In the early morning hours of Sunday, February 7, 2010, a tractor driver who had worked the Caesar parade route in Metairie was heading home to his apartment in the Lake Terrace section of New Orleans when he decided to take a detour through City Park.
While driving down Harrison Avenue, approximately half way between the renovated New Orleans Police Department Mounted Unit horse stables and Scout Island, in the vicinity of the infamous Mona Lisa Drive, the man was startled to see a dark form lurch out of the shadows and approach the road.
The witness slowed his vehicle for a better look. The dark form ran along the treeline for several minutes, moving in and out of the misty and shadows under the oaks. The driver now came to a complete stop and observed what he described as a troll or a gill man dart across the Harrison Avenue turnaround, making its way toward Scout Island and the overgrowth of the abandoned City Park East Golf Course.
According to the witness, the creature had dark or black skin covered in masses of skin or fins that looked like algae growing all over its body. It seemed to have gills or matted hair that looked like gills on its face and head; two yellow eyes leered out from under a prominent forehead. Apparently aware of the mans presence, once it had crossed the road, it stopped and looked back at the man who said it then opened its mouth in a growl, revealing a set of massive fangs and a lolling tongue that looked, according to the man, too big for its mouth. It lifted up a clawed hand as if to wave the man off, the driver clearly observed long claws at the fingertips in the ambient light, and then it turned, lurching off into the shadows of Scout Island.
The witness did not report his strange experience to the police because he assumed they would not believe him and since the gill man, troll, or whatever it was had not hurt him, he didnt feel it was necessary to bring unwelcome scrutiny upon himself. When he joined a group of fellow tractor drivers for parade routes early the next morning, he told a friend what had happened. His friend put him in touch with Haunted America Tours.
Here at Haunted America Tours the staff has long been aware of legends regarding ghosts and creatures lurking in the placed environment of the New Orleans City Park. The urban legend surrounding the Parks Mona Lisa Drive is one example.
According to some reports there is an older legend, popular among the Allipoosa Indians who lived along nearby Bayou St. John in the colonial days of New Orleans, concerning a foul, ghoul-like creature inhabiting the woody tracts and marshy areas along the bayou shore. Descriptions of the creature by the Allipoosa, and accounts from slaves who worked on the Allard Plantation, which comprised all the acres that later became City Park, match the account provided by the tractor driver this past weekend.
Haunted America Tours spoke to a Mid-City resident who lives in the City Park Avenue area and who claims to be a descendent of the Allipoosa tribe, and he confirmed that recently there have been numerous strange occurrences in City Park.
The resident, who asked not to be identified, suggested that the recent sightings might be connected to the numerous film projects that have used City Park and its surrounding areas as locations and backdrops for shooting. Some of these projects, he said, have supernatural or paranormal storylines, and it is his opinion that this activity has stirred up the spirits of the land from the ghosts of Allard plantation slaves and long-dead Indians, to more modern phantoms. City Park, he said, has many, many guardians.
A member of the Haunted America Tours staff discussed an interesting footnote to this story: On a recent visit to the Popps Fountain area in City Park, she noticed that some of the heavy iron bars in the security fence now surrounding the fountain had been bent and broken, as if by tremendous force. The interesting thing, other than the fact that the black, wrought iron would be impossible to break without the aid of machinery or welding equipment, is that the breaks appeared to have occurred from the inside out.