Hotel Monteleone

It has been said that the French Quarter begins in the lobby of the Hotel Monteleone. The claim is not merely geographic. Standing at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets since 1886, the Monteleone is the only high-rise building in the interior of the Quarter, a Beaux-Arts landmark that has anchored the cultural life of the neighborhood for well over a century. It is one of the last great family-owned hotels in America, and it is, by nearly every account, one of the most actively haunted buildings in New Orleans.

The hotel's origins trace to Antonio Monteleone, a Sicilian nobleman who had operated a successful shoe factory before immigrating to New Orleans around 1880. Setting up a cobbler's shop on Royal Street, then the commercial and banking heart of the city, Monteleone prospered quickly enough to purchase a small sixty-four-room hotel on the corner of Royal and Iberville. He renamed it the Hotel Monteleone, and the property grew rapidly. A major expansion in 1903 added thirty rooms, and a sweeping 1908 renovation added three hundred more.

Antonio died in 1913, and the hotel passed to his son Frank, who oversaw the addition of the Queen Anne Ballroom and two hundred more rooms in 1928—one year before the Depression. The Monteleone was one of the rare family-owned hotels to survive those lean years intact. In 1949, Frank introduced the hotel's most famous feature: the Carousel Piano Bar and Lounge, a twenty-five-seat revolving bar turning on two thousand steel rollers at a rate of one revolution every fifteen minutes. The original building was demolished and rebuilt in 1954, and a final expansion in 1964 added the upper floors, a Sky Terrace, rooftop pool, and the Presidential Suite. The hotel today holds 570 guest rooms across its towering frame.

The Monteleone's literary associations alone would secure its place in American cultural history. Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, and Truman Capote were all frequent guests. Hemingway referenced the hotel in his short story "Night Before Battle." Williams used it as a symbol in The Rose Tattoo. Capote famously claimed on The Tonight Show that he was born in the hotel—his mother lived there during her pregnancy but made it to the hospital in time. In 1999, the Friends of the Library Association designated the Monteleone an official literary landmark, one of only three hotels in the country to receive that distinction. In 1942, New Orleans author Innis Patterson Truman jumped to her death from the hotel's twelfth floor, an event documented in letters by the writer Lyle Saxon—one of the building's darker episodes and one that adds genuine tragedy to the property's layered past.

The paranormal reputation of the Hotel Monteleone is extensive and has been the subject of formal investigation. In March 2003, the International Society for Paranormal Research conducted a multi-day investigation and reported making contact with more than a dozen earthbound entities. Among them were two former employees—a chef and a busboy or waiter—whom investigators linked to a recurring phenomenon involving the hotel restaurant's door, which opens and closes on its own despite being locked and operated by a push-button mechanism. The investigators concluded the two spirits were engaged in an ongoing disagreement about whether the door should remain open or shut. The most widely reported spirit is that of a toddler named Maurice Begere. According to the legend, Maurice's parents, Jacques and Josephine, were frequent guests in the late nineteenth century who would leave their young son with a nanny while they attended performances at the French Opera House on Bourbon Street.

One evening, Maurice developed a high fever and died in his room on what is now the fourteenth floor. His grief-stricken mother returned to the hotel repeatedly, and eventually, the story holds, Maurice's spirit appeared before her, saying words to the effect of not to cry, that he was fine. Guests to this day report seeing a small boy wandering the fourteenth-floor hallway, sometimes standing at the foot of their bed, sometimes heard laughing. The fourteenth floor—which is actually the thirteenth, as the hotel skipped that number in its floor plan—has become the most requested floor among guests seeking a paranormal experience. Other reported entities include a man named William "Red" Wildemere, who died of natural causes in the hotel, a ghostly figure in nineteenth-century clothing believed by some to be Antonio Monteleone himself still watching over his creation, a phantom child who takes visitors' hands and then vanishes, and a spirit identified as "Solemn John," a Tennessee businessman said to have committed suicide after failed investments. Guests report shadows gliding through corridors, unexplained cold spots, elevators that stop on the fourteenth floor without being called, and the sounds of children playing in hallways where none are present.

Today the Hotel Monteleone continues to operate under the fifth generation of the Monteleone family. The grandfather clock still chimes in the lobby. The Carousel Bar still turns. The doormen still stand at the entrance on Royal Street. And somewhere on the fourteenth floor, a small boy may still be looking for his parents—or simply making sure he is remembered.