Trick-or-treaters will be hitting the streets tonight, and French Quarter ghost tour operators are hoping locals pay them a visit this Halloween.
"Halloween for us is like, I guess, Valentine's Day would be to a florist," Sidney Smith, the owner of the Haunted History Tours, told WWL's Dave Cohen. "Halloween is usually, unfortunately, the only time that we see local residents come out to take the tour."
While Smith admits the tours do cater mostly to tourists, he says locals could learn a lot about their hometown and its haunted history.
"We take people to sites mainly in the French Quarter connected and associated with real documented hauntings based on paranormal investigation, paranormal activity, and this type of thing," Smith said.
But why is New Orleans considered to be one of the most haunted in the United States?
"We have had a heavy concentration of death that has taken place in a small area over a relatively short period of time," Smith noted.
Smith says New Orleans is a city filled with tragic events, including a warning he says the city's founders ignored.
"The earliest French settlers were warned by the Indians not to build the city here, that the area was cursed," he said, noting the hurricanes, catastrophic fires, yellow fever epidemics, murders, and more that have hit New Orleans over the last 304 years.
Those types of violent death, Smith says, contribute to hauntings.
"A lot of people say, 'Rest in peace,' but what if you can't?" Smith said. "We do have a lot of restless spirits here, and when people come and take our tours, a lot of times we see people that are very skeptical--like the wife is dragging the husband. Then at the end of the tour, those husbands are the first ones to come up to the tour guide and say, 'You know what? I'm a believer now."
