Interview with Trevor Aubin about NOLA's haunted history

Interview with Trevor Aubin about NOLA's haunted history

Collin Breaux
4/24/12
Hist. 2300
Oral history interview transcription
Interview with Trevor Aubin
Tour guide for French Quarter Phantoms/Bartender at Flanagan’s Pub

Collin Breaux: So what’s your name and how long have you been doing this?
Trevor Aubin: My name’s Trevor Aubin. I’ve been a tour guide here in New Orleans for just over a year.
CB: Why do you think New Orleans is such a hot spot for hauntings?
TA: Part of is just the sheer density of history here, the French Quarter being 8 blocks by 13 blocks, in 5 more years it’s our tricentennial, that’s 300 years of history in a 8 block by 13 block area. You don’t find that kind of historical density in other places in this country. So just that alone is part of it. Also, I think part of it is being a New Orelenian. You go to other parts of the country, people ask you where you’re from. “Oh, I’m a New Orlenian.” Nobody says I’m from New Orleans; “I’m a New Orlenian.” People here, there’s a sense of ownership, of living in the city, there’s a sense of more than just living there, there’s a sense of I’m a part of it and it’s a part of me, of investment in it. So nobody is just kind of nonchalant. You either love it or you hate it, there’s no in-between. And I think that energy feeds into it and makes a pretty good blank canvas for things to get planted on it. So that’s why there’s residual hauntings, hauntings that occur, almost a perfect storm kind of situation. That’s my personal opinion. The problem with any of this is...it’s not a science. Nobody’s doing research into it in a scientific kind of way. There’s no paranormal investigators. You can’t go to some place for 48 hours and say, “We’re going to prove this.” That’s just not scientific. You need to stake that place out for 5 years, get everything that happened there. Check everything twice. Discount everything that’s from natural occurrences and then go back to the anomalies and go ok, was this repeatable? Did it happen in a certain spot? What was the situation around it? But nobody as a scientist is going to risk their credibility to do this. You’d risk your job, man. So that’s kind of part of it. I kind of term myself to be a believing skeptic. I know what I’ve witnessed through my life. Well, what’s the causes of it? I’ve heard everything from the supernatural to God’s will down to crazy quasi-physics. (sarcastic professor voice) Oh it’s quantum physics and it’s this interaction. (regular voice) Who knows? All I know is that it does happen. I’ve lived here too long and every other place I’ve lived, I’ve been around it my entire life. It’s just part of my fascination for it.
CB: What’s sort of the earliest documentation of the earliest haunting in New Orleans?
TA: Mmmm. (inhales cigarette) Man…
CB: That you know of?
TA: That’s a really good question.
CB: Does it stretch back to the 1800s? ‘Cause in my history class I’ve been learning…
TA: It would be before the 1800s and a lot of the things that happened here in the early days of the French Quarter. That’s a really good question, ‘cause I don’t want to tell you, I don’t know to be absolutely accurate. I know there’s the witch of the opera house over on the corner of St. Peter and Royal, and that goes back to the opera house days, when the opera house was on Bourbon. I believe that was the late 1700s. I can’t give you a date on that, ‘cause that’s not a story. With our company we try to only do stories we can give historical cooperation behind. I don’t like to tell somebody, “Oh, this is definitely...” when I’m not sure the details myself. But, like I said, if you go and look up Dwyer’s ghost hunting guide in New Orleans, he lists most of the major cities for every area of the city. What I did for my tour was I bought that book, flipped through the stories that I automatically knew were B.S., I heard that for years, and knew that was not true. I know the history of the town. That’s obviously not factual. Then there were stories that, even if something happened, it’s not a haunting, there’s something that would go down in urban myth, urban legend, that people would believe that it’s haunted. What happened there to start that haunting? And honestly, that’s my major interest in this.
CB: How much of the ghost lore is fact or fiction, and why do things snowball?
TA: Well, I think it’s just part of being a human being. We always, it’s how human beings describe the world. We tell stories to each other. Ever since somebody figured out how to build a fire, someone sat around it and went, “How was your day?” “Aw man, I had the craziest day. A saber-toothed tiger chased me for an hour. Dude it was epic.” We’ve always done that. It’s just part of being a human being. And as far as it goes, there’s history, there’s folklore, there’s urban myth, and then there’s just fiction. And usually though, in the first three, there is something that happened that is the kernel of fact. Now, as time goes on, we like to exaggerate. We like to have entertainment, we like to build stuff up. Well, this happened, in history, to folklore going into urban myth. And then people build on top of it.
CB: You were talking about the Lalaurie house (during the tour) and I was doing a little bit of research. One historical document said that the newspapers already had a vendetta against her…
TA: Yeah, the New Orleans Bee was considered to be yellow rag journalism, kind of the National Enquirer for New Orleans. It was really considered…
CB: (laughing) That’s kind of low..
TA: Well human beings have always been human beings. And so-and-so showed up at the party in this year’s fashion and did this. The editor of that newspaper or one of the editors paid court to Dauphine. She considered him to be beneath her. You’re just a journalist, you don’t have money, you’re a writer.
CB: I’m a writer. (editor’s note: Well, I am.)
TA: From that day forward, whenever he could snipe at her in a social article, he did. When this happened in the Lalaurie mansion, he immediately jumped on it. And that’s where the more grandiose stories of the Lalauire mansion came out. He wrote a story that they pulled up the floorboards and found the decomposing bodies of dead slaves shoved into the floorboards. Well, that house is handcut marble. You didn’t gouge that up and put a body in it. That’s silly. And also, New Orleans in the summertime. You got a decomposing body in your house and you’re throwing parties on regular basis? People are gonna notice. River’s two blocks away. And that part of the Quarter, that was literally the suburbs at the time. There weren’t any of these buildings in between (referring to the current architecture around us).