Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/07/haunted-house-formerly-owned-by-nick-cage-up-for-sale-again.html
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Here’s a nice video about what it takes to be a Tour Guide in New Orleans. Andy also has a bunch of videos about the city’s history.
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New Orleans is comprised almost entirely of spooky haunted histories and doors that mysteriously open on their own
This is a charming turn of phrase that is also extremely false. I grew up here, moved away, and came back, and have zero spooky ghost experience from my time living in Gentilly Woods and Mid-City. The city does certainly have a lot of fucked-up history and a ton of uneasy ghosts but they are largely concentrated in the French Quarter and Uptown.
It’s already gotten its historic site placcard, why not let the building live out the rest of its life as a museum?
Half the Quarter’s already museums. Do we need another one?
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I lived on Bourbon St in the 80s and worked as a photographer and the thing is you can just make up a story about anyplace being haunted and people are ready to believe it. I’ve been in tons of ‘haunted’ places and spent the night and never experienced anything. That people believe in ghosts amuses me to no end.
My funniest story was working assisting a guy who was photographing for Gambit and it may well have been this place for all I remember and I was talking to the lady who was writing the article and she told me a witch doctor lived there.
We called these shoots “Horrible Homes and Inferior Interiors” which were featured in the rag about notible or famous people’s houses.
So we go in and there’s a very nice black wife who greets us - the place screams of wealth with all this African art and expensive furniture, but seems a zillion miles from suggesting it’s ‘haunted’.
We are assured that the doctor will be home any minute and I’m looking at some of the art and wondering how this witch doctor makes enough money to live like one of the rich and famous. And we are almost done and the writer wants the doctor and wife in a photo and we are anxious he’s ever going to show up. And then he does and like his wife he’s extremely good looking - they are probably in their 50s and still movie star great looking. And he’s in a suit and tie and blowing my expectation that something about him will scream WITCH DOCTOR.
The more I look at him, how affable he is and am trying to picture him doing voodoo ore whatever - does a 1980s witch doctor still dress up in a grass skirt and bone vest and wear some sort of mask or face paint - you know the silly Hollywood movie caricature thing?
I can’t picture it, hands are shaken, picture taken and we pack up and leave.
In the car I chat with the writer and say that was weird as hell - the house like Architectural Digest and not what I expected. I ask how much money is in his job to afford the place with him being a witch doctor. Now she has a NYC twang to her voice not being a native and says “What?” “I thought you said he was a witch doctor?”
She agrees “He is a witch doctor.” So how is there money in that? Does he sell a lot of voodoo stuff or what?"
Now she’s confused and enunciates very carefully “A RICH >R-I-C-H< DOCTOR!” Her accent was akin to Elmer Fudd - all the R’s she pronounced sounded like W’s.
A rich doctor, not a “witch doctah” as she pronounced it.
“Oh, well that’s completely different.”
In ‘haunted’ Nawlins nothing seems implausible…
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[ article posted by Natalie Dressed ]
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My trash can is haunted. It gets angry and won’t even let me use it anymore.
Better than the toilet, I guess.
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My BF got me this obviously haunted doughnut a couple months ago.
It tasted as shrill as it looks, and the filling was the most astonishingly BRIGHT neon red, wretchedly phony watermelon flavor.
Still, I ate every bit, making faces the entire time which amused my BF.
It wasn’t quite as haunted as these, tho -
At least mine couldn’t bite back.
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I really have to trade in these specs.
I read that as Nick Cage was haunting the place.
Bit premature, I thought to myself.
Still, if anyone can pull that off, it’ll be him.
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Buy now and as a bonus they’ll throw in to sweeten the deal, your new celebrity roommate Nicolas Cage! (I’m assuming he still needs ungodly amounts of money and his agent just answers phone calls with a “yes, he’ll do it”)
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I’ve been there I think 3 times? My dad used to live there, as his dad was stationed there in the Coast Guard. I think its a neat place. Lots of history and cool buildings.
If I went again it would be less Bourbon Street and more history tours.
ETA - one of the coolest things I saw was Doreen’s Jazz Band in St. Louis Square. I got one of their CDs of Jazz. It’s a big ensemble band (it was bigger the time I saw them). Great stuff. Here is a sample of them playing on youtube.
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I have it on good authority that New Orleans’ reputation for being haunted is nothing but a marketing gimmick cooked up by the local vampires.
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I mean, it’s a former public high school (among other things) built on the site of a mansion where bad things happened.
I’m curious if Cage was the first of the “edgy Hollywood elite” to want it for it’s unpleasant history* - the 2007 purchase date feels right for the post-Katrina transformation of the French Quarter into a theme-park version of itself.**
In any case, it may be bouncing from aristocrat to aristocrat, but it isn’t “always elevating in price” at least.
Cage bought it for $3.45 million in 2007. It sold for $2.3 million in 2009, and $2.1 million in 2010, to the current owner.
*Actually, is that why Cage bought it? It seems like the current higher values are based on the address having been featured in the 2013 season of “American Horror Story.”
**I probably don’t know what I’m talking about, but I spent some time there before Katrina, in the immediate aftermath, and a few years later. And pre-Katrina, the French Quarter felt like a real place that was being overrun by tourists. A few years later, it felt like a theme-park. Visiting now just feels depressing.
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I’m a real world/science person but walking around the French Quarter at night, in the residential area away from the Bourbon St commercial zone, I’ve had moments where the hair on the back of neck was zinging.
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