A grave holiday decision

On Chestnut and First, in the Garden District of New Orleans, stands a handsome Greek revival mansion. Until a few years ago, it was the home of Anne Rice, high priestess of popular vampiric fiction and author of Interview with the Vampire, responsible, more than anyone else, person responsible for the making the Crescent City a hub for devotees of the supernatural.

It was Rice's feverish page-turners that brought in hordes of visitors eager to experience the city's gothic atmospherics, along with its celebrated Creole food and jazz. This year, in the run-up to Halloween, I saw only pumpkins, plastic skulls hanging from porches and the odd Frankenstein's monster tied to a tree, as I walked around Garden District.

Seeped in gory history

Of course, the gothic atmospherics long antedated Rice and she looked to them for inspiration. Interview with the Vampire begins with the story of one of the Louisiana indigo plantations not far from the city, characterised by humid swamp lands and gnarled oaks dripping with Spanish moss. But the action moves to the French Quarter, still largely preserved, and its streets of Creole cottages and colonial villas, with their battered shutters and secluded courtyards. A port historically charged with voodoo magic (thanks to the slave trade) and Catholic mysticism (from generations of European immigrants), suggested blood-spilling of a vampiric kind. And the city identified with being a plausible home for irresistible throat-piercers.

Rice's revenant heroes roam the extraordinary St Louis and Lafayette cemeteries, which, however many sightseers may crowd them, still resemble horror-film sets, with the crumbling, sun-bleached tombs above ground (the water table is so high that bodies buried in the usual way floated back to the surface). There's a lot of rusting decorative ironwork; the pathways between the crypts are narrow and twisting; crosses and statues atop the tombs cast odd shadows across the necropolis; and votive candles add the final touch.

Rice traded on the evocative architecture and Southern exoticism of one of the oldest cities in the US. "This was New Orleans", begins a passage in her most famous novel, "a magical and magnificent place to live. In which a vampire, richly dressed and gracefully walking through the pools of light of one gas lamp after another, might attract no more notice in the evening than hundreds of other exotic creatures ..."

Feeding a thirst for more

Now a new set of Louisiana vampires has come along to entice bloodsucking devotees to the New Orleans area. True Blood, the hit TV series, is based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels of Charlaine Harris, which has as its premise the entering of the vamps into mainstream society.

The fanged hero, Bill Compton, enchants Sookie, another reworking of Bram Stoker's virginal Mina Harker.

This Halloween weekend, New Orleans played host to a vampire film festival and the bloodsuckers aren't likely to disappear any time soon. There's intense rivalry between businesses selling haunted-history trips and "spooktaculars" in the city. The locals are keen, following Katrina, to do all they can to attract visitors: better ghost stories than real memories of a ghost town.

Over the years, such stories have been told, retold and fabricated to feed public appetite for escapism with a ghoulish theme. The legend most recycled by my guide at the St Louis cemetery is of Marie Laveau, the Creole "voodoo queen". Her tomb is covered in sets of three "X"s, scratched on by visitors to represent wishes they hope the sorceress will grant. There are voodoo shops in the French Quarter that sell gris-gris, statues, fetishes, incense and masks. And all over the city, the supernatural is a selling point. Every hotel seems to have a ghost. The Monteleone, an establishment on Royal Street, boasts a number of spectres and poltergeists, not least one that keeps opening a locked door.

And the house with "the most ghosts in America"? Two hours outside the city, in St Francisville, beyond Baton Rouge, is the Myrtles Plantation house, built in 1796. An engaging guide, Robi, makes the most of shlocky legends of vanishing jewellery, footsteps on the stairs and trapped spirits in a mirror. The bed and breakfasters who lodge upstairs, we are assured, rarely make it through the night. It's all down to the cruelty of an antebellum owner of the house, Clark Woodruff, who forced a slave, Chloe, to become his mistress and then put her to death. In revenge, she is said to have killed Woodruff's wife and daughters. That there's no record of Woodruff owning any slaves and that his family, in fact, died of yellow fever is of no consequence — the phantoms provide the frisson.

I was expecting a certain frisson myself when I sank into the plush red cushions of the darkened sance lounge of Muriel's Jackson Square, in the French Quarter, for my first tarot reading. Behind heavy, tassled curtains, a couple of Egyptian mummies looked on. But my psychic had the benign and tingle-free demeanour of a National Trust volunteer. I listened as my Louisiana Mystic Meg gently, and vaguely, explained the possible meanings of the three cards I had drawn.

So, disappointingly, no ghosts or vampires made themselves known to me in New Orleans. In truth, the long history of the city is fascinating enough without a vampire lurking in every shadow; there's plenty of genuine gothic to go around. And a bowl of gumbo ya ya, followed by a night of music on Frenchman Street, is intoxication enough for me.