On Chestnut and First, in the Garden District of New Orleans, stands a handsome Greek revival mansion with Ionic and Corinthian columns and arches of ornate, lacy ironwork. Until a few years ago, it was the home of Anne Rice, high priestess of popular vampiric fiction and author of Interview with the Vampire, who, more than anyone, is responsible for making the Crescent City a tourist mecca for willingly gullible devotees of spookiness and the supernatural.
Rice assumed the role of Queen of the Night with brio: she would turn up to book signings in a quilted coffin, and once staged her own mock funeral at Lafayette Cemetery No 1, complete with horse-drawn hearse and a brass band playing dirges. She opened her elegant home to the public every Monday, and adoring fans clad in black would queue around the block to see the macabre artefacts it was stuffed with, including a lemur skeleton and a collection of evil-looking antique dolls, set out in rooms painted mauve and fuschia.
Guides offering tours to "Haunted New Orleans", who built their itineraries around a visit to Rice's mansion, were decidedly glum when the writer left the city five years ago, just before Katrina hit. She is, after all, one of the world's bestselling authors, and her feverish page-turners brought in hordes of visitors eager to experience the city's gothic atmospherics, along with its celebrated Creole food and jazz. This year, First Street offered rather more pedestrian fare in the run-up to Halloween: when I walked around the Garden District – it's an unmissable part of the city – a fortnight ago, I saw only pumpkins, plastic skulls hanging from porches, and the odd Frankenstein's monster tied to a tree.
Of course, the gothic atmospherics long antedated Rice, and she looked to them for inspiration. Interview with the Vampire begins with the story of one of the Louisiana indigo plantations not far from the city, characterised by humid swamp lands and gnarled oaks dripping with Spanish moss. But the action soon moves to the old city – the French Quarter, still largely preserved – and its streets of Creole cottages and colonial villas, with their battered shutters and secluded courtyards. A port historically charged with voodoo magic (thanks to the slave trade) and heavy with Catholic mysticism (from generations of European immigrants), suggested all too obviously blood-spilling of a vampiric kind. And a city long identified with sexual permissiveness was a plausible home for dashing, irresistible throat-piercers.
Rice's revenant heroes roam the extraordinary St Louis and Lafayette cemeteries, which, however many sightseers crowd them, still resemble Hammer horror film sets. The crumbling, sun-bleached tombs are, unusually, above ground (the water table is so high, bodies buried in the normal way always floated back to the surface). So the Spanish-style vaults in these "cities of the dead" are reusable, and house many sets of remains within them. There's lots of rusting decorative ironwork; the pathways between the crypts are narrow and twisting; crosses and statues on top of the tombs cast odd shadows across the necropolis; and votive candles add the final touch.
Rice lovingly traded on the evocative architecture and sexy Southern exoticism of one of the oldest cities in America. "This was New Orleans," begins a passage in her most famous novel, "a magical and magnificent place to live. In which a vampire, richly dressed and gracefully walking through the pools of light of one gas lamp after another might attract no more notice in the evening than hundreds of other exotic creatures . . ."
Now a new set of Louisiana vampires has come along to entice bloodsucking devotees to the New Orleans area. True Blood, the hit TV series which has attracted five million viewers in the States (it's currently showing on Channel 4 in the UK), is based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels of Charlaine Harris, which has as its premise the entering of the vamps into mainstream society – thanks to the availability of Japanese-made synthetic blood they have "come out of the casket". In the opening paragraph of the first Sookie book, Dead Until Dark, we hear of the exciting arrival of the first revenants in the fictional backwoods town of Bon Temps, Louisiana. New Orleans, meanwhile, is "a real centre" for vampires with "the whole Anne Rice thing, right?"
Alan Ball, the creator of True Blood, whose previous work includes Six Feet Under, has described his new show as "bubblegum TV" (anyone talking of it in the same terms as other HBO shows such as The Sopranos or The Wire has let the bayou humidity go to their head). But it is fun and raunchy and knowing: we see a newspaper headline that announces "Angelina adopts Vampire Baby". The fanged hero, civil war veteran Bill Compton, seduces Sookie, another reworking of Bram Stoker's virginal Mina Harker – on the night she succumbs she wears a white nightgown with flowing sleeves.
Ball plays around with vampires as metaphor – his seductive revenants are clearly stand-ins for gay people (the opening credit sequence features a sign that reads "God Hates Fangs", a play on the Kansas City-based Westboro Baptist Church slogan "God Hates Fags"), and those who enjoy being bitten by a vampire during sex are castigated as "fang-bangers". The vampires are a persecuted minority fighting for integration and civil rights – they are outsiders, the staple of teenage fiction. In True Blood, it has become illegal to "drain" vampires of their blood which, when drunk by ordinary mortals, is a potent hallucinogen and aphrodisiac, nicknamed "V".
