This week, we have a story from a fan who had an interesting experience in New Orleans back in July of 2013.
In 2013, my mother and I visited New Orleans. It was July 5th and boy was it hot! The kind of thick, suffocating Southern heat that makes the air feel like a damp shroud. We had spent the morning on the streetcar, watching the Garden District blur past, before hopping off near the French Quarter to find some shade and a meal.
The block looked ordinary enough: a men’s clothier, a souvenir shop, and tucked between them, a narrow restaurant with a chalkboard sign out front advertising a lunch special of shrimp and grits. It was exactly 2:00 p.m.
As we stepped into the dim interior, the transition from the blinding sun to the shadows was jarring. Before my eyes could even adjust, a woman’s voice sliced through the quiet.
“We’re closed!” she shrieked at us. It wasn’t a polite greeting; it was a warning, sharp and jagged with unearned anger.
We froze. At that moment, a man brushed past us toward the exit. He looked perfectly normal, dressed for the heat, carrying the faint, savory scent of country cooking. He gave us a sympathetic, breezy smile.
“Food’s good,” he whispered as he stepped out into the sun. “Real good.”
We apologized to the invisible woman in the shadows and retreated, promising to return the next day before the clock struck two. We walked away feeling unsettled. It was a tourist city in the middle of a holiday week; why would a bustling cafe slam its doors shut at mid-afternoon?
The next day, the heat was even worse. We returned to that same stretch of sidewalk, stomachs growling for the meal we’d promised ourselves. We found the men’s clothing store. We found the souvenir shop.
But between them, there was nothing.
No doorway. No chalkboard. No narrow windows looking into a dim dining room. Where the restaurant had stood just 24 hours earlier, there was only a seamless, soot-stained brick wall that looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in a century.
We stood there in the sweltering heat, mouths agape, the silence between us heavy and cold. I felt a rhythmic pulsing in my ears, a physical rejection of what my eyes were seeing. My skin crawled with a sudden, violent chill that the Louisiana sun couldn’t touch.
Later that week, back in the safety of a hotel room, I caught a local program on the city’s darker history. The narrator, voice low and gravelly, spoke of “The Hunger Gaps”—pockets of time where the city’s violent past bleeds into the present. He claimed that in New Orleans, the dead don’t just haunt houses; they keep their appointments. They shop, they walk, and they eat.
I think about that man’s smile—the one who told us the food was good. I wonder now whose life he was tasting, and I wonder why that woman screamed at us to stay out. Maybe she wasn’t being rude. Maybe she was making sure we didn’t end up on the menu.
Remember if you’ve had a paranormal encounter like this and want to send it in, you can send it through our Google form. You can also email us at spookyappalachia@gmail.com
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