New Orleans Killers and Thrillers Tour

This tour was high on energy, low on accuracy — and if you’re the type who likes your history with a heavy side of fiction, you’ll love it. Our guide was lively and clearly passionate, but at times it felt like facts were optional. France canonizing Joan of Arc? (Nope — Catholic Church, 1920.) First pharmacy in the U.S.? (Only if you conveniently ignore the fine print.) Fire hydrants tall because the ground is sinking? (That’s... not how physics or infrastructure works.) And the claim that greed motivated building on expensive, flood-prone marshland instead of cheaper riverfront property? (Pretty sure greed usually favors easy money, not engineering headaches — might want to run that theory through a second draft.) I came to have fun — and I did — but if you're expecting even a modest respect for historical truth, just know you’ll be mentally fact-checking most of the way. To be clear, I wasn’t trying to nitpick or spend the tour fact-checking. I genuinely wanted to enjoy the experience and go along for the ride. But the inaccuracies were so frequent, and at times so outlandish, that I simply couldn’t turn my brain off. After about thirty minutes, I stopped fighting it and spent the rest of the tour admiring the buildings, the skyline, and the people around me — while doing my best to tune out the storytelling. Adding to the atmosphere, the guide (mid-50s) leaned heavily into awkward "hashtag" jokes — loudly saying "hashtag" followed by a repeated word she thought was clever, pausing for laughs that never came, and then laughing at her own jokes. It felt a bit like being trapped in a live-action Facebook comment section. Perhaps the most surreal moment was the telling of a bizarre story involving the King of France supposedly gathering prostitutes, shipping them to New Orleans because "only Native American women were available for rape" (yes, that phrase was actually used), and claiming that the prostitutes, suffering from vitamin D deficiency after their voyage below deck, arrived with dark circles under their eyes and were mistaken for vampires — leading to talk of burning them at the stake. At that point, it became clear this was less a historical tour and more a loosely assembled anthology of folklore, sensationalism, and imagination. In short: High energy, Good vibes, Great city, But if you're hoping to leave a little smarter about New Orleans history, plan on doing some homework afterward. Thanks for the entertainment — intentional or otherwise.