Old Ursuline Convent
Completed around 1752 and now widely regarded as the oldest surviving building in the Mississippi Valley, the Old Ursuline Convent was raised by French colonial engineers to house the Ursuline nuns who taught and sheltered the young women of the colony. Among the new arrivals were the so-called filles à la cassette, or "casket girls," who carried coffin-shaped trunks for their belongings; their unnatural paleness and the grim shape of their luggage seeded a centuries-old whisper that vampires had been smuggled into New Orleans. Legend holds that after the trunks were found mysteriously empty, the nuns sealed the convent's third-floor dormer shutters with nails blessed by the Pope, and to this day those shutters are the only top-floor ones in the French Quarter kept tightly closed. Paranormal investigators who camped outside in 1978 reported unexplained noises and shadowy figures near the attic windows, and visitors still describe the apparitions of nuns drifting along the original foyer staircase. Historians note the vampire layer is a modern embellishment, but the eerie reputation of the sealed attic endures.
📍 1100 Chartres St, New Orleans, LA 70116, New Orleans, LA · Get directions