On the first floor of most French Quarter strip clubs, the energy isn’t that much different from other dens of sexy dancing scattered across America. There’s the thump-thump of a club remix, criminally overpriced drinks, and—of course—half-naked women with names like Dynasty popping and locking with varying levels of enthusiasm. When you start exploring other rooms, though, that's when everything becomes a little more, well, eerie.

“It’s hard to tell from the street, but all those strip-club buildings on Bourbon Street are huge. I used to hate going to the upper floors and the smaller rooms in the back, because it gets spookily quiet. The hair on the back of your neck just stands up,” says Liam Deegan, a former bartender at the strip club Scores.

Deegan, who now co-owns the popular bourbon bar Barrel Proof, has a particular story he can’t shake. A dancer at the club—who was known for her laid-back personality—came flying down a back staircase to the bar one night, panicked and out of breath. In an attempt to sneak past a VIP area for a smoke, she had taken a quasi-hidden, underused path out of her dressing room and passed a strange mirror along the way. When she glanced in, what she caught looking back wasn’t her reflection, but a giant orb of light. The orb started moving, and chased her down the stairs like some sort of enraged spirit. “I didn’t go upstairs for a few weeks after that,” Deegan says.

For better or worse, many New Orleans strip clubs have a little something extra in store when you hit up a champagne room or sneak away for some private time—the promise of hauntings.

It might seem odd, at first blush, that ghost stories and sex are sold in incredibly similar fashion in the French Quarter. Upon closer inspection, though, it becomes all too clear how the two are inextricably linked. There’s an undeniable pull to people and places that are dangerous or forbidden, whether that manifests as a fascination with the undead or dating a guy with a motorcycle. What’s more, the tethering of pleasure to pain in the human brain makes us animal-like in our response process, serving as the root of everything from BDSM arousal to the adrenaline rush of walking through a haunted house.

The tug-of-war between the bass-pumping, tasseled, gyrating allure of the strip club and the faux-gothic mystique of ghost tours has pushed and pulled in the French Quarter for decades, with the two competing for the almighty tourist dollar and—funny enough—turf. “Ghost tours of the French Quarter became a phenomenon in the late 1990s, when Ann Rice’s vampire novels were all the rage,” says Dr. Richard Campanella, author of Boubon Street: A History. “On any given night today, you can see a dozen such tours milling around the lower Quarter telling their yarns. But they tend to stay away from the commercial end of Bourbon because its wholesale dedication to entertainment is incompatible with the shtick of the walking tours.”

"People say that they can still see the daughter of the man who lived there before it was a brothel. They also say they can see the head servant—a bigger lady—and from time to time, a little girl."

Located in the very heart of that neon-bright and beer-soaked stretch of Bourbon, Scores is the kind of strip club that somehow retains a charming, mom-and-pop feel. Harmless, potbellied men in sports-themed attire push past me onto the street, squinting like moles in the sunlight, and the lack of doorman at this strange midday hour feels like the ultimate welcome mat.

Sidling up to the bar on a warm Tuesday afternoon, I’m curious just how close to popping bottles with ghosts I’ll be able to get on my Ghostbusters-style strip-club crawl.

“One of the clubs I operate, Temptations, was maybe the first brothel in New Orleans back in the day,” says Chad Murray, Scores’ manager, who has joined me as I sip Maker’s. With his shaved head and two-sizes-too-small black T-shirt, Murray could easily win a Pitbull-look-a-like contest. “People say that they can still see the daughter of the man who lived there before it was a brothel. They also say they can see the head servant—a bigger lady—and from time to time, a little girl.”