New Orleans Ghost, Voodoo and Vampire Tours: What You Buy

Two night walks are the most-reviewed things anyone books in New Orleans. Between them they carry 20,711 of the 123,643 reviews across the 50 products we sample — 16.8% of the city's recorded attention sitting on 4% of its products, a concentration of about 4.2×. Both last 1.8 hours. Both cost about €32.5. Neither includes admission to anything, because there is nothing to be admitted to: the route runs on public streets.

That is the product. The question worth answering before booking is the other one — which of the things said on that walk the city can actually document, and which it cannot. The answer is not uniform, and the three words in the tour title sit at three different distances from the record.

What a New Orleans ghost tour actually includes

A guided walk, at night, of roughly 1.8 hours, covering perhaps a dozen French Quarter blocks on foot. No building interior is entered. No cemetery is entered. The purchase is a narrated route and a guide's delivery, and the delivery is most of the value.

The two headline products price that at €32.53 and €32.54 — about €18.07 an hour — which sits below the €48 median of the New Orleans catalogue. The comparison worth making is inside the same evening: the authorised St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 walking tour costs €21.99 for 0.9 hours, or €24.43 an hour, and that one does buy access to ground you cannot otherwise enter. The night walk buys narration on streets that are free at every hour.

Why two night walks outsell everything else here

The catalogue makes the scale plain. The general ghost, voodoo and vampire walking tour holds 13,647 reviews at 4.55, the single most-reviewed product in the city. The adults-only ghost, crime, voodoo and vampire tour holds 7,064 at 4.75 and ranks third. Between them sits a jazz cruise on 8,095 reviews at 4.13.

The pair are separated by one cent of price and zero minutes of duration, and by 0.20 of rating. The higher-rated of the two is the one that removes the family audience and adds documented crime to the itinerary. That is the clearest signal in the whole set: when the format narrows its promise, satisfaction rises. Whatever these walks are selling, the version that leans on record rather than on scares is the one people come back and score at 4.75.

What a New Orleans tour guide licence certifies

The guide standing in front of you is licensed by the city, and the licence has a specific, checkable content. The City of New Orleans requires a first-time tour guide to sit a written examination scheduled at application and to reach a passing score of 70%, submit a federal background check sent directly from an approved facility, and pay $50, with renewal at $20, per nola.gov. Tour guides are exempt from the drug testing applied to some other permits.

Read what that guarantees and what it does not. It guarantees a person who scored at least 70% on the city's history and culture exam and who cleared a federal records check. It says nothing whatsoever about the truth of any individual ghost claim made on the route, because no examination tests that. A licensed guide is a vetted narrator, not a verified one — which is exactly why the boundary between the documented and the attributed is worth knowing before the walk starts, rather than after.

Louisiana Voudou is a living religion, not a costume

Voudou — the Louisiana spelling used by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities — is described by its 64 Parishes encyclopedia as "a synthesis of African religious and magical beliefs with Roman Catholicism," one that "emerged in New Orleans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." It was reinforced by refugees of the Haitian revolution: nearly ten thousand arrived in New Orleans in 1809, divided roughly equally among white residents, enslaved people and free people of color, and those of African descent "brought their Vodou traditions with them."

Two things follow that a tour title flattens. First, hoodoo is not a synonym: the same source describes hoodoo as a system of magic worked by solitary practitioners for individual clients, while Voudou describes organised congregations and ceremony. Second, this is present tense. 64 Parishes states that "authentic Voudou congregations continue to thrive in the city," and names the gap directly — "the casual visitor to New Orleans sees only sensationalistic 'voodoo and ghost' tours and 'tourist voodoo' souvenir shops."

The word in the middle of that tour title belongs to people who are alive, who have obligations on Sunday, and who did not write the marketing copy.

Iracema Melo, on reading the New Orleans night-tour catalogue

Marie Laveau: what the archives record and what they don't

Marie Laveau is not folklore. She was born 10 September 1801 and died 15 June 1881, a free woman of color who gave consultations, held ceremonies and led St. John's Eve observances. 64 Parishes records that she was simultaneously a lifelong Roman Catholic and a Voudou priestess: "baptized, married, attended Mass, and had her children baptized at St. Louis Cathedral." Cemetery records confirm her burial in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.

The same entry marks where documentation stops. The successor daughter, "Marie II," is described as legend rather than record: Laveau's daughter Marie Philomène "was a rigidly proper Catholic matron who had no association with Voudou," and the identity of Marie II, "if she existed at all, remains a mystery." Her contemporary obituaries described a woman who "nursed the sick, provided for those in need, ministered to prisoners," and she lived modestly against the legends of wealth. Her reputation as an evildoer, the entry notes, "evolved during the twentieth century" — meaning the sinister Marie Laveau a night tour describes is younger than the woman by roughly a century.

