Drinking Sazeracs at New Orleans' Haunted Carousel Bar

New Orleans' sordid past is what brings people here, and the reason why many paranormal investigators believe it to be the most haunted city in America. I sought to investigate one of these cases myself while sipping a fancy Sazerac—the official drink of New Orleans—at Hotel Monteleone's Carousel Bar, where I hoped to ask bartender Marvin Allen about the hotel's haunted history.

Though the hotel it occupies—which is still owned and operated by the Monteleone family—dates back to 1886, the Carousel Bar itself first spun in 1949. It looks just like your favorite childhood merry-go-round (plus booze, of course), featuring 25 seats in a circle around a central bar that the bartenders have to climb into. In your seat, you make one revolution every 15 minutes or so—roughly the amount of time it takes to finish a swanky cocktail.

In its time, the bar has hosted literary greats like Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Eudora Welty. Truman Capote even claimed he was born in the hotel—which is not quite true, but his mother did live there until her water broke. Liberace was one of the first to play the piano here, and the bar still has the piano he played. But while its most famous guests have all moved beyond this earthly plane, the building still allegedly hosts a couple of ghosts.

I sat down at the Carousel at 11:30 AM prepared to find them.

First, I opened up an electromagnetic field (EMF) reader app on my phone and placed it on the bar. If some ethereal presence flickered in, I'd be the first to know. I started on the south side of the bar and made my way around, with Allen trailing my slow movement. I was disappointed to find he's no great believer in ghost stories.

"It's supposedly haunted, but I don't know," said Allen, leaning in slightly. He pointed behind him. "The only thing I've encountered are the spirits back here."

Allen has bartended for 25 years, 13 of those at Carousel Bar, but has yet to meet a ghost on the job. "Part of the problem is that I don't believe in ghosts," he added. "I mean, I don't believe in them, but I don't disbelieve in them either."

After I pressed him slightly, however, Allen admitted to the hotel's haunted history. "On one of the floors a boy died here in the hotel," he said with a shrug. "His parents went to the Opera House while they were staying here, left him, and he died. Supposedly he still haunts the floor and plays there."

Eureka! A confirmed nearby ghost character, I thought.

"Every so often you get a guest who comes down and says they've seen the ghost," he said. "Again, maybe. Usually it's a woman who says her room got really cold and she heard some weird noises."

Just then, I noticed my EMF meter going off the rails. There are three colored gauges at the top of the app, and the indicator put us in the purple—the darkest color out of the three, which I could only assume implied ghost activity. At this point, I'd made my way to the north side of the carousel. I checked the surroundings: a couple of green chairs by the window and a bedazzled 21st-century black-and-white picture of an early 20th-century woman. Perhaps the soul of the woman was crying out at the gaudy purple necklace someone had attached to her.

"We've been on Haunted Hotels in America and brought in ghostbusters who say they've seen it," Allen continued. "The French Quarter is supposedly haunted, too. I think it's just part of the myth of the Quarter. I've lived here for 20 to 25 years. I mean, if you think about how some of these buildings go back 300 years, you do kind of wonder sometimes."

Allen swept around the circle of the bar and filled drink orders, many of them Sazeracs. The speed with which he approached them was impressive, twisting lemon peels and tossing them into drinks with a flick of the wrist. The guy can narrate, too. Though he might not be a believer in ghosts, he is a student of history.

"What's interesting about the Sazerac," Allen said to me and my seatmates, "is that the only ingredient that is the same one as when it was first created is the Peychaud's bitters. The original Sazerac was Cognac-based. That's the source of the name—Sazerac de Forge, the Cognac they used. So people would come in and ask for that Sazerac cocktail. But then in the late 1800s, the phylloxera epidemic killed the French wine crop, and brandy is grape-based."

Allen stopped to take a drink order and then started back up again.

"Thomas Handy bought the Sazerac Coffee House and his family was into whiskey," he continued. "He thought rye would be more palatable to American consumer, so he switched it over. Absinthe was used instead of Herbsaint, but when absinthe got bad the instruction became Herbsaint, which is a locally produced spirit. When Sazerac became the cocktail of the city, absinthe was still banned, so Herbsaint stuck with the recipe."

At the end of our talk, Allen made me a Sazerac—surprisingly smooth, with rye was the focus.

After a few quick sips, I made my way back to the corner of the room where I'd had the biggest energy reading, but the reader didn't spike again. The ghost had gone, so we wouldn't be able to learn about its early afternoon moods.

Once I finished my drink, I went up to the 14th floor, where the boy supposedly died. (It's technically the 13th floor, but superstitious elevator designers decided to skip it.) Unfortunately, it was a bust. I had one huge spike while up there, but I realized that it might've been caused by the ice machine turning on.

After my third ride up the elevator, it occurred to me that it was strange I was stalking around a hotel I wasn't staying at, taking readings and moseying down empty hallways. But no one looked at me or found me odd. That's good, but undoubtedly during their stay in New Orleans they'd find or see something spooky to take home with them. Hopefully, for the people at this hotel, it'd be a little ghost boy.