Spirits of New Orleans. Kala Ambrose
their relationship. She was from a family of higher standing and he was not French. Undeterred, the young lovers had continued to meet and had been securing funds to elope. The young woman had reached out to an uncle and aunt whom she had thought were sympathetic to her cause, as her uncle had married a woman who was not of the same social class. Trusting them, she had shared her plans about eloping. To her great surprise, her uncle was against the idea. He told her that while he had married his love, he also had the means to raise his wife up in social standing; as a woman, she would never be able to raise the social standing of her young lover and would surely be disowned and disinherited by her family should she proceed further with her plans.
The young woman left her uncle’s home angry, but with the belief that he would keep her secret safe. This proved to be an error in judgment on her part. After she left, her uncle’s wife went to her parents and betrayed her secret to them, hoping to raise her own standing within the family by delivering this news. The young woman’s father then devised a plan to stop this engagement at once and used his considerable resources to have the young man arrested on what were false pretenses.
She pleaded with her father day and night to have the young man released. She swore that if he did, she would never see him again, wishing only for his freedom. She would give up her desire to marry him if only her father would grant her this one wish. She offered to go to a convent or marry any man of her father’s choosing. However, her father refused to relent, and the young man stayed in jail. About a month later, she learned through sources that her lover had died in jail. It was unclear what had occurred. Some said it was natural causes; others said he had contracted a terrible fever and died of some disease, and others claimed he had tried to escape and was killed by guards.
She did not know which story was true, but she suspected that her father had something to do with her lover’s death since she had not given up her daily vigil of pleading with him to release him from jail. Through death, her father had complied with her wish of setting her lover free, but not in the way she had intended. She never knew what truly happened, as there was no burial announcement that she could find and no one could tell her what happened to his body. She continued to come to this area night after night, hoping that he had escaped and would find her at St. Louis Cathedral. This never came to pass, and she decided the only way to find him again would be to join him in the afterlife.
As she looked up at me with tears streaming down her face, I noticed that her eyes were glazed over and that her arms were wrapped tightly around her waist. She was experiencing severe abdominal pain from having taken some form of poison, which was working its way through her body. Her sobbing was from both physical and emotional pain, as she was experiencing what she remembered at the end of her life. Even now in her ghostly form, she still clung to this pain in the afterlife. I spoke softly to her and asked why she was here in the alley instead of in front of St. Louis Cathedral, where she had arranged to meet her young man. She told me that she could not stand near the front door of the cathedral because taking her own life was a sin.
As gently as I could, I explained to her that she did not have to remain here in pain and grief. She could move on to the other side and find her lover waiting for her there. She told me that only bad things waited for her on the other side because of what she had done, and she remained here hoping he would find her. I told her that she had been waiting long enough and that if she could move on, she would find him there on the other side. She replied that she had only been waiting for a short while, and she was sure he would find her soon.
This is often the case with ghosts; they are truly unaware of how much time has passed since their death. She had no idea of how many years had gone by while she remained in this half-life world of grief and despair. When I explained to her that she had been waiting for a very long time, she swore at me and said she did not believe me. I asked her then to look at me, to really look closely at me, and look at my clothing to see that I was speaking to her from another time. She slowly placed her gaze on me and swore in shock, seeing that I was a woman wearing pants. Gaining her trust and piqued interest, I invited her to look around at the shops, the lights, and the street to see how things had changed over time. The realization began to wash over her, and she broke free from her spell of grief in frozen time. What happened next is something that makes me weep with joy every time I think of it and as I write it here today.
As she stared in amazement of what I was showing her, a figure in the distance approached us slowly. The movement caught my eye, and as I turned my gaze to see who was approaching us, the young woman noticed I had stopped communicating with her and also turned to see what I was looking at in the alley.
The figure grew closer, and with a gasp, the young woman softly asked, “Me’re?” The figure, now standing in front of us, smiled and held out her arms to her daughter. The young woman, still reeling from anger, shock, and grief, paused for a moment and then fell into her mother’s loving arms. Embracing her daughter, the mother looked over at me and sent me an energetic impulse, which I can only describe as a wave of gratitude. The young woman was crying again, this time in the safety of her mother’s arms, and the mother began to cry in relief, as only a mother can understand her eternal love for her child. At this point, I began to cry. As an empath, I felt the emotional intensity of this experience, as well as an understanding as a mother and a daughter myself.
Pulling her child away gently from her arms, she spoke lovingly to her daughter and said, “It’s time to go home.” The daughter looked at her in fear and asked if she truly could go home with her mother. Her mother—a beautiful, strong, and regal woman—wiped away her child’s tears, tucked the tendrils of loose hair behind her daughter’s ears, and told her indeed, she was sure that she could come home. Taking her daughter’s hand, the two set off down the alley and soon disappeared from my sight into a beautiful field of white light.
A mother’s love is eternal and knows no bounds; not even death and traveling through the spiritual planes can stop her for coming to rescue her child. My feeling about the situation was that the mother had tried many times before to reach out to her child over the years, but in the state of overwhelming grief that the young girl had stayed in, she was hidden in a dark gray plane of existence that made her difficult to locate by others in spirit. When they did locate her, it would be hard to communicate with her in such a state of grief and pain.
I had no clue where the young girl had actually died, or if her body had ever been found. She indicated that she had not passed on here in the alley and explained to me that she traveled here each night in the hopes of finding her lover. My best assumption in experiencing other cases like this is that if the young girl had been buried in the family vault, her mother would have been able to reach her there at some time. So it’s likely that the girl went out into the wilderness after taking the poison and died alone. This cannot be confirmed, though, as it is also possible that the young girl had been found and was buried elsewhere off of consecrated ground, as church doctrines did not allow for suicides to be buried on holy grounds. During my time with the young girl, I did not think that a discussion of this sort would best serve her in the brief time that I had to spend with her. Even if the mother had visited the grave that was located elsewhere, it is likely that the young girl would have hidden from her in the shame of the circumstances regarding her death.
In her moment of clarity when we spoke and she realized that time had indeed passed by for longer than she had imagined, her energy lifted from the grief, making her spirit easier to locate by her mother, whom I believed had long been searching for her daughter each night.
It’s unknown at this time if the young woman has been reunited with her long-lost love in the afterlife. I hope to bump into them one day when I’m on the other side, and if I do, I plan to treat them to a café au lait and some beignets together, as the Café du Monde is so delightful that there surely must be one open 24 hours a day in the heavens.
I was weary after this experience and needed to ground back down to the earth plane again and replenish my energy, so there were no more ghostly explorations on this night. Pirates Alley, though, is very supernaturally active. I highly recommend that paranormal researchers visit it, especially for EVP recordings,