Old Absinthe House

One of the oldest bars in America, built around 1806 and serving as a landmark since. Pirates, politicians, and poets have patronized this establishment, and its walls are covered with business cards from visitors spanning two centuries.

The Old Absinthe House at 240 Bourbon Street is among the oldest bars in New Orleans, with a history stretching back to 1752 when the original structure served as a gathering place in the French Quarter. That building was destroyed in the Great Friday Fire of 1788, a conflagration that ravaged much of the city within hours. The current structure was reconstructed in 1806 by two Spanish merchants, Pedro Front and Francisco Juncadelia, who operated a grocery store specializing in imported wines and tobacco for forty years. In 1846, Aleix's Coffee House took over the site, and by 1874 it was renamed The Absinthe Room when mixologist Cayetano Ferrer created the establishment's signature drink, the Absinthe House Frappe, a concoction of absinthe and sugar water that became wildly popular and earned the bar its enduring identity. During Prohibition, the owners secretly relocated the bar's operations and its famous copper-topped bar to a hidden location a few blocks down Bourbon Street. It was not until 2004, after approximately sixty years and three million dollars in renovation, that the copper bar and original furnishings were returned to the restored building on Bourbon.

The bar's most famous legend involves a meeting on its second floor between General Andrew Jackson and the pirate Jean Lafitte during the War of 1812. According to the story, Jackson agreed to release Lafitte's imprisoned pirates and grant full pardons to anyone who would fight in the defense of New Orleans. Lafitte's crew provided crucial artillery expertise at the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815, where British forces suffered approximately two thousand casualties compared to only sixty American losses. Over the centuries, the establishment has drawn a remarkable roster of visitors including Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, P.T. Barnum, Mark Twain, Robert E. Lee, Franklin Roosevelt, Frank Sinatra, and Liza Minnelli.

The ghosts of some of these legendary figures reportedly never left. The most prominent spirit is that of Jean Lafitte himself, who is said to throw occasional spectral parties on the second floor where he once negotiated with Jackson. Staff and visitors report the sounds of raucous laughter and beer mugs and glasses falling over, as though the pirate and his crew are still celebrating their exploits. Lafitte's apparition has been spotted wearing his signature pirate hat, and legends persist of secret underground tunnels linking the tavern to Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop further down Bourbon Street, though no physical evidence of these passages has been found.

The spirit of Marie Laveau, the legendary Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, is frequently sighted on the second floor, gazing out the windows at the street below. The ghost of Andrew Jackson and that of Civil War-era General Benjamin Butler have also been reported by visitors and employees. A woman in a long white dress is seen ascending and descending the staircases, and a child's spirit has been observed playing tricks on the third floor. Doors open without cause, bottles and chairs move about the bar on their own, and mysterious whispers reach the ears of customers when no one is nearby. Sudden drops in temperature sweep through the building without explanation. The Old Absinthe House wears its haunted reputation as comfortably as its two-hundred-year-old walls, a place where the living come to drink and the dead apparently do the same.