The Best Ghost Tour In New Orleans, All 14 Compared

Fourteen ghost-themed tours operate in New Orleans right now, and eleven of them depart on foot from somewhere in or near the French Quarter. They range from an $18 pub crawl with a free shot to a $55 bus tour with hotel pickup, and the ratings sit between 4.5 and 5.0 across a combined 23,138 reviews. The problem is not scarcity. The problem is that five of these products have near-identical names, three of them start at the same coffee shop or restaurant, and the differences that actually matter, duration, group size, whether you go inside anything, only show up in the fine print of each listing.

This guide settles it. Every figure in the table below is current: prices, ratings, review counts, and meeting points for all 14 tours. Nothing is averaged, nothing is rounded, nothing is invented. Ghost stories, where they appear, are attributed as the tours tell them, because a haunting is a story a guide tells on Royal Street, not a fact a comparison table can verify. The ownership of the LaLaurie Mansion, the access rules at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 and the city's tour-guide licensing exam, by contrast, are verifiable, and this page states them directly.

What Is The Best Ghost Tour In New Orleans?

The best ghost tour in New Orleans for most visitors is the Voodoo and Vampire Themes walk, from $33 for 1.5 to 2 hours, rated 4.5 from 3,221 reviews, the most-reviewed walking tour on the roster. It blends ghost, voodoo and vampire lore in one evening. For cemeteries, the Official Walking Tour at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, from $25 and rated 4.5 from 4,684 reviews, is the city's most-reviewed product.

Why does the walking tour win for most people? Three reasons. First, coverage: the Voodoo and Vampire Themes tour run by The Witches Brew Tour Company bundles the three story strands visitors actually come for, classic hauntings, voodoo history and the vampire folklore the French Quarter is famous for, into a single 1.5 to 2 hour walk. Second, proof: 3,221 reviews at 4.5 is the largest review pool of any walking tour you can book here, which means the rating is not standing on a handful of enthusiastic nights. Third, price: from $33 sits in the middle of the walking range, $30 to $37, so you are not paying a premium for the breadth.

The cemetery pick needs its own framing. St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 has been closed to unguided walk-ins since March 2015, by policy of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, after repeated vandalism, so a guided tour is not one option among several, it is the only way in for a tourist. The Official Walking Tour, run from Basin St. Station, is the listing attached to the only licensed operator with official access, 4.5 from 4,684 reviews, from $25, 55 minutes, departing every 15 to 30 minutes during the day. If your question is "which ghost-adjacent tour in New Orleans has the most evidence behind it," that is the answer.

If you are still weighing whether the money is worth it at all, the honest breakdown of value per dollar, what you get, what you skip, lives in Is A Ghost Tour Worth It In New Orleans, which runs the same numbers against a self-guided walk.

What City Has The Best Ghost Tours?

New Orleans has a strong claim to the best ghost tour scene of any American city, and the numbers back it: 14 bookable ghost-themed products, 23,138 combined reviews, ratings from 4.5 to 5.0, and a licensing regime requiring every paid guide to pass a written history exam. Savannah and Salem compete on story density, but neither matches New Orleans on format breadth: walking tours, cemetery access, vampire walks, pub crawls and bus tours with paranormal equipment.

The comparison with other cities usually comes down to three things. Story density: the French Quarter packs the LaLaurie Mansion, the vampire lore of the Casket Girls, the voodoo legacy of Marie Laveau and a century of yellow-fever-era ghost stories into roughly a square mile of walkable streets. Access: few cities let you tour a cemetery as storied as St. Louis No. 1, and none of them do it under a single licensed operator with departures every 15 to 30 minutes. Regulation: the City of New Orleans requires paid tour guides to hold a city-issued permit, which means an application, a fee, a background check and a written exam on the city's history and culture with a 70 percent minimum pass score, per the city's tour guide permit page. A guide on a licensed New Orleans tour has, at minimum, demonstrated baseline knowledge a random storyteller in costume has not.

That regulatory floor is the quiet differentiator. It does not guarantee a great storyteller, and reviews on the live listings make clear that guide quality varies night to night, but it does mean the floor is higher than in cities where anyone with a lantern can start charging. The roster on New Orleans Haunted Tours is built entirely from products whose operators operate inside that system.