Such is the show's success, it won't be long before there are "fangtastic" tours to Clinton, the small Louisiana town around 50 miles from New Orleans where much of True Blood is filmed (I drove there, and there's little to see at present). This Halloween weekend, New Orleans plays host to a Vampire film festival, and the bloodsuckers aren't likely to disappear any time soon. There's intense rivalry between businesses selling haunted history trips and "spooktaculars" in the city, and the locals are understandably keen, following Katrina, to do all they can to attract visitors: better fictional horrors than real ones, and better ghost stories than actual memories of a ghost town.
Over the years such stories have been told, retold and blithely fabricated to feed the public's appetite for escapism with a ghoulish theme. The legend most excitedly recycled by my guide at the St Louis cemetery, for instance, is of Marie Laveau, the Creole "voodoo queen", whose crypt there is, reportedly, the second-most visited grave in the US (after Elvis's but ahead of JFK's). The tomb is covered in sets of three "X"s, drawn or scratched on by visitors to represent wishes they hope the famed sorceress will grant.
The story goes that Laveau, who was alive in the 1800s and worked as a hairdresser to rich, white families, would stage ceremonies in which the participants would be possessed by spirits and dance naked. She told fortunes and healed the sick, dispensing charms and potions called gris-gris. When she finally died in 1881, aged almost 80, legend has it she turned herself into a huge black crow that still flies over the cemetery (though, in truth, it's doubtful she's buried there at all).
There are, naturally, voodoo shops in the French Quarter that sell gris-gris, statues, fetishes, incense and masks. And all over the city, the supernatural is a selling point. Ghosts bring in dollars as surely as Mardi Gras and every hotel seems to have a ghost. The Monteleone, an august establishment on Royal Street, boasts a number of spectres and poltergeists – not least one that keeps opening a locked door. Sure enough, on my first morning there, the story was doing the rounds that a ghostly boy had been sighted the previous night, sitting on some steps on the 14th floor. When a guest tried to take his photo, all that was captured by her camera was a black, formless shape.
Guides stopping outside the three-storey LaLaurie mansion further down Royal tell a grisly tale of cruelty to slaves in the mid-19th century. Madame LaLaurie was a prominent figure in the town and hosted many parties in her lavish residence. But rumours began to spread about the unhealthy appearance and the disappearance of her household servants and slaves. A young girl was chased on to the roof and fell to her death; she was buried underneath the cypress tree in the courtyard. Then a fire broke out in the mansion and rescuers discovered evidence that servants had been chained up and maltreated. Madame LaLaurie fled the city. Even more lurid details, which add spice to this story of "the most haunted house in New Orleans" – women nailed to floors, makeshift sex-change operations, and so on – turn out to have been the invention of the owner of one of the local ghost-tour businesses.
And the house with "the most ghosts in America"? Two hours outside the city, in St Francisville, beyond Baton Rouge, is the Myrtles Plantation house, built in 1796. An engaging guide, Robi, makes the most of shlocky legends of vanishing jewellery, footsteps on the stairs and trapped spirits in a mirror: see the handprints, see the streaks of ... what? Blood? Mississippi river water? The bed and breakfasters who lodge upstairs, we're assured, rarely make it through the night. It's all down to the cruelty of an antebellum owner of the house, Clark Woodruff, who forced a slave, Chloe, to become his mistress then put her to death as a punishment for eavesdropping. In revenge, she is said to have killed off Woodruff's wife and daughters. That there's no record of Woodruff owning any slaves, and that his family, in fact, died of yellow fever is of no consequence – the phantoms provide the frisson.
I was expecting a certain frisson myself when I sank into the plush red cushions of the darkened séance lounge of Muriel's Jackson Square, in the French Quarter, for my first ever tarot reading. Behind heavy, tassled curtains, a couple of Egyptian mummies looked on. In hindsight, I realise I was expecting too much – Jane Seymour's Solitaire in Live and Let Die, to be specific. Instead, my psychic had the benign and tingle-free demeanour of a National Trust volunteer. I drew three initial cards, Knight in Cups, Emperor and Happiness, and listened as my Louisiana Mystic Meg gently, and extremely vaguely, explained their many possible meanings.
So, disappointingly, no ghosts or vampires made themselves known to me in New Orleans, though – in keeping with local tradition – I became pleasantly familiar with spirits of another kind (special mention goes to the brandy milk punch at Brennan's). In truth, the long history of the city is fascinating enough without it being haunted and without a vampire lurking in every shadow; there's plenty of genuine gothic to go around. And a bowl of gumbo ya ya, followed by a night of music on Frenchman Street, is intoxication enough for me – at least, that is, until I can get hold of some "V".
Getting there
KLM (+44 (0) 871 222 7474) flies to New Orleans, via Amsterdam, from 15 UK airports from £434 rtn inc tax.
Where to stay
Hotel Monteleone (+1 866 338 4684) has doubles from $99-$239, room only.
Further information
True Blood season one is out on DVD and Blu-Rayfrom HBO.
New Orleans' Convention & Visitors Bureau.
