"So here's the story: Antonio Monteleone, a shoe-making nobleman from Sicily who moved to New Orleans in the 1800s and established a cobbler shop, bought this 64-room hotel in 1886. And then he bought another one and merged them together. It's still in the same family today, and it's still a four-star hotel, thanks to multiple renovations over the course of the last century. Incidentally, it's also supposedly haunted, with many reports of ghost sightings and other strange occurrences. Not necessarily a bad thing, since many luminaries have made the hotel their home, including Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Truman Capote. "