The Craziest Celebrity Gossip I’ve Ever Heard In Real Life

A very good question to ask any taxi driver is “Have you ever driven a celebrity?”

You will probably get a run of the mill response that is nonetheless interesting. The previous weekend your driver drove the band Journey to their concert at the Staples Center. They were very nice, very fun guys. This is a pretty typical celebrity encounter.

But once in awhile, if you ask the question persistently, you will be blessed with a truly bonkers celebrity sex story.

This is the case with the lightly unhinged Uber driver I encountered in New Orleans. He drove my friends and I from the french quarter to the garden district for the somewhat silly task of taking a few photos in front of the Buckner mansion and then driving us home. And then my friend was messy and left her purse outside the mansion so he ended us driving us around for an hour all around the city. We didn’t find her purse (it was turned into the police a few months later, after someone had enjoyed her $3 in cash and Sephora travel items) but we did learn a lot about our driver.

His most famous celebrity client was Nicolas Cage who famously lived in the quarter in Delphine LaLaurie’s mansion.

Nic Cage is just kind of a funny person to talk about in general. His acting is comically over the top, he might be a centuries old vampire, and he does low key insane things like buying Delphine LaLaurie’s mansion. LaLaurie was a brutal socialite and slave owner who built the mansion with her husband. When the mansion partially burned down in 1834 other members of New Orleans society discovered the torture chamber in her attic where she kept slaves. She fled the country and the mansion was turned into a school before being used as an apartment building, a bar, and even a retail store. In 2007 Nic Cage bought the mansion and lived there before it went into foreclosure.

The taxi driver’s story takes place when he was living in the home on the far end of the quarter.

He and his unnamed girlfriend (apparently she wasn’t famous enough for the driver to recognize her) lived there and were frequently interrupted by the presence of a female spirit. While sleeping in the master bedroom Nic would have sexual dreams that wandered between a dream state and awareness. The female spirit did not like his girlfriend and would make her cold and uncomfortable, and even push her out of bed during the night.

Nic, however, was adored by the enamored ghost lady to the extent that he would receive such juicy half-dream, half-real encounters that the events would end with a “happy ending”. The ghostly visits were frequent, messy, and they made his girlfriend jealous. According to our driver, Nic was planning to spend less time in New Orleans as a result of the “haunting”.

In 2009 the LaLaurie mansion officially went into foreclosure and was auctioned to a bank. There’s been no work done on the house and tourists are not allowed inside. It stands empty at 1140 Royal Street waiting for a new dapper owner to entertain it’s eternal inhabitants. The legacy of Nic Cage and the LaLaurie house exists pretty much as a fun story our Uber driver gets to tell about the time he drove Nic Cage and his gf around and they argued about how frequently he jizzed his pants in bed.

Ask your Uber drivers! You’ll never know what insane celeb gossip you may uncover.