours out.
- Want the full classic route with the Pharmacy Museum: book the original $33 night walk
- Want the darkest, true-crime-forward telling: book the HELLVISION route
- Want the Casket Girls and St. Germain covered in depth: pick a tour that lists both by name before booking
- Every route covers under one mile at a slow, frequently-stopping pace
Frequently Asked Questions
Which stops does a French Quarter vampire tour make?
Seven core stops make up the classic route: Jackson Square, the Pharmacy Museum, the Old Ursuline Convent, Jacques St. Germain's house, Gallier House, the LaLaurie Mansion and Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop. Not every tour hits all seven; the Pharmacy Museum and St. Germain's house vary by route.
Where exactly are the vampire landmarks?
All within roughly a mile of Jackson Square: the LaLaurie Mansion at 1140 Royal Street, Jacques St. Germain's house at 1039 Royal Street, Gallier House at 1132 Royal Street, the Old Ursuline Convent at 1112 Chartres Street, and Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop at 941 Bourbon Street.
Can you go inside the LaLaurie Mansion?
No. It's privately owned and has never been open to tour visitors. Every route views it from the street, standing across from the corner of Royal and Governor Nicholls.
How do you photograph the French Quarter at night without disturbing residents?
Skip the flash entirely, especially toward lit windows, and use the gas lanterns as your actual light source with a phone's night mode. Brace against an iron post or railing rather than carrying a tripod, and keep your voice down once the group reaches a residential block.
Which tour covers which stops?
The original $33 night walk covers the fullest classic route, including the Pharmacy Museum and St. Germain's house. The $22 award-winning walk runs a brisker version of the same geography, and the adults-only HELLVISION route swaps those stops for a true-crime-heavy telling and a stop near Marie Laveau's house. Both end at Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop and include the LaLaurie Mansion.
Is the route walkable without a tour?
Yes, every address on this list is a public street you can walk on your own. What you lose without a guide is the storytelling itself, the context connecting one stop to the next, and the honest breakdown of what's documented history versus legend at each address.