Ghosts of New Orleans

If you click the "Slambo" link, you'll end up at Samantha's blog, where you can read a pretty cool, and very spooky, story of one of her paranormal experiences.

That story inspired me to tell one of my own. Originally, I had planned to post this around Halloween (appropriately enough, the anniversary of the event), but laziness got in the way, and I never did write it up. But now, however, you're in luck...

Halloween fell on a Saturday in 1998, so my friends and I decided a good place to celebrate the day would be in New Orleans. It's the perfect time to be there, seeing as it's a party city, and I would give it my vote as the spookiest and most haunted city in the US.

The weekend was a lot of fun- we had some excellent food, went to a lot bars, got to go out in public in our costumes and go to more bars, and then eat some more. You really can't ask for a whole lot more in a vacation.

I was sharing a room with my friends Rob and Hemsley. Rob was leaving Sunday evening, while Hemsley and I were going home on Monday morning. Sunday was pretty slow-paced- we were recovering from the night before, and we just walked around town, enjoying the sights before we had to head back to our regular lives.

In the morning before we started out I noted that there was no more soap left in the bathroom. As Hems and I were headed out early the next day, I made sure to stop by the front desk and ask for a couple bars. The porter assured us he would drop some off for us.

We went out walking, had our last meal together, and took Rob to the airport. Afterwards, Hems and I walked around some more, had dinner and went back to the hotel. My first stop was the bathroom to check on the soap (I can get kind of obsessive about things like this), but there was none. I called down to the front desk and they said they would bring some right up.

Hems went straight to sleep, but, since I had a later flight, I stayed up reading and waiting for the soap. After a while, my bladder started to need emptying, but I wanted to hold off until the soap came. When it looked as if it was never going to arrive, I went to the bathroom to answer the call of nature.

So, I'm in the loo, attending to business when I think I hear someone knocking on the door. "Perfect!" I thought- the porter arrives when I'm indisposed. Well, my bladder wasn't going to stop emptying just so I could answer the door, so I figured the porter was going to have to wait until I was finished.

After I was all emptied out and I had washed my hands, I headed toward the door. First thing I did was look through the peephole, but there was no one out there. I opened the door to see if maybe he had left the soap outside...

(Before I continue, let me describe the hallway. We were staying in a small hotel just off the French Quarter. Our room was at the end of the hall- to the right was the elevator and nothing else. To our left were a few more rooms. The other side of the hall was one long wall- all the rooms were on one side of the hall. The hall itself was pretty narrow- I could lean against one wall and touch the other wall with my palm. Basically, I'm saying that if anyone else was in the hall with me, I would have seen him.)

...I opened the door to see if maybe he had left the soap outside, but there was nothing. The floor was completely empty. Figuring that I had imagined hearing the knock on the door, I turned to go back into the room.

Just as I was turning, two bars of soap came out of nowhere and hit me squarely in the chest.

It was such a weird thing, that it didn't totally register. I took the soap, went inside, and got into bed. As I was drifting off to sleep it suddenly hit me what had happened. All I can say is I had a pretty restless night after that.

And that's my coolest ghost story. I have two more- one about the time I kept seeing possibly the lamest ghost ever, and a collection of tales from the hotel where my wife used to work.