BROUSSARD MANSION
Location: New Orleans is the largest city in Louisiana. Located at the confluence of the Mississippi River, it's separated by a number of sections such as Vieux Carre, also known as the French Quarter, and Bayou St. John, the location for the Broussard Mansion at 1326 Leda Street.
Description of Place: The Broussard Mansion is a three-story twenty-two bedroom Italianate mansion, a type of architecture that became popular in New Orleans after the 1788 fire. Composed of brick and stucco, it includes a walled-in courtyard and wrought iron balconies with a steeply pitched roof, side-gabled with several roof dormers. The interior foyer features a closed-over elaborate stairway with French Colonial furnishings. The structure used to include two adjoining wings which were demolished in 1945 along with an additional thirty acres of property which once side St. Louis Cemetery #2, which is also known for hauntings. Since 1945, the property has since been sold and subdivided, enclosing the property with several private homes.
Ghostly Manifestations: For more than eighty years, the Broussard Mansion has been a very minor haunted location. Because of it's history, unkempt appearance and the rich local folklore, it's been assumed that the location was haunted, but no one has every actually reported anything. In a scale of haunted houses, the Broussard Mansion was a Category One reserved for locations as the Belvidere Mansion and Surrency Mansion in Georgia or the Cherry Mansion in Tennessee, haunted houses known in history for being haunted only by reputation to the point that they're nothing more than urban legends. Category Two haunted houses have long and colorful paranormal histories but largely remain unconfirmed by paranormal researchers, such as California's Brookdale Lodge and Hollywood Roosevelt, the Grant Corner Inn in New Mexico, the Buxton Inn in Ohio and Aquia Church in Virginia. Category Three haunted houses are practically on the wish list of every serious paranormal researcher; they're so over-exposed in the media that their ghosts are major celebrities in the paranormal realm. Not every prison can be Alcatraz or Eastern State Penitentiary. Not every haunted hotel measures up to the Queen Mary or the Overlook Hotel. Practically every school boy knows about the ghosts of the Lizzie Borden and Thomas Whaley houses. In October 2010, the Broussard Mansion jumped Category Two and landed in Category Three.
"Is the Broussard Mansion haunted?" Actor Edward Furlong muses for an answer. "Let's just say I would not want to spend the night there."
The Broussard Mansion actually received notoriety through the help of another haunted location, the former Hull Mortuary in Oregon. A Halloween party at the location in 1986 resulted in the deaths of six high school kids from a lethal combination of drugs, alcohol and firearms; the only two survivors claimed that their hostess had become possessed by evil spirits and reanimated the bodies of her slain classmates. While the investigation into the case was brief and cursory, it failed to gain national attention until Hollywood overly-dramatized the witness account into a 1986 movie called "Night of the Demons," which became a cult horror hit and spawned two sequels. Around 2008, the creators of that film thought the film could stand a remake and they soon descended on New Orleans and the Broussard Mansion with a full movie crew and a colorful cast of actors.
"We went with the Old Broussard House because we were not interested in a direct remake." Director Adam Gierasch insists. "The location looked great, it looked haunted, it had the atmosphere we wanted and it more than fit the image of what we wanted. Little did I know that even houses want to get to Hollywood....
"We had electrical problems from the start." He continues. "The house has not seen a decent electrician since Reagan was in office. It took less than a few hours to exchange a few fuses and run extra wires through the back windows of the house, but after that, obstacles and surprises kept popping up that were more... unusual.. to say the least."
The unusual ranged from voices that were not heard at taping but could be heard on playback of scenes. A conversation between three actors in an upstairs bedroom picked up vague extra sounds of people muttering from somewhere in the house. Crew could never determine who was talking or from where. Actress Monica Keena heard whispering behind her as she was waiting on a scene being blocked.
"I thought someone was right behind me." She sort of giggles. "It was like someone was standing trying to whisper in my ear, but my mind was not on it otherwise I would have realized what was being said. It was just a brief distraction, and I'd not have recalled it at all if others had not started sharing stories."
Shooting of the movie lasted over four to five weeks and mostly occurred at night. Electricians, technicians, prop masters and assistants covered practically every corner of the property, but almost every one agreed that that the cellar of the house was the most eerie place to be. Cellars in New Orleans are built above ground, and this one had an old tunnel left over from Prohibition that was worked into the movie. Another trait this cellar had was that it was particularly spooky. Strewn with the forgotten belongings of former tenants, the sounds of someone else lurking in the shadows could be heard. Gierasch at one time thought he heard a gasp and part of a conversation had to be filmed over. In another room, the sound of distant giggling could be heard. In the end, around a quarter of the movie was re-dubbed because of unusual ambient noises on the location.
"Loved the house... hated the ghosts..." Actress Shannon Elizabeth confides. Having also starred in a film based loosely on the old Zorba House, she's not a stranger to the horror movie genre, but it was her first time wearing excessive make-up and doing wirework off the ground. Playing the possessed Angela Franklin (renamed Angela Feld for reasons of legality), she looks ghoulishly sexy in white make-up and a tight form-fitting black dress, sort of like "the wild little sister of Elvira, the Mistress of the Dark." In one seen, she's supposed to stand out of screen and appear out of no where, but she missed her cue because she was distracted.
"I thought I saw a crew member on the stairs to the top floor." She confides. "I'm there in full body make-up listening for my mark, and just over my shoulder, I see this figure looking at me. It only took a second, but it could have been ten minutes, because in a split second I see a man in period dress, slicked back hair, narrow thin mustache, a dark suit and tie, holding a glass of wine or sherry, and he's looking at me as if he's checking me out. I notice him, look over and he's not there, but that image is in my head. How does that happen?"