How All 14 Tours Compare At A Glance

Five formats: four ghost walks ($30-$37, 1.5-2 hours), four cemetery tours ($25-$35, 45 minutes-2 hours), two vampire walks ($21-$22, 2 hours), two adults-only pub crawls ($18-$37, 2 hours) and two bus tours ($36-$55, 2-2 hours 15 minutes). All include free cancellation up to 24 hours before. Cheapest: Three Haunted Bars, Free Shot, $18. Most expensive: Bus Tour With Hotel Pickup, $55.

Here is the master table, every product, its decision name, its verified price, rating and review count, and where you meet it. Use the decision names rather than the marketing titles: three of these products are separate listings for the same cemetery, and two pub crawls sound interchangeable until you see what is included.

Two patterns jump out of that table. First, the ratings barely separate: nine of the fourteen products sit at 4.5, two at 4.6, two at 4.7 and one at 5.0, so the rating is close to useless as a tiebreaker and the review count is the real signal. Second, the meeting points cluster: 620 Decatur St alone hosts three different products from two different operators, and the two vampire walks meet at the same Voodoo Lounge corner. Check the meeting point on the live listing before you go, because the Voodoo and Vampire Themes listing notes its point may vary.

The Best Walking Ghost Tours, Ranked

The best walking ghost tour is the Haunted History, Guided Walk at $30, 4.5 from 2,293 reviews, if you want the classic two-hour French Quarter ghost walk at the lowest walking-tour price. The Voodoo and Vampire Themes tour at $33 is the pick if you want the voodoo and vampire material folded in. The two interior-visit tours at $37 each are the pick if going inside a haunted location matters more than the price difference.

The four walking tours are closer than their names suggest, and the differences come down to what you get for the spread between $30 and $37.

The Haunted History, Guided Walk run by Haunted History Tours is the purest version of the format: two hours, the standard ghost canon of the Quarter, and a meeting point at the Vampire Apothecary Restaurant and Bar at 725 St Peter St, which means you can arrive early and have a drink where the tour starts. The listing shows it booked five or more times on a typical day, and the group cap is 28.

The two interior-visit tours answer the most common complaint about ghost walks, which is that you hear stories about buildings you never enter. Both the Interior Visit, 2 Hours tour from Tour Orleans and the Ghost Adventures Interior Visit from New Orleans Ghost Adventures include going inside a haunted location as part of the two hours, and both cost from $37. The trade is seven dollars over the cheapest walk for access that, in this city, is genuinely scarce, because the most famous haunted private home on the roster's routes, the LaLaurie Mansion, is a private residence and no tour enters it.

If the walking format is what you came for, the full route-by-route breakdown of all four, including what each covers and where each ends, is in New Orleans Ghost Walking Tours.

The Best Cemetery And Voodoo Tours

The best cemetery tour is the Cemetery No. 1, 55 Minutes Official Walking Tour, from $25, 4.5 from 4,684 reviews, the most-reviewed product on the entire roster and the only listing attached to the licensed operator with official access to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. For a longer, smaller-group experience, the Cemetery No. 3, Private Option at $35, 5.0 from 479 reviews, is the highest-rated product on the roster.

Cemetery access in New Orleans is not a free-for-all, and the rules decide your options before price does. St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 has been licensed-guide-only since March 2015 under Archdiocese policy, so there is no independent walk-in option to weigh against the tours; the Archdiocese's own FAQ states the access terms directly. St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 remains closed to the general public entirely. St. Louis Cemetery No. 3, by contrast, is open to the public for self-guided visits during gate hours, which is why a paid tour there has to earn its money differently.

The three St. Louis No. 1 listings need careful telling apart, because their titles blur. Only the 55-minute Official Walking Tour carries the official licensed-access language on its listing; the 45-minute and 2-hour listings are separate, legitimate products covering the same cemetery with different operators, durations and framings, and this guide does not extend the official-access claim to them. What is verifiable: the official listing departs every 15 to 30 minutes during the day from Basin St. Station at 501 Basin St, which makes it the most schedule-flexible product on the roster, and its 4,684 reviews make it the most-reviewed anything here.

The Cemetery No. 3, Private Option, run by Red Sash Tours and led by author and historian Sally Asher, is a different animal. St. Louis No. 3 is free to enter on your own, so the $35 buys expertise rather than access: a 1.5-hour historian-led walk with a 5.0 rating from 479 reviews, morning and afternoon departures, and a private option for groups that want the guide to themselves. A 5.0 from 479 reviews is the strongest rating-to-pool combination on the roster.

