Join us on Halloween for Ghost Stories with Jimmie Jackson, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear detailed, first-person accounts of the hauntings at the New Orleans Jazz Museum at the Old U.S. Mint from former LSM Police Officer, Jimmie Jackson!
This free event will take place on Tuesday, October 31 from 4pm-5pm. Free and open to the public.
About Jimmie Jackson:
Jimmie Jackson is one of them.
“They are all around us, all the time, here in New Orleans,” says Jimmie, a former Louisiana State Museum Police Officer. “This place is a hotbed of spiritualism. My great-grandmother was from Haiti and she introduced me to clairvoyance when I was 13 or 14. My grandmother from LaPlace was a soothsayer. I have the gift. It’s in my DNA, but it doesn't have to be in your bones for you to see.”
Jimmie worked at the New Orleans Jazz Museum at the Old U.S. Mint regularly enough that he felt driven to research them and try to find out who they are.
It was Jimmie Jackson led the team of investigators from “Ghost Hunters,” the popular Syfy Channel program, around the Mint in 2008. Watch it here:http://www.syfy.com/ghosthunters/episodes/season/7/episode/4/french-quarter-phantoms
Although the “Ghost Hunters” assessment of whether the Mint is haunted was “inconclusive,” Jackson says there is nothing inconclusive about the spirits who have visited him while he has been in the employ of the State Museum for the past eight years.
“At the Mint, there are regularly four spirits I come in contact with: "two women and two men," he says. “Elizabeth Bell, I heard her name, is a black woman, tall and thin, and she looks haggard. I see her every morning between 8:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. She never causes any trouble; she just drifts around on the second floor and sometimes causes a commotion with the lights.”
The other woman who visits Jackson regularly is Barbara Quirk, whom he describes as “an old white woman who has a patch over her left eye, and she manifests herself as being crippled.” He sees her on the second floor.
If Bell and Quirk are non-confrontational, not so Peter Ackers.
Peter Ackers was 29 years old when he was thrown from a horse and hit his head. “He was committed here,” Jackson says. “Wherever he goes, there’s a nasty nasty odor, a foul smell that follows him around. The maintenance crew keeps this place clean so we know it’s nothing like that,” Jackson says. “Ackers really stinks up the place.”
The fourth spirit that greets Jackson during his shifts at the Mint is either William Roy or Mrs. William Roy. Jackson says it isn’t clear which, but that the spirit “hangs around” in the jazz archive area.
“Mrs. William Roy was incarcerated here briefly for murdering Mr. William Roy so maybe that’s why it’s hard to tell which one I’m seeing,” he says.