You step off Toulouse Street and the French Quarter rearranges itself around you: gas lamps throwing narrow cones of light, shutters clacking with the warm night breeze, the Mississippi far off and breathing humidly. Guides fall into the cadence of the city—measured, wry, competent—and the sidewalks begin to feel less like stone and more like the pages of a long ledger. This is not Hollywood horror; it’s the slow accumulation of three centuries of small disasters, epidemics, duels, and grief, each one leaving a story that lingers in doorways and under balconies.