One cemetery you cannot book here at all: Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 in the Garden District has been closed to general walk-in visitation since September 9, 2019, and it remains closed, with historical, explicitly non-ghost tours from the Preservation Resource Center scheduled to begin only in early October 2026. No product on this roster visits its interior, and the deeper story of why it is famous anyway is covered in Why Is Lafayette Cemetery So Famous.

The Best Vampire Tours

The best vampire tour is the Ghost and Vampire Walk at $21, 4.7 from 2,541 reviews: it is the highest-rated vampire-themed tour on the roster and the second-cheapest tour of any kind here. Its sibling, the Nightly Ghosts & Vampires Walk tour at $22, 4.5 from 472 reviews, is nearly identical on paper but runs a fixed nightly departure around 8:00 PM and carries a much smaller review pool.

Both vampire walks are run by French Quarter Phantoms, both last two hours, and both meet at the Voodoo Lounge on the corner of Orleans St and N Rampart St. The Ghost and Vampire Walk ends at Jackson Square, which is a genuinely useful feature: you finish in the middle of the Quarter at walking distance from everything, rather than back where you started. The $1 price difference between them is noise; the rating and review count are the signal, 4.7 from 2,541 against 4.5 from 472.

What do these tours actually cover? As the tours tell it, the French Quarter's vampire folklore runs through the Casket Girls legend, the story of the young women who arrived in the city with coffin-like chests, and through a modern layer of vampire-sighting lore that operators narrate as living local legend. None of it is settled history, and no honest tour presents it as such, but the storytelling tradition is real, documented, and specific to this city in a way few other American cities can match. If the voodoo side of the lore is what pulls you, the dedicated coverage is in New Orleans Voodoo Tours and the question of visiting the Voodoo Queen's traditionally cited tomb is answered in Can I Visit The Voodoo Queen In New Orleans.

For a format-by-format look at the vampire category, including how the two walks differ in tone, see New Orleans Vampire Tours.

The Best Haunted Pub Crawls, 21+

The best haunted pub crawl is the 21+ Pub Crawl, LaLaurie at $37, 4.5 from 2,212 reviews, which visits Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop Bar, passes the LaLaurie Mansion exterior and ends with a complimentary drink. The Three Haunted Bars, Free Shot at $18, 4.7 from 79 reviews, is the cheapest tour on the roster but carries the smallest review pool here, so its rating rests on far less evidence.

Both crawls are strictly adults-only: 21 and over with valid government photo ID, matching Louisiana's legal drinking age, and the listings state the requirement directly. Never book either for a family with minors; the format does not permit it.

The $37 crawl is the story-first option: two hours with New Orleans Ghost Adventures, the same operator behind the Ghost Adventures Interior Visit walk, visiting Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop Bar, one of the oldest bar buildings in the country, and passing the LaLaurie Mansion at 1140 Royal Street. The mansion stop needs honest framing: it is a private residence, owned since late 2024 by Lance Zaal, founder of US Ghost Adventures, an operator unaffiliated with anything on this roster, and no tour goes inside it or any other tour of it. The crawl views the exterior from the street, which is the only access that exists for anyone.

The $18 crawl from Big Easy Walking Tours is the budget option and the social option: three haunted bars, a free shot, and the smallest group economics on the roster. Its 4.7 rating is the joint-highest on the roster, but it comes from 79 reviews, a pool so small that this guide will not call it the most popular anything. It is the cheapest tour in New Orleans, that claim is rock solid.

One practical note that applies to both: New Orleans permits open alcoholic containers in plastic or foam go-cups on public streets only within the defined French Quarter zone, upriver of Canal St, lakeside of Rampart St, downriver of Esplanade Ave and the river, and glass is banned outright in that zone under the city code. The crawls operate inside that zone, but the allowance is not a blanket citywide permission, and the rules are covered in full in New Orleans Haunted Pub Crawl.

The Best Ghost Bus Tours

The best ghost bus tour depends on what you need: the Bus Tour With Hotel Pickup at $55, 4.5 from 463 reviews, is the only roster product with hotel pickup and the only daytime option, covering St. Louis Cemetery No. 3, the French Quarter and the Garden District. The Night Bus Tour, Exclusive Access at $36, 4.5 from 1,774 reviews, is the after-dark option and the only tour here that uses EMF detectors.

