MFM Minisode 497

**Karen Kilgariff** (0:16)
Hello, and welcome to My Favorite Murder, The Minisode.

**Georgia Hardstark** (0:20)
We read you your stories, and you will go first. Okay. I'm not gonna give this one away.

**Karen Kilgariff** (0:27)
Okay.

**Georgia Hardstark** (0:27)
Let's see. Love from New Orleans, 1700s, Cemetery Pool Lore.

**Karen Kilgariff** (0:33)
Please.

**Georgia Hardstark** (0:34)
Hey, Karen and Georgia. Hello from New Orleans, Louisiana. I work as a ghost tour guide in the French Quarter. Yes, it's as dream jobby as it sounds.
And in 2024 Minisode, someone wrote in about swimming in the pool where Herb Ballmouster strangled his victims. And that's Episode 67
This reminded me of a creepy piece of pool-related historical lore here in New Orleans. New Orleans. New Orleans.

**Karen Kilgariff** (0:58)
New Orleans. Yeah.

**Georgia Hardstark** (1:00)
In the late 1700s, New Orleans closed its first cemetery, St. Peter Cemetery, where the dead were actually buried underground as opposed to in the above ground tombs we tend to use today. Some of the bodies from that old cemetery were moved by their families to tombs in the new St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 that many bodies were forgotten or abandoned, just paved over and left there.
In 2011, a guy who owned a condo in the French Quarter decided to dig an in-ground swimming pool in his courtyard.
His condo happened to be on one of the blocks where St. Peter Cemetery had been, and you guessed it, the crew started hitting bodies as they dug. 15 bodies, in fact, within a 20-square-foot area. A forensic team from LSU studied the unearthed remains and concluded that all of these people were either African-American or indigenous, which may explain why they weren't moved to the new cemetery. Their families probably didn't have the connections or the money. That's when a really cool thing happened. The head archaeologist on the project decided to arrange a public reburial event for these people who were left behind. There was a ceremony to honor the mixed heritage of black and native people in New Orleans. And afterwards, there was a second line parade to St. Louis Cemetery number one, where the remains were reinterred on sanctified ground.
The pool was eventually completed. And I happen to know the current owners of the condo. Have I swum in that pool? Absa-fucking-lutely, many times. Everyone calls it the Pool of Souls. Anyway, I don't know of any poltergeist style hauntings at the Pool of Souls. And I like to think that's because all of those people have been so kindly laid to rest on sacred ground. We try to do right by our dead in this city. PS. Karen, I have got to tell you the sinkhole-related pun my boyfriend recently made. We were driving through our beautiful dysfunctional city with its potholes the size of meteorite craters. And we noticed a new place where the street had caved in. My boyfriend goes, Oh shit, a new sinkhole just dropped.
Get it? Just dropped? I died. Stay sexy and love New Orleans like the goddamn magical gem it is. Ariadne, she, her.

**Karen Kilgariff** (3:12)
Wow.

**Georgia Hardstark** (3:12)
Yeah.

**Karen Kilgariff** (3:13)
I love New Orleans and those stories. And when you said that they gave those like the unnamed dead a sec, it's called a second line.

**Georgia Hardstark** (3:22)
Parade?

**Karen Kilgariff** (3:23)
Yeah. So that's the band walking and like the whole, like it's the celebration of life type of vibe.

**Georgia Hardstark** (3:29)
So cool.

**Karen Kilgariff** (3:30)
It's amazing.
The subject line of this e-mail is Parkouring Out of Getting Arrested for Underage Drinking. Dear Karen and Georgia, you recently asked for stories about parkouring out of trouble. What?

**Georgia Hardstark** (3:46)
Who are we?

**Karen Kilgariff** (3:47)
I really love when I, I really purposely ignore stuff so that it's just as fresh to me as it is to you. And I did not read past that.

**Georgia Hardstark** (3:56)
What the? Okay.

**Karen Kilgariff** (3:57)
It's so funny for us. It says, no, in reference to the Roof Man story in episode 536, Smart and Tricky.

**Georgia Hardstark** (4:03)
It all makes sense.

**Karen Kilgariff** (4:05)
We asked for that, especially ones that involve high school parties. And I immediately knew I had a story to write. Couldn't have been more specific with these people. And they're like, yep, we got it.

**Georgia Hardstark** (4:15)
I got that, finally.

**Karen Kilgariff** (4:16)
It says, I'm in my 30s now, still close friends with the three girls I went to the party with, and we still tell the story with pride. To set the scene, I was 16, me and my three best friends went to a party at a friend's house whose parents were out of town. There was beer pong and lots of underage drinking. One of my friends decided, with the poor judgment of a teenager, to walk to a gas station with a group of people, and on the way there, they got stopped by cops because a neighbor had called in a complaint about the party.