Old Ursuline Convent
Completed around 1752 and regarded as the oldest surviving building in the Mississippi Valley, the Old Ursuline Convent housed the nuns who taught New Orleans' young women. Among the arrivals were the filles à la cassette, or "casket girls," whose coffin-shaped trunks and unnatural paleness seeded a centuries-old whisper that vampires had been smuggled into the city.
Legend holds that after the trunks were found empty, the nuns sealed the third-floor dormer shutters with nails blessed by the Pope, and those shutters remain the only top-floor ones in the French Quarter kept closed. Investigators camped outside in 1978 reported unexplained noises and shadowy figures near the attic, and visitors still glimpse apparitions of nuns on the foyer staircase.
Historians call the vampire layer a modern embellishment, but the sealed attic's eerie reputation endures.
📍 1100 Chartres St, New Orleans, LA 70116, New Orleans, LA · Get directions