Dishing Up Love

“Here’s some awesome NOLA lore for you. After all, this is a haunted tour, right? In that scene, Anne Rice was super accurate in her portrayal of how funerals were done down here. It was pure chaos, everyone going in different directions, no one taking the same route. It probably looked strange if you were paying close attention to this, because nowadays, we have a funeral procession. Everyone heads to the graveyard in an organized line, flashers on, even police escorted. We’ve grown up showing respect for the dead by pulling over to the side of the road when we see a procession coming from the opposite direction. Back then though, they purposely mixed it up. They never went straight from the funeral to the graveyard for a very specific purpose.” He lowers his voice and we all lean in. “It was known as ‘spirit confusion’ and it was done so the evil spirits couldn’t follow you into the cemetery.”

“Ahhh,” a couple people in our group, including me, murmur, and Erin smiles up at me, seeming to enjoy my enthusiasm for gaining cool knowledge.

We make our way down the street, stopping momentarily for Ronnie to point up at a random building. “If you look up, do you see those upward-facing spikes?” I tilt my head back and squint to see several metal spikes circling each of the poles Erin gave me the lesson about on the way to her house before we recorded the cooking part of the show. “We call those Romeo spikes. You could always tell which homes had residents with daughters, because they’d have these spikes.” A few of the tourists chuckle, but I don’t get it. Luckily, Ronnie explains further. “If the young Romeos tried to climb the poles to Juliet’s room, they were soon met with these very painfully sharp spikes. And if they did make it past them, they returned down the pole as Juliets themselves.”

It dawns on me what he means then, and I burst out laughing.

I shake my head, finishing off my drink, and I see Erin is done with hers as well. As we continue walking, I toss both of our empty cups into a trashcan. When our hands brush, having to walk so closely on the narrow sidewalk, I take the opportunity to casually slip my fingers through hers, lacing them together. I purposely don’t look down at her to gauge her reaction, choosing to not make a big deal about it as I glance up, noting more of the Romeo spikes on various buildings we pass by. I can feel her eyes on me, but fighting my urge to lock gazes with her, I feel her limp fingers finally tighten around mine, and something inside me eases, an anxiousness I didn’t even realize I had before, suddenly gone.

We continue to hold hands even as we come to our next stop, and don’t let go throughout Ronnie’s next fascinating yet tragic tale.

“Here’s where our tour takes a darker turn. I’ve told you a fun vampire story, some cool architectural history, and a pretty humorous tidbit about spikes along the galleries. But the farther along we get in the tour, the more obvious the reasons why our little town is known as one of the haunted places on earth will become. If you look across the street, this boutique hotel, now known as the Andrew Jackson, used to be a private boarding school for boys. And yet another fire broke out here, killing everyone inside, including the children. But don’t worry, the boys still live there.”

There’s collective nervous laughter from the group, but more importantly, I note Erin wrapping her free hand around my bicep as she steps closer to me. I look down to see she’s not part of the uncomfortable chuckles. She has a distinctively sad look on her face I want to ask her about, but Ronnie starts up his story once more.

“People, for decades, have reported the sounds of children laughing, playing, running up and down the halls. But when they open their door to tell them to quiet down, to go back to the room they surely share with their parents while visiting the city, there’s no one there. Also, for a lot of years, this was an adults-only hotel, so the sound of kids playing out in the courtyard was especially ominous.”

I shiver a bit, a reel of every creepy movie starring ghost children playing through my mind, freaking me out a little. And I damn near scream like a little bitch when Erin uses the hand previously wrapped around my bicep to tickle up my side.

“Woman,” I growl after jumping almost a foot away from her but never letting go of her hand. I use our connection to pull her tight against me. “You’ll pay for that, sugar.”