She's not the only person to see things. A prop man was terrified by a stiff human figure racing through the ballroom area. The room was used to hold props, costumes and a make-up area among other things. According to Gierasch, the prop man had stepped into the room to fetch a replacement musket specially designed to fire harmless blanks, but the second he entered the room, he must have surprised something because he came rushing out describing "a thin dark female specter that launched itself from one side of the room to the other." It didn't seem to walk or glide with a motion; it just passed quickly out of the room as if it were an unposed figure sprung at moderate speed along an unseen track.
In addition to other witnesses, both Monica Keena and actor Michael Copon observed strange shadows. During a break in a scene to change and alter the scenery, they noticed the scenery changing itself. They noticed a shadow gliding down the corridor outside a room moving toward the stairway and heading down to the first floor. The staircase was busy with assistants and camera men going up and down and yet this unaffected dark shape passes down and below it vanishes. They just look each other to confirm they both saw it and tape the scene.
Amelia Kinkade from the original movie has a cameo as a scheming book-keeper who defrauds her hostess played by Miss Elizabeth. Her scene involves about a hundred and fifty local teenagers in a Halloween costume party. During the taping of this scene, a few ghostly extras popped in who were not planned. There is one deleted scene where Eddie Furlong heads deeper into the house to avoid someone, and after passing a couple making out, there is the image of what looks like a woman standing in profile and staring ahead who was not known to be there. She appears for all of three seconds and her debut is over, yet, when Monica passes the same extras, the mystery woman is not there. Amelia has a similar situation. As she is shooting her scene out front, she looks up to notice a dark figure on the exterior balcony, says her lines and looks back. The person is gone.
Another cameo from the 1986 movie is actor William Gallo, who plays a police officer. When he enters followed by officers, one can see a distant man to the background in prominent dress standing in a room behind him. He looks part of the scene except he's older with a slight mustache and slicked black hair, maybe early thirties, holding a brandy glass to his lips and noticing Gallo enter, but in the constant revolving camera shot, the camera completes its journey to look into the room again behind Gallo and this extra is not there. Actress Cathy Podewell, another cameo from the original movie, also described seeing this figure as she was sitting outside and reading the script.
Since the movie wrapped, the caretakers and crew employed by the City of New Orleans have noticed a definite increase in activity. Before the movie, they were used to the creaks and groans of the aging structure as well as the odd shadows, but now they have to get used to a new intensity in the phenomenon. One week after the movie crew left, they were on site cleaning and manicuring the structure, but as they were wrapping up and gathering in the foyer to depart, an upstairs door suddenly slammed shut. It was a crew of seven employees present and everyone was accounted, but no one felt daring enough to venture back upstairs to check out the noise.
Today, the house is owned as an assembly hall by the New Orleans Men's Club and often rented out for private parties and as temporary quarters for visiting celebrities and politicians to New Orleans. Actors such as Hugh Jackman, Johnny Depp and Robert Downey Jr. have been invited to stay as guests here without knowing about the reputation of the house. In October 2009, actor Jake Ryan was in New Orleans filming a movie and sharing the house with several friends. Following his TV success in the syndicated horror comedy, "Zombie High," Jake was asked on a talk show if he believed in ghosts, and he responded by claiming he once saw a female phantom. The story continues that the apparition was discovered standing in moonlight on the grounds outside his bedroom window after midnight. Ryan describes her as as "very attractive, very "hot" and yet, not exactly right," adding that she seemed very ethereal and overcome by a trance as of she were overcome by a visage in the distance. Jake saw her like this for what seemed to be just a few minutes, but she must have suddenly became aware of Jake because she slowly turned up her head to him and looked up to him on the second floor. Her eyes were completely black.
Although Jake has placed this incident as happening in both Ireland and England, his entourage confirms it actually occurred at New Orleans' Broussard Mansion.
History: The Broussard Mansion was built sometime around 1790 by Louis Antoine De Broussard, a poor nobleman who lost his French title during the French Revolution, but who made his fortune in New Orleans at the turn of the Nineteenth Century in shipping and property. His descendants reportedly played hosts with all the local characters of the time including General Andrew Jackson, Jean Lafitte and Marie LaVeau. The house was acquired by the Orleans Parish in 1927 and acquired by the local men's club in 1986.
Identity of Ghosts: The last Broussard to live in the house was Richard Broussard in 1925. He is reported to have used the house to smuggle illicit liquor through a tunnel from his neighbor's house, but after his death, his wife, Evangeline, inherited the house from him. Lonely and alone in the house but for the servants, she was very much in love with Henri Louis Devereaux, the scion of another wealthy Orleans family. According to legend, Evangeline acquired a voodoo spell from one of her servants to make Devereaux fall in love with her, but he must have still rejected her because Evangeline took her life by hanging herself from the front of the house. The force of her fall was so powerful that her head was ripped from her body by her noose; her body was found on the front steps, her head a few feet away from her. Devereaux and her other guests that night were never seen again, apparently secreting themselves away to avoid scandal. Rumors over the years claim Evangeline murdered her guests and had her servants clean and dispose of the remains, but this tale is unconfirmed. Supposedly, Broussard Mansion is haunted by Evangeline keeping her guests trapped in the house over her broken heart or perhaps over loneliness.
Source/Comments: Night of the Demons (2010) - Activity and phenomenon loosely based on the La Laurie Mansion in New Orleans, Louisiana, Oak Alley Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana and the Olson House in Savannah, Georgia.
Jake Ryan from "Hannah Montana" (2005-20010)