Between May 1918 and October 1919, a killer stalked New Orleans’ Italian immigrant grocers, breaking through back doors with a chisel and striking sleeping victims with their own axes. At least six people were murdered and several more badly wounded across more than a dozen attacks. The press dubbed him the Axeman, and the city, gripped by fear, bolted its doors every night.
Then, in March 1919, a letter arrived at the offices of the New Orleans States, purportedly from the killer himself. Writing in a florid, taunting hand, he claimed to be “a fell demon from the hottest hell” and announced that on a specific night the following week, he would pass over the city — and any household playing jazz music in their home at the time would be spared. New Orleans took no chances. That night, dance halls overflowed, jazz bands played on street corners, and it was said no home in the city sat silent. No one was killed. Whether the letter was genuine or a hoax exploiting a genuine panic has never been settled, but the Axeman never struck a home playing music, then or after.
The attacks stopped as abruptly as they began. No one was ever charged. A woman named Mrs. Joseph Davi later claimed to have shot and killed her husband’s business rival, Joseph Mumfre, in Los Angeles in 1919, alleging he was the Axeman and had murdered her husband — but the connection was circumstantial, contested even at the time, and left the wider case legally unresolved.
The Song That Still Keeps the Door Shut
The Axeman’s letter effectively invented a piece of New Orleans folklore that outlived the murders themselves. “The Axeman’s Jazz,” a song written and recorded in the panic’s immediate aftermath, is still played at Halloween events across the city, and local ghost-tour operators in the French Quarter and the old Italian neighborhoods of Faubourg Marigny and the Lower Garden District include Axeman stops on their routes, pointing out addresses where axe marks were supposedly found in door frames. Residents of some of the era’s surviving shotgun houses have reported cold spots and unexplained knocking near back doors — the same doors the Axeman was known to chisel through — and at least one paranormal investigation aired on regional television in the 2000s claimed to record disembodied breathing in a former grocery on Magnolia Street tied to one of the 1918 attacks.
Whether the Axeman was a serial killer with a private grudge, a copycat panic magnified by newspapers, or something the city half-invented to explain a string of unrelated violence, New Orleans never forgot the lesson of that one silent-turned-musical night. Even now, jazz clubs in the Quarter sometimes invoke the story around Halloween, only half-joking that the tradition of never letting the music stop is the reason the Axeman never came back.