The two bus products could hardly be more different despite sharing a category. The Bus Tour With Hotel Pickup, run by New Orleans Native Tours, is the logistics product: 2 hours 15 minutes, pickup at most hotels in the French Quarter and Business District, daytime departures, and a route that takes in St. Louis Cemetery No. 3, the French Quarter and the Garden District. At $55 it is the most expensive tour on the roster, and what you are buying is range and the pickup, not scares.

The Night Bus Tour, Exclusive Access from Tour Orleans is the atmosphere product: 2 hours after dark, meeting at 620 Decatur St, using EMF detectors, the paranormal-investigation equipment that no other product on this roster carries. Two honest caveats from the operator's own listing: the tour is stated as not suitable for children under 10, and the EMF framing is the operator's own. It is the closest thing on this roster to a ghost hunt rather than a ghost walk, and the fuller mechanics of the format are in Things To Do In New Orleans At Night.

How To Choose In Five Minutes

Pick by format first, then by price. Want the classic French Quarter night out? Take the Voodoo and Vampire Themes walk, from $33. Want the city's most famous cemetery? Take the Official Walking Tour at St. Louis No. 1, from $25. Want drinks included? Take the 21+ Pub Crawl, LaLaurie, from $37. Every one of them cancels free up to 24 hours before, so the cost of choosing wrong is zero.

The five-minute decision tree works because the roster's formats barely overlap. Walking ghost tours are evening French Quarter story walks. Cemetery tours are daytime visits to a licensed-access site. Vampire walks are the cheapest themed nights here. Pub crawls are 21+ bar nights with ghost framing. Bus tours are for range, pickup or after-dark equipment. Very few travelers want two of the same format, so the real question is which single format fits your evening, and the answer is usually settled by who is in your group and what time of day you have free.

Budget planning across the whole roster is straightforward: the floor is $18, the ceiling is $55, and the median sits around $33. The full cost anatomy, including what the listings include and what they leave you to buy, is broken out in New Orleans Ghost Tour Cost, and the season-by-season timing question, October demand, summer heat, is answered in Best Time For A New Orleans Ghost Tour.

What To Check Before You Book Any Of Them

Check four things on the live listing before you pay: the meeting point, the cancellation window, the group size and the age rule. The meeting point matters because three tours start at 620 Decatur St and one listing notes its point may vary; cancellation is free up to 24 hours before on every roster product; group caps run to 28 on the walking tours; and both pub crawls are strictly 21+ with government photo ID.

The meeting point is the one that catches people. The two vampire tours meet at the same Voodoo Lounge corner, the Interior Visit, Ghost Adventures and pub crawl products all meet at Bon's New Orleans Street Food at 620 Decatur St, and the Voodoo and Vampire Themes listing carries an explicit note that its meeting point may vary and should be confirmed on the listing. Arrive ten minutes early, and screenshot the meeting details.

Cancellation is uniform and generous: free cancellation up to 24 hours before, on every one of the fourteen products. That is the single best fact on this page for a planner, because it means you can book the October dates now and rebook later if your itinerary shifts. Weather is worth one extra glance for the cemetery formats: the Cemetery No. 1, 2 Hours listing runs rain or shine, and St. Louis No. 1 is an open-air site with no shade, so the heat advice in What To Wear On A New Orleans Ghost Tour applies double in summer.

Group size and age are the last two. The walking tours cap at 28 travelers where a cap is stated, which keeps the guide audible on a busy street. The pub crawls card everyone, 21 and over, no exceptions, and the Night Bus Tour states it is not suitable for children under 10. Families with kids should look at the walking and cemetery formats instead, and the full age-by-age guidance lives in New Orleans Ghost Tour With Kids.

The Bottom Line

If you book one tour in New Orleans, book the Voodoo and Vampire Themes walk at $33: the biggest review pool of any walking tour, all three lore strands, and a central French Quarter meeting point. If you book two, add the Official Walking Tour at St. Louis No. 1 at $25, the most-reviewed product in the city and the only licensed way into its most famous cemetery. Both cancel free up to 24 hours out.

The roster rewards decisiveness more than research. The ratings are so tightly packed that no amount of comparison-shopping separates them, the prices span less than forty dollars, and the free-cancellation window means the downside of picking fast is a rebooking, not a loss. The people who have the worst ghost tour experiences in New Orleans are, in the main, the ones who show up in October without a booking at all and find the walking formats sold out, a risk the listings flag on the most popular products.

So: one walk, one cemetery, one drink if you are 21 and over, and a bus only if your knees or your schedule demand it. That is the whole decision.

Common Questions About The Best Ghost Tour In New Orleans