Things to Do in Slidell

The vibrant mural stretching across the side of National Art & Hobby’s building serves as a symbol of the creativity-fueling items held inside. The shop’s cozy interior is packed with shelves of fine art materials, craft supplies, and jewelry-making equipment, as well as an extensive collection of glitter, sequins, rhinestones, and feathers often used by local Mardi Gras Indians to decorate their ornate costumes. Owner Nat Ward and a friendly staff stand by to answer customers' questions and shed artistic advice, from product suggestions to thoughts on which nontoxic paste is the tastiest.

For the last 20 years, satanic cults, monsters, and the undead have been congregating at The House of Shock to perform unspeakable horrors in the name of Halloween. Envisioned by a crack team of fright experts, including Pantera frontman Phil Anselmo, this seasonal haunt has been featured in the Travel Channel's Halloween's Most Extreme, Rolling Stone, Maxim, and Top Haunts magazine's list of the Top 13 Haunts nationwide. The house's exhibits are so scary that they've caused some extreme reactions. Allegedly, one patron's heart stopped beating. After she was resuscitated and rushed to the hospital, it was determined she had technically been dead for a short period.

As a live metal band strikes its first ominous chords, the fright fest kicks off with a nightly horror show of pyrotechnics, death metal, live stunts, and masochists. Adrenaline levels soar as courageous guests tiptoe through the coffins, ornate gravestones, and crumbling mausoleums of an ancient graveyard. The house's professional actors don't just slink by waving chainsaws and body parts—they tear apart bodies and scare the dickens out of guests who brave the interactive horrors of a funeral parlor, a morgue, and a butcher shop's dreadfully rotten cuts of beef. The adventure reaches terrifying new heights in a controversial satanic church, where flickering candles and hellfire cast eerie shadows on demonic worshipers and their torture victims. The onsite Hell's Kitchen churns out thematic eats and adult beverages to help frightened guests regain their senses before they revert to a mental world where the only conflict is over which Teletubby wore it best.

Beauregard-Keyes House, with a white-columned tuscan portico, was originally built in 1826 on land sold by the Old Ursuline Convent and rises dramatically above two grand stone staircases. Within the restored Victorian interior, period furniture, personal effects, and other ephemera pay tribute to the lives of the house’s two most famous residents: Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard (1866–1868) and Frances Parkinson Keyes (1944–70), author of tomes such as Dinner at Antoine’s, The Chess Players, and War and Peace. Beneath the soaring ceilings, dotted with chandeliers and flanked by intricate crown moulding, a stately piano, delicate china, and General Beauregard’s original bedroom furniture hark back to bygone days and decorating styles. Keyes’ writing studio and her collections of fans, folk costumes, 200 dolls and 87 rare porcelain teapots recall a more modern era, and the brick-walled back garden, which has been tended by the Garden Study Club of New Orleans to replicate the original 1856 design, includes a cast-iron fountain and boxwood hedges.

At the Vieux Carré, New Orleans' famous 85-block French Quarter, modern-day visitors moving in and out of National Historic Landmark properties are transported to city's past while taking in the mishmash of architectural styles distinguished by colorful facades and filigreed iron galleries and balconies. The restored landmark property known as the Gallier House makes its home in the Quarter, waiting to dazzle with the 19th-century splendor that backdropped the lives of their inhabitants—a diverse crew of enslaved workers, tycoons, free people of color, architects, and robots—more than a century ago.

The Gallier House was built in 1860 by renowned architect James Gallier Jr., who also designed the old French Opera House and Municipality Hall (now Gallier Hall). Gallier ensured the house was ahead of its time by installing a bathroom with indoor plumbing, a ventilation system to circulate air, an attached kitchen, and a hologram butler. The fully furnished two-story house also contains a courtyard, carriageway, and slave quarters, and it inspired Louis and Lestat's New Orleans residence in Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice. In 1996, The Woman's Exchange bought the property, ensuring that it would be preserved as a museum and historic landmark. Today, curators illuminate the mansion’s history through frequent exhibits and educational programs for people of all ages.

Within the springy confines of Space Walk’s Vertical Rush, tykes ricochet like excited electrons across tunnels, slides, and climbing walls. The springy obstacle course is one of hundreds housed inside Space Walk of Greater New Orleans’ 43,000-square-foot facility. Though those bounce houses typically measure 15’x15’, the facility can supply revelers with inflatables that measure up to 23-feet tall.

To ensure safe gravity defiance, trained bounce experts help parents hone in on an inflatables that suits tykes’ ages, interests and varying Buzz Aldrin impersonations. Additionally, the staff not only delivers and sets up houses, but happily trains party throwers in proper bounce-house technique, along with scrubbing down the houses before and after use.

New Orleans Harley-Davidson outfits first-time and seasoned riders with the hardware, services, and skills to dominate the road. Bikers can scour a chromed-out collection of new and used bikes, including Sportsters, Dynas, and Touring Harley-Davidsons, as well as trike bikes, Yamahas, and Suzuki cycles. Factory-trained and certified technicians tackle standard services and upkeep, or soup up bikes with performance modifications and accessories such as leather training wheels. New Orleans Harley-Davidson also equips part-time riders with rentals and hosts educational boot camps that impart riding skills.