People travel from across the country to visit New Orleans for Halloween.
The city’s ghost tours, cemeteries, haunted houses and spooky culture make the city a top destination for the holiday.
Cody Eoff flew in from San Antonio, Texas, and said Halloween in New Orleans has become an annual tradition.
“We’ve been coming here for several years now, and this is our first time to come to the Skeleton House,” he said. “But we come here to celebrate on Bourbon Street, hit up Frenchmen Street, see all of the costumes, and see all of the fun people.”
There is no shortage of activities on Halloween weekend. People visit the Skeleton House on St. Charles, Ghost Manor, the Mortuary. This year, the Freaky Deaky music festival is making its New Orleans debut.
“New Orleans is one of the top Halloween destinations in America for sure,” Kelly Schulz with New Orleans and Company said. “We love to dress up, we love any excuse to have a good time and visitors know that. Not only that, we have our haunted history, our ghost tours. We have our vampires and voodoo.”
More visitors mean more money going into the local economy.
“We’re seeing very strong hotel occupancy for this weekend with Halloween being on a Saturday night. It’s fantastic,” Schulz said. “Almost 90% occupancy for Saturday night is what we’re seeing in those 26,000 hotel rooms in the main downtown area.”
Hotel occupancy rates were also high last weekend when the Krewe of Boo parade took place.
WDSU spoke with out-of-state visitors from Tennessee to Texas, who said there is no better place to celebrate Halloween.
“We have a couple of costumes planned,” Eoff said. “One for tonight, one for tomorrow. So just mix and mingle with all of the locals and all of the people that are visiting.”
READ MORE:Visitors travel to New Orleans for Halloween weekend
