Est. 1849 · 1853 New Orleans Yellow Fever Epidemic · Creole Townhouse Architecture · French Quarter History
The Creole townhouse at 626 St. Philip Street in the French Quarter dates to 1849. During the summer of 1853, when a yellow fever epidemic killed nearly 10,000 New Orleanians in roughly three to four weeks — about one-fifth of the population that had remained in the city — the address served as a makeshift morgue. Many private residences and commercial buildings across the French Quarter opened their doors to hold the rising number of dead during the epidemic's worst weeks.
Regional ghost-tour writing describes the building as the location of one of the city's first integrated mortuaries, accepting the bodies of crime victims, disease victims, and others when the formal civic morgue infrastructure was overwhelmed. The 1853 epidemic is documented in the Yellow Fever Sanitary Commission Report of 1853, held by the Historic New Orleans Collection.
The building later opened in the twenty-first century as the Morgue Bar and Lounge, a themed cocktail bar named for the address's nineteenth-century role and known for its house cocktail, the Embalming Fluid. The bar is referenced in past tense in regional travel writing, suggesting it is no longer in operation under that name at this writing.
Sources
- https://ghostcitytours.com/new-orleans/haunted-new-orleans/haunted-morgue/
- https://sites.google.com/site/lcrpnola/yellowfever1853_page1
- https://hnoc.org/research-collections/collection-highlights/sanitary-commission-report-1853
Borrowed personal items (women's restroom)Disembodied voices in bar area
Regional ghost-tour writing on 626 St. Philip Street centers on its role as a makeshift morgue during the 1853 yellow fever epidemic. The best-known figure in the tradition is the mortician's daughter, described as a woman who is said to have stolen jewelry from bodies stored at the address and who continues, in retellings, to borrow items from women using the building's restroom — which during the morgue era was the body-storage space.
When the building operated as the Morgue Bar and Lounge, retellings describe paranormal activity in the main bar area and especially in the restroom area. The bar's house cocktail, the Embalming Fluid, played on the building's nineteenth-century role.
These accounts circulate in French Quarter ghost-tour writing rather than in named-investigator publications. The 1853 epidemic itself is well-documented in city and state archives.
Notable Entities
The mortician's daughter
Media Appearances
- Ghost City Tours — The Haunted Morgue New Orleans
- Theresa's Haunted History of the Tri-State coverage
