Haunting the Dead: New Orleans Cemeteries as Supernatural Tourist Spectacles

The old walled historic cemeteries of New Orleans have been used as public spaces for cultural activities that go beyond the traditional role of cemeteries as resting places for the dead for over two centuries (the first known tourist narrative of a New Orleans cemetery dates from 1803). These “cities of the dead” have long been venues for all saints’ day celebrations, Voodoo rituals, and tourism. However, in the last twenty or so years, spooky haunted ghost cemetery tours have proliferated at the cemeteries. These tours repurpose the memory of those interred within as subjects of thrilling, scary, “real life” narratives without the consent of the dead or their families. According to promotional materials, much of the interpretive content of these tours derives from the lives of actual people, many of whom suffered tragic deaths from yellow fever, disasters, war, and murder. Intensifying their intrusive nature, many tours use “tools” such as EMF readers and dowsing rods to attempt to detect and contact cemetery spirits. One invites participants to “photograph paranormal activity in the darkness.”

This paper focuses on the recent explosion of extractive ghost tours, often staged at night, that fetishize New Orleans cemeteries for kitsch packaged tourist experiences. The history of the cemeteries as venues for early tourism and religious and social rituals provides a context for the recent rise in paranormal tourism and its use and abuse of memory in these sacred, fragile historic places, but this late exploitation of the dead for profit is unprecedented. Cemeteries as public spectacle in tours such as the “Dead of night cemetery ghost tour” and the “night cemetery and ghost BYOB bus tour” are examined as sensationalized story telling marketed as history and spiritual exploration.