The vampire in the title has a publication date

The third word is the easiest to date, and dating it is not a criticism of the tour so much as a description of it. New Orleans acquired its vampire association through fiction written by a New Orleans author: Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire, published in 1976 and set substantially in the city and its surrounding plantations. The city's vampire walking routes postdate that book.

Nothing in the municipal or parish archives corresponds. There is no birth record, no burial record and no property record behind the vampire figures named on these routes, in the way there demonstrably is behind Marie Laveau and behind Delphine LaLaurie. A visitor buying a ghost, voodoo and vampire walk is buying three products in one wrapper: a religion, a criminal case and a literary genre. They are worth different things and they should be believed differently.

Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop: what the Park Service says

The bar at the corner of Bourbon and St. Philip streets is on nearly every route, introduced as the smuggling front of the privateer Jean Lafitte. The National Park Service, which runs Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve and has every institutional reason to celebrate him, does not support that.

Its account is blunt about the limits of the record: of Lafitte himself, "even the date and place of his birth and death are unknown," and he "was likely born in the early 1780s in either France or the French colony of St. Domingue, now Haiti." On the building, nps.gov writes that "the mythical Lafitte Blacksmith shop is still a modern tourist attraction in the French Quarter today, though no evidence confirms the legend," and points instead at proximity: Pierre Lafitte's partner Marie Louise Villard owned property nearby, acquired from Claude Tremé on 17 August 1816. The structure is genuinely old and genuinely worth standing in front of. The attribution is the part with nothing behind it.

The LaLaurie house: the address with a documented record

One stop on these routes rests on documentation, and it is not a ghost story. Delphine LaLaurie, born 19 March 1787, died 7 December 1849, kept a mansion on Royal Street. 64 Parishes records that "on the morning of 10 April 1834, a fire at Madame Lalaurie's Royal Street mansion revealed seven bondspeople who had been starved, tortured, and chained." A mob nearly demolished the emptied house after her carriage reached Lake Pontchartrain and she boarded a schooner; she reached Paris by 1835.

The encyclopedia adds the caution that matters for a night walk: "the lurid nature of the actual events gave rise to subsequent rumors, urban legends, and folktales." The house is private and closed, so every version of this stop happens on the pavement outside. What happened there was the torture of seven enslaved people by their enslaver, and it is documented. The elaborations added to it over the following two centuries are not, and a tour that cannot tell you which sentence is which is selling you the wrong half.

Ghost, voodoo and cemetery options compared

Prices, durations and ratings are the figures we track today for the products in the New Orleans experience catalogue. Museum admission and street access are the operators' own published terms, read on 26 August 2026.

Where to learn what the walk only gestures at

The New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum at 724 Dumaine Street, between Bourbon and Royal, has served the city since 1972 and charges $10 for adults and $8 for seniors, military and students, opening 10am to 6pm Monday to Thursday and 10am to 7pm Friday to Sunday, closed on Christmas Day and Mardi Gras Day, per voodoomuseum.com. It is two small rooms. It is also the cheapest hour in this subject and the only one where the religion is the exhibit rather than the atmosphere.

Congo Square in Louis Armstrong Park costs nothing and is the ground itself, where enslaved Africans were permitted to gather under colonial law. The St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 tour at €21.99 is the only product here that unlocks a place. And the Louisiana State Museum holds the state's collections in the Cabildo and the Presbytère on Jackson Square for anyone wanting the colonial and Reconstruction context these stories sit inside. For the rest of the city's bookable evening, our guide to what to do in New Orleans and the one on what the city puts on a plate covers the categories a night walk leaves out.

Voudou

The Louisiana religion synthesising West and Central African belief with Roman Catholicism, emerging in New Orleans across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and practised in active congregations today.

Hoodoo

Not a synonym for Voudou. A system of magic worked by solitary practitioners for individual clients, using mojo bags and roots alongside Catholic candles, oils and images of the saints.

Tour guide licence

The City of New Orleans permit costing $50 and renewing at $20, requiring 70% on a written history and culture exam plus a federal background check.

St. John's Eve

The 23 June observance Marie Laveau led on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, and the best-recorded public element of her practice.

Bondspeople

The term 64 Parishes uses for the enslaved people found in the LaLaurie house on 10 April 1834. Seven were found.

How to choose a New Orleans night tour

Pick on the guide, not the itinerary, because the itineraries barely differ. Every route in this category walks the same public blocks, and the 0.20 rating gap between two products priced one cent apart is a gap in delivery, not in content. Read recent reviews for the guide's name rather than the stops.

Ask one question of any operator before booking: which of tonight's claims are documented and which are attributed. A licensed guide who scored 70% on the city's history exam can usually answer it, and the answer separates the good version of this walk from the bad one. Booking costs nothing to hold, since 100% of the 674 New Orleans experiences we track cancel free of charge and none carries a sell-out flag. Prices for every departure sit on the New Orleans destination page.

Frequently asked questions