New Orleans Premier Ghost, Voodoo & Vampire Walking Tour — What to Expect

TripAdvisor's Travelers' Choice award for New Orleans ghost and vampire tours is based on verified guest reviews — not advertising spend, not industry nominations, not self-submission. The #1 Haunted Tour has held this position eight consecutive years, which is a meaningful signal in a city that has more haunted history tours than almost anywhere in the United States.

The reviews that sustain that ranking point to three things: the quality and depth of the guide's historical knowledge, the authenticity of the route (genuine sites with documented histories, not invented locations), and the tour's ability to satisfy both committed history enthusiasts and first-time visitors who just want an atmospheric evening in the French Quarter.

Premier, in this context, means consistently excellent over time — not just a strong season, but sustained year-over-year performance that holds up when measured against thousands of independent guest reviews.

The guided tour also operates under city licensing requirements. New Orleans requires walking tour guides to pass a municipal exam covering local history. That baseline requirement filters out the worst operators, but the gap between a licensed guide who barely passed and one who has spent years researching the paranormal and voodoo history of the French Quarter is enormous.

The guides on this tour fall firmly in the second category.

Who Was Marie Laveau?

Marie Laveau is the central figure of New Orleans voodoo — not a mythological character but a documented historical person who wielded extraordinary social and spiritual power in 19th-century New Orleans. Born a free woman of color around 1801, she became the city's most famous Voodoo Queen and practiced publicly and openly in a city where the lines between Catholic tradition and African spiritual practice had always been permeable.

Laveau led mass spiritual gatherings at Congo Square, where enslaved and free Black residents had been permitted to maintain African cultural practices since the French colonial period. She was said to have operated an information network throughout the city — through her work as a hairdresser serving white Creole households — that gave her knowledge and leverage others found supernatural. Whether her power was spiritual, social, or both, it was real and documented.

Marie Laveau on the French Quarter Route

The #1 Haunted Tour route passes the house at 1020 St. Ann Street, associated with Laveau's residence during her years of peak influence. The tour also passes St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, where Laveau is believed to be interred in a tomb that still receives offerings from visitors who leave three X marks on the wall and make a wish — a voodoo ritual that has persisted for over a century despite the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans attempting to discourage it.

Your guide will present Laveau in her full historical complexity: a Catholic who attended Mass at St. Louis Cathedral, a voodoo practitioner who led rituals attended by thousands, and a woman who navigated the racial and social hierarchies of antebellum New Orleans with a sophistication that confounded and threatened the white power structure of the era.

Jackson Square Fortune Tellers

The voodoo tradition in the French Quarter is not purely historical. Jackson Square at night is surrounded by tarot readers, fortune tellers, and practitioners who work the square as they have for generations — some credentialed in specific spiritual traditions, some purely theatrical. The tour passes through this landscape and the guide can provide context for what's genuine practice versus performance.

New Orleans takes the occult seriously in a way that has no parallel in American cities, and the fortune tellers of Jackson Square are part of a living tradition, not a theme park.

The ghost voodoo and vampire walking tour is not three separate topics — it's one coherent narrative about a city that developed a unique relationship with the supernatural over three centuries of layered culture. The vampire element is woven throughout rather than treated as a separate chapter.

The French Quarter's vampire history draws on multiple documented sources: the Casket Girls of the 1720s (women who arrived from France with cassette chests, associated in legend with bringing vampirism to the city); Jacques St. Germain's documented disappearance from 1902 after a woman escaped his Royal Street house claiming he had bitten her neck and authorities found no food but bottles of blood; and the 1932 Carter brothers case, documented in city police records.

Your guide presents these stories with appropriate historical grounding — distinguishing between legend, oral tradition, and documented record — which makes the vampire history of New Orleans more interesting, not less. The real events are strange enough to need no embellishment.

All three tours featured on this site cover ghost, voodoo, and vampire history in the French Quarter. Here is how to choose between them:

For the premier ghost, voodoo and vampire experience in terms of sustained award recognition and sheer value, Tour 3 is the answer. For the most historically comprehensive vampire walking tour covering the most significant sites, Tour 1 is the stronger choice. For adults who want something more technologically immersive and mature in tone, Tour 2's HELLVISION™ projectors offer something genuinely different.

A good fit if

• First-time New Orleans visitors who want the city's top-rated paranormal tour
• Fans of New Orleans voodoo history who want to understand Marie Laveau's actual legacy
• Couples and small groups who want an award-winning evening walk with a cocktail at the end
• Visitors on a budget who don't want to compromise on guide quality or route authenticity
• Guests with moderate mobility — under one mile, on the Quarter's main streets
• Anyone celebrating Halloween, Mardi Gras, or a birthday in the French Quarter

Not ideal for

• Guests with significant mobility limitations — the route includes cobblestone and uneven brick sidewalks
• Children under 13 — the tour covers dark history, antebellum violence, and mature themes
• Visitors who want the deepest historical dive and are willing to pay $11 more (Tour 1 covers more sites)
• Guests who need a fully indoor experience — this is an entirely outdoor walking tour

What to pack

• Comfortable walking shoes — cobblestone and brick sidewalks throughout the French Quarter
• Bug spray — New Orleans evenings are mosquito territory from spring through fall
• Water bottle — mandatory for outdoor walking in Louisiana humidity
• Phone or camera — gas lanterns on Royal and Chartres Streets create exceptional photo conditions at night
• Light rain layer — tours run in light rain; New Orleans weather changes without warning

What to leave behind

• Food or drinks while walking (out of respect for residents and the group)
• Pets — impractical on narrow French Quarter sidewalks in a group setting
• Large bags or rolling luggage — disruptive on the route and impractical on narrow sidewalks
• Children under 13 — minimum age enforced by the tour operator