Historic Inn Comes With Ghosts: Unreal Estate

NEW ORLEANS (TheStreet) -- For $3.8 million, you could own a historic inn on New Orleans's famed Bourbon Street with 14 rooms and a 10-car parking lot. It even comes with some long-term "guests," according to local lore.

The possibly haunted Lafitte Guest House has hit the market just in time for Halloween. Located in the French Quarter, the nation's second-oldest historic preservation district, the stone mansion features wrought iron balconies, a garden and a patio that accommodates 50 people.

The mansion was built around 1848 and designed by architect Robert Seaton, who also created the New Orleans Opera House. He was hired for the project by original owner Paul Gleiss, a gas company debt collector whose family fortune allowed him to pay the then unheard-of price of $12,000.

The patio at the Lafitte Guest House accommodates 50 people.

For most of its existence, the hotel served as a single-family residence, a three-story structure with an attached wing that once housed slaves. The land itself was once owned by the King of Spain and bequeathed in the 1800s to a hospital that later burned to the ground.

According to numerous Web sites, including Haunted New Orleans Tours, the Lafitte is just one of many hotels on the bayou that are popular among the spirit world. Guests who stay in Room 21 have long reported an unexpected roommate.

Legend has it that a local woman had two of her children die there, one succumbed to smallpox and the other hung herself. The mother, eternally distraught, found it impossible to leave the premises, even after death.