HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
French Quarter Hotel on the Site of an 1794 Boys' School
919 Royal St, New Orleans, LA 70116
Research updated October 2026
Age
Minimum check-in age: 21.
Cost
$$$
Mid- to upper-mid French Quarter hotel rates. Minimum check-in age is 21.
Access
Limited Access
Historic French Quarter building with stairs and courtyard; partial accessibility on the ground floor
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1890 · 1794 Great New Orleans Fire site · Former U.S. Federal Courthouse · Andrew Jackson contempt-of-court episode
The land at 919 Royal Street in New Orleans's French Quarter has a layered institutional history. In 1792 the Spanish Colonial government opened a boys' boarding school and orphanage on the site for boys who had lost their parents to yellow fever. The school was destroyed in the Great New Orleans Fire of 1794 — one of two catastrophic eighteenth-century fires that reshaped the French Quarter — and five boys died in the fire after becoming trapped by falling structural elements.
Following the fire a U.S. Federal Courthouse was built on the site and operated through the nineteenth century. During the courthouse era General Andrew Jackson was held in contempt of court and charged with obstruction of justice in the building, an episode that supplies the modern hotel's name. The courthouse was demolished in the late nineteenth century and the current building was erected in 1890.
The building has been operated as the Andrew Jackson Hotel for decades and is part of the French Quarter's continuous-stock of late-Victorian commercial-residential architecture. Today it operates as a boutique hotel with a minimum check-in age of 21 and is a regular stop on New Orleans ghost-tour routes.
Sources
The Andrew Jackson Hotel's haunted reputation in French Quarter ghost-tour writing centers on the children of the 1794 fire. Guest accounts collected by US Ghost Adventures, Ghost City Tours, and French Quarter Phantoms describe children's laughter and playful sounds in the courtyard at night, light pranks during sleep, and a young figure sometimes called Armand who is described waking guests with laughter or pushing them out of bed.
A secondary figure described in tour-route retellings is a general apparition resembling Andrew Jackson, attached to the building's name and its courthouse-era contempt-of-court episode rather than to any documented death on the property.
These accounts circulate in the New Orleans ghost-tour industry rather than in named-investigator publications. The hotel's marketing openly references its haunted reputation and the children's-school history as part of the property's identity.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Book a room at the French Quarter hotel at 919 Royal Street; the minimum check-in age is 21. The site is associated with the 1794 fire that destroyed the Spanish Colonial-era boys' school and orphanage that previously stood here.
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