The streets are full of costumed tourists who have started to celebrate a little early. Sasha adjusts her long, flowing black dress. Later tonight she will be dancing her heart out at the vampire’s ball, but for now, she is content to tour the city, and considering the occasion, she decides to start at the old cemetery.

In the heart of New Orleans lies the crypt filled graveyards called, ‘the City of the Dead.’ Stone pillars rear up menacingly against the dusky sky. In bright daylight it was an eerie and impressive place, but now, as night falls it begins to seem like the stuff of horror tales.

The guide turns to Sasha and with deadly seriousness he tells her that they have to leave. The specters will grow restless in their graves and rise out of their stony tombs to haunt the living. The man pauses at a chalky tomb, the epitaph reads, “Here lays a woman who froze to death to prove her love.” Legend claims that a poor young woman had fallen in love with a rich and well bred man.

They soon became involved but the noble man thought she was beneath him so he refused to marry her. The poor girl vowed to prove that she was not beneath him and that she was worthy of his love.

She climbed up the steep stairs to the roof, all alone, and held her arms open to the wind. A fierce wind whipped up but she ignored it. A terrible storm rolled in and she was pelted with shards of icy and heavy rain but still she would not move. If she survived the storm, she thought, her noble love would be so impressed that he would propose at last.

Meanwhile in the warmth of his home, the noble dismissed her threat as empty silliness. In the morning he regretted their argument and tried to find her. His heart pounded when he remembered her silly vow, and he raced up her stairs. She lay on the roof, soaking wet and deathly pale with her hand outstretched as if to take his hand. The man fell to his knees and wept, knowing that his vanity had killed her.

And now the legend claims that as soon as the weather begins to turn, she rises from her grave and stalks through the empty streets, forever trying to prove her love. Sasha doesn’t believe in ghost in the reassuring light of day, but standing in the shadows of the crypts listening to her guide’s cracked, dry voice a little shiver runs down
her arms.

Dusk has fallen on Halloween night. And the French quarter fills with laughter, jazz, colorful costumes, and candy which rains down from garlanded balconies. A sea of costumes and roaring music mingles together, creating an atmosphere of lively joy. And yet, the faces are ghoulish and strange. More than a few devil horns and skeletal faces meet Sasha’s gaze but after the fright she’s had, she welcomes the trick-or-treaters, the glow sticks and the fake Halloween soundtracks.