My name's Maddie, I'm a British student who did a year abroad at the University of Southern Mississippi. August 2011-May 2012.

May-June I'm traveled around a bit

Here is the account I kept of it all, for the memories, my family and the people who get sent here randomly by a search engine. It was often typed quickly so the spelling, structure and grammar isn't always correct (sorry Mum).

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Sunday 30 October 2011

This is Halloween

This weekend we went to New Orleans for Halloween, which was pretty darn crazy. It's not the first time I've been there nor the last as we have a school trip next weekend too, so I won't go into much detail. Being at Southern Miss is a good location for its proximity to NOLA and it's a very different world to Hattiesburg.

But anyway, rather than tell of my experiences of Bourbon Street I thought I'd share the spooky occurrences that are very darn relevant to Halloween.



We stayed in St Vincent's Guest House on Magazine Street, around a 20 minute from the French Quarter.
A grand, Gothic building which greeted us with the charming words "St. Vincent's Infant Asylum" on the highest tower; turns out the place served as an orphanage in the 19th century! It really was something straight out of Guillermo del Toro movie.





Inside there are many photographs of nuns and orphans. I thought the kids all looked cute but they scared my friend Rosie, who had difficulty looking at them. I do admit that the black and white pictures of children receiving dental examinations/hair cuts were a little unnerving.

The building has also served as location for some movies and TV shows, the most recent being R.E.D which starred Helen Mirren, Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman (yet another trip which has bought the Oscar winner and I closer together) and also, the old flick Candyman. Which says it all.


Now I'm not one that really believes in the supernatural and I'm incredibly skeptical about ghosts- no matter how creepy somewhere is, the presence of ghouls is not something that worries me. In fact I'm not even one that really jumps at horror films and was really enjoying the unsettling nature of the place, pretty much unphased by the location and its' history, giggling at its nature and winding Rosie up....

Until I took a photo of an ORB! We were taking pictures of the place and I took two in a row, same conditions as each other, orb presence in one, gone in the other. As someone that enjoys photography (gutted I didn't bring a camera this weekend) I can assure you that it isn't glare from the flash, moisture particles, rain or anything the like


ORB!/ No Orb

EDIT: after looking closer at the no orb photo there's two faint ones in it, possibly indicating more ghosts but more likely indicating that it was some camera thing, chortle.

This is my face after noticing the orb in the pic.
(oh yeah parents, I dyed my hair red for Halloween, surprise!)
It made me laugh but Rosie did not appreciate it. We got talking to a guy that lived there and he said he'd sometimes come back to his room to find furniture moved around... Scooby Dooby Doo, where are you?

Another creepy happening was the theft of my pajama shorts! We went out for food, leaving many valuables, but everything was left untouched, indicating some odd body just wanted my PJ bottoms? We can't work out who it was because there were only two females in our dorm and they seemed nice (and also preoccupied with getting dressed up). I was pretty gutted as they were awesome shorts. Oh well.

Why we keep staying in accommodations that would be fantastic locations for horror stories, I'm not sure but the Southern Gothic reputation definitely has been delivered.

1 comment:

  1. brrr seems pretty darn scary, not that I believe in ghosts and ghouls either! xx

    ReplyDelete