The Anne Rice House (officially known by the Orleans Parish Landmarks Commission as the Brevard-Rice House) is a home, perhaps a mansion, located in New Orleans' garden district. It was built in 1857 for Albert Hamilton Brevard, and passed through ownership by several families until purchased in 1989 by Anne Rice, who lived there until 2004. The house is located at First and Chestnut Street, three blocks away from St. Charles Avenue, one of the major streets in New Orleans.
The house is also famous for being the (somewhat fictionalized) scene of Anne Rice's novel The Witching Hour and its sequels. It is the model for the Mayfair Mansion, the sprawling complex inhabited by a haunted and inbred family of New Orleans' witches. Like many places that I've read about in books, the actual experience of visiting it somewhat deflated the mental picture I had of the house. I imagined the mansion as a large house sitting behind a tall hedge, set back from the road, which I imagined to be a great boulevard. While the house is large, it lies at the juncture of two residential streets, and has only a few feet of yard between the house and the road. While in a way this does undermine the mental image I had for almost two decades, it does give another, more complex reading to how Anne Rice presented horror in these books: rather than the traditional "lonely castle" of the English gothic, she presented a horror where the events were visible in public, and were intertwined with the happenings of the community: all of the supernatural events in the book were not taking place in an isolated mansion, but rather along a busy residential street.
The house is a private dwelling, and the owners are probably not favored to people spending too much time ogling their house. However, it is a tourist landmark right in the middle of a famous tourist district, so viewing it from the sidewalk is probably appropriate.
2014 Horrorquest.