The Rampart Street Murder House in New Orleans was home to a grisly murder in 2006, where cops discovered a woman’s charred head in a pot on the stove. This location also features the Bloody Mary Haunted Museum which holds a number of supposedly haunted items. We used an ovilus device for the first time on this hunt.
Date: June 16, 2019
Location: New Orleans, LA
Investigators: Chris, Matt
Location History
In 2006, a hotel surveillance camera caught a 28 year old man, Zackery Bowen, jumping to his death. In his pocket was a note that he had to commit suicide because of what he did. Zackery had murdered his girlfriend, Addie Hall, 12 days earlier. When the cops arrived at the couple’s apartment, they found her charred head in a pot on the stove, with her seasoned limbs in the oven.
While the autopsy did not reveal any cannibalism, Bowen had dismembered Addie in the bathtub and believed to have tried to get rid of the evidence by cooking her remains.
Our Experience
A voodoo shop, The Haunted Museum, acquired the apartment after the grisly murder. They allow small groups to conduct paranormal investigations in their museum and apartment. Since we were in town, we decided to check it out for an evening.
Our guide, Michael, started out the night with a portal opening ritual and we hunted for about 2 hours. Opening “portals” is not something we believe in and it seemed quite silly, but we followed along with the group.
We used a variety of devices that night, including an ovilus, a REM pod, Mel meters, audio recorders, and EMF detectors. We spent time in the downstairs museum area, the upstairs murder apartment, and out back in a carriage house.
The museum was filled with a variety of strange articles that Michael claimed were haunted. Additionally, he had a nice setup of technical devices in the museum so we were able to watch some of the video and listen to the audio of our hunt while onsite.
Rampart Street video viewing
Trying out an Ovilus device
This was our first time using an ovilus device. An ovilus is an electronic speech-synthesis device which utters words depending on electromagnetic waves in the air, by using an EMF Meter.
It seemed to throw out a lot of words every time we were on the stairwell headed up to the murder apartment. The most interesting word it threw out was “malevolent”.
Ovilus device
The apartment itself was quite creepy knowing its recent violent history. The bedroom is now filled with toys and creepy dolls. In the kitchen were the appliances that were used to try to dispose of the body.
Matt and I conducted EVP sessions in the bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom, but did not hear anything of note.
Overall, the hunt made for a fun evening, but we did not capture anything that I would denote as paranormal. We had one moment where all the devices went wonky at the same time, but it may not have been paranormal related.
Did we capture paranormal evidence?
No
