READ: Jennifer Lawrence Reports Paranormal Activity During Film Shoot in New Orleans
Academy Award–winning actress Jennifer Lawrence, known for unsettling films like mother! and the horror-thriller House at the End of the Street, says some of her scariest moments didn’t happen on a movie set. They happened in New Orleans.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Lawrence shared the stories on the “Las Culturistas” podcast, where she talked about “really bad” hauntings she experienced in New Orleans while filming her 2022 movie Causeway, as well as in Charlotte, North Carolina.
During the Causeway shoot, Lawrence said she moved three times before finally settling into a hotel in the city. One day, she was lying in bed when she heard a housekeeper enter the room. She recalled the woman coming in, apologizing for waking her, and leaving. It seemed like a normal interaction… until later.
When Lawrence got up and went to the door, she realized it had been deadbolted from the inside the entire time, making it impossible for anyone to have opened it and walked in. She acknowledged she might have been drifting in and out of sleep, but the clarity of the voice and the sequence of events left her deeply unsettled.
Before the hotel, Lawrence stayed in a local house during filming. That’s where the activity intensified.
She said that while watching TV alone, the kitchen doors suddenly began slamming open and shut on their own. On another day in the same house, she was washing her hair when a towel that had been sitting on the toilet fell and landed perfectly laid out on the floor, as if someone had carefully spread it out rather than it simply dropping. Taken together, the slamming doors, the mysterious towel, and the deadbolted hotel door formed a pattern that Lawrence clearly interpreted as paranormal.
Lawrence’s experiences fit right in with New Orleans’ long reputation as one of the most haunted cities in America. The city’s French Quarter and Garden District are famous for ghost stories tied to tragic histories, voodoo legends, and infamous locations like the LaLaurie Mansion. Above-ground cemeteries, historic mansions, and narrow, shadowed streets have helped shape New Orleans into a hotspot for ghost tours and paranormal lore. Many visitors leave convinced they’ve brushed up against something they can’t explain.
Jennifer Lawrence appears to be one of them, walking away from Causeway not just with another powerful performance on her résumé, but with a set of ghost stories that sound like they belong in one of her own movies.
