NAPOLEON HOUSE Restaurant — New Orleans, Louisiana Status: Operating · Access: Open to public Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/napoleon-house-new-orleans-louisiana/ The 1797 house built for Napoleon’s "rescue"—never used. A restaurant in New Orleans, Louisiana, Napoleon House is filed here for what the record attaches to it. The 1797 house built for Napoleon’s "rescue"—never used. The presences in its file go unnamed: the napoleon house dead, the record says. The dossier holds 3 reported claims, 1 legend and 2 documented facts, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. It still serves diners. In 1814 Nicholas Girod — commission merchant, former smuggler, elected mayor of New Orleans in 1812 — inherited a lot at Chartres and St. Louis from his brother and raised a grand three-and-a-half-story townhouse on it, capped with an octagonal cupola from which he could watch the port. The building, enlarged from a 1797 predecessor, was one of the finer private residences in the city. That same year Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled to Elba, and New Orleans — still French in sentiment — produced the story that gave the house its name: a plot to rescue the Emperor and install him in Girod’s upstairs rooms. Napoleon died on St. Helena on May 5, 1821, and the plot died with him; the name stayed. THE DOCUMENTED RECORD The house is documented as the Mayor Girod House, a National Historic Landmark since 1970. Girod resigned the mayoralty in September 1815 under financial pressure; the townhouse passed through the usual Quarter fortunes, and by 1914 it was operating as the restaurant-bar that still runs it — Pimm’s Cups, classical music, and the upper floors rented as apartments with original trim intact. The plot has more paperwork than most legends: correspondence between Napoleon’s brother Lucien and the Comte de Las Cases records that Napoleon genuinely weighed retirement on the Mississippi or Ohio, and on learning his brother Joseph had reached America first he remarked that in Joseph’s place he would “create a great empire in the Spanish Americas” within a year. The request for a French frigate to carry him to retirement was written; it never arrived. The ground floor has poured drinks through every regime the Quarter has seen since — the restaurant that took the name in 1914 passed from the Impastato family to the Brennan interests and never once hosted the man it’s named for. THE RESCUE LEGEND New Orleans tradition fills in the rest: Dominique You — Lafitte’s gunner-captain — would lead Baratarian seamen to St. Helena aboard a yacht called the Seraphine, spring the Emperor, and Girod would put him up on Chartres Street. The Times-Picayune’s tricentennial series filed it as the city’s favorite what-if; historians note the plot exists mainly in the telling, with no executed plan in any register. The haunting reports are the quiet quarter-suite kind: a presence in the upstairs rooms — the rooms that stayed ready — footsteps in the apartments, the residual claim that the house kept waiting. Nothing in the file attaches the presence to Napoleon himself; the emperor’s ghost would be, on the record, a tourist. Some versions crew the Seraphine with Baratarian pirates on a contract that existed only in tavern talk — the file notes no charter, no manifest, no voyage. The timeline is the proof against it: Girod’s cupola watched a port for a rescue that news of May 1821 made moot before it launched. WHAT REMAINS The Napoleon House still serves dinner and Pimm’s Cups at 500 Chartres, inside a landmarked shell that predates the Louisiana Purchase. The file’s verdict: the legend is better documented than most hauntings — there is actual correspondence — and the ghost, whoever the upstairs footsteps belong to, took the rooms the emperor never did. National Historic Landmark designation came April 15, 1970; the Vieux Carré had listed the address five years earlier. Chartres Street keeps its noise; the cupola keeps its view of a port that never delivered the guest. The emperor never came; the bar outlasted the empire. The file closes on the arithmetic: a house named for a man who died an ocean away, still pouring drinks in his honor nightly. FILED CLAIMS — 3 on record, reported not verified · [Local folklore] apparition: Reported a presence in the upper rooms of the Napoleon House — the 1797 Creole townhouse whose legend says it was offered to Napoleon himself in a rescue plot. The emperor never came; the lore says the rooms kept waiting anyway, and some guests say they still feel occupied. The report keeps its place in the record. source: Napoleon House (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_House) · [Local folklore] apparition: Reported figures in the house — apparitions at the Napoleon House, where the documented history (a mayor's mansion, a famous bar, two centuries of Pimm's Cup) already reads like legend. The ghosts here drink in a bar that predates the Republic's second century; they've had time to settle in. The account stays in the file — reported, retold, unresolved. source: Napoleon House (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_House) · [Documented legend] named ghost legend: The dead are reportedly seen at the Napoleon House — the blunt claim on a building that was offered, in the famous legend, as Bonaparte's New World refuge. The rescue plot may be folklore; the house and its ghosts are on the register either way. The account stays in the file — reported, retold, unresolved. source: Napoleon House (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_House) HISTORY — 2 documented facts · [1797] Built 1797; the Napoleon offer is documented. The restaurant's documented history in New Orleans, Louisiana is the record the rest of the file stands on. This belongs to the verified spine of the entry, the layer everything else is measured against. Sources including 'Napoleon House' carry the record. The detail belongs to the verified spine of the entry. · [1794] The 1794 house is documented. An old restaurant with its history on record gives the dossier a verified foundation. The fact is historically verified — the part of the file that doesn't need hedging. 'Napoleon House' documents the entry. The date is part of the site's documented spine. The report keeps its place in the record. SOURCES — 1 cited · Napoleon House — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_House — HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not. Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/