Julie on the Roof: The Octoroon Mistress
New Orleans, Louisiana

If you were to take a stroll down Royal St. on the most blustery night of winter, you might just see Julie perched on the roof of one of the townhouses (number 734) near St. Louis Cathedral - naked.

Julie was what was once called an Octoroon. It's a racial title that identified her as being one eighth black and seven eighths white. Julie was not a slave, but rather the well-kept mistress of a noble Frenchman. The noble Frenchman rented a townhouse in the French Quarter on Royal St. for Julie to live in. It was lavishly decorated and Julie wanted for nothing. Except marriage.

At this time in history, society did not allow for him to marry a woman with any trace of African bloodlines. Octoroon women often became mistresses of wealthy men. Julie was one of them. But Julie was not satisfied with the life as the mistress while her French nobleman had his family out on a plantation outside of New Orleans. She repeatedly pestered him to leave his family and marry her. She begged and pleaded for a marriage to her nobleman. Each time he brushed it off and would buy her an expensive present in an attempt to pacify her. The lavish gifts did not dissuade Julie from her greatest desire.

One evening the Frenchman held a poker game at the townhouse with some of his close friends. Annoyed that she was not the center of his attention that evening, she began to bug him again about a marriage proposal. In a fit of exasperation, the nobleman told her that if she could do something to truly prove her love to him, then he would "think about" marrying her. It is not known whether the next events were his idea or Julies, it has been told both ways.

Julie went up to the third floor of the townhouse and opened the window. It was freezing cold out. It was the dead of winter outside and the coldest night of that year. Julie stripped all of her clothes off and climbed outside on the slate roof. She was going to spend the entire night out on that slate roof, naked, to prove her love to her French lover.

The next morning the Frenchman went looking for Julie throughout the townhouse. He could find her nowhere. He went up to the third floor and saw the pile of clothes and the open window. When he went to the window he was horrified. There lay Julie on the slate roof, curled into a ball, frozen to death.

Ever since that night, every winter, on the coldest night of the year, people have seen Julie's ghost pacing back and forth on the slate roof, shivering and naked. Unlike many apparitions that will go disappear randomly, Julie only seems to disappear with the rise of the sun.

- Kristine Antczak

http://www.ghost-stories.org/stories/julie.asp