Desperate Ghosts or Desperate Ploy?

Normally, I’m all for laughing off any hotel that claims to have “friendly ghosts” as a scam to draw in tourists, especially here in New Orleans. You can’t walk three feet without bumping into someone telling you their store, their bar, their hotel, their hot dog cart is haunted and the tourists eat it up (though if they’re smart, they won’t eat up that hot dog).

I read an article on the Hotel Monteleone that kicks it up a notch (sorry, Emeril). So, they’ve laid claim to ghosts in the past. Ghostly kids. Ghostly dancers. Ghostly jazz singers (because this is New Orleans, right?). Ghostly clock workers. Ghostly naked Mardi Gras revelers. You got a reason for coming to New Orleans, and they have a ghostly version of it. I’m surprised they don’t say the ghost of Marie Laveau haunts the place.

Well, now they’re saying that the ghosts are getting angry and acting up. Throwing things. Slamming doors. Wailing more? Why? On the one hand, it seems a strange marketing ploy to say, “Hey, you know our friendly ghosts? Well, now they are petulant, borderline crazy.” On the other hand, maybe business is slow and they’re trying to lock down the ghost tourism. I mean, if you fancy yourself brave and say you want to stay in a haunted hotel, stay there and tell your friends back home you stayed in the scary angry ghost one and not the Casper the Friendly Ghost one, right? Maybe draw in more ghost hunters? Take their money. Tell them, “Huh, that’s weird. Nothing happened last night. Normally they go crazy.”

It’d be funny if it turns out the place actually really was haunted now and the ghost was getting violent because people keep wanting it to be cutesy and do tricks like a trained puppy. What could they do? They couldn’t say the place wasn’t haunted because they built a reputation on it, that the scary ghost was all in their head. Same for an exorcism, because then they’d have to be like, “Well, no more ghosts here at all, everyone! Find a different haunted hotel!”

What do you think? Have they gone too far with their marketing or do you think maybe they actually finally have a real ghost and don’t know what to do about it?

Stay strange!

-Steve