Hottest Hell Tours - Burning Bright and Hot
Bond Ruggles on Dauphine Street
April 2024As its name suggests, this company is all about superlatives: Owner Bond Ruggles explains how she’s going about redefining the New Orleans walking tour industry.
– by Kim Ranjbar
photos by Ellis Anderson On any given day or night, you're bound to run into tour groups clustered around animated guides, crowding the French Quarter's sidewalks. In a city that plays host to nearly 20 million visitors each year, walking tours are omnipresent, most of which regale their guests with stories about ghastly hauntings, blood-thirsty vampires and Voodoo.
Some of them are mash-ups of urban legend, while others are demented plays on faux history, for instance, a colony of vampires residing in the Ursulines Convent. How is a visitor – or even a curious local – to separate truth from fiction?
Meet Bond Ruggles, owner of Hottest Hell Tours.
Bond Ruggles began tour-guiding eight years ago while pursuing a degree in American History at the University of New Orleans. An avid reader with a fervent love of the past, she dreamed of one day becoming a college professor and sharing her passion for knowledge with other students like herself. Tour guiding seemed like the next best thing. Named after Lauren Bacall's character in The Shootist, Bond seemed destined to entertain.
“I fell in love with being a guide,” she said. “As a historian, a lover of New Orleans, and as an ambassador who wants everyone to love the city the way I love it."
Bond quickly rose into management and over the next few years, helped the company she worked for become one of the most successful in the local tour industry. Unfortunately, conflicting opinions and management styles led to a parting of ways, but several other tour guides left along with her.
“They wanted me to start my own [company], and at first I didn't want to,” she said. By this time, Bond was working on her MA at the College of Charleston and she was unsure she could take it on. But after considering the possibilities and urging from her former co-workers, she decided to give it a go.
Hottest Hell Tours was founded five years ago as a partnership. The name came from a letter that the famous Axe Man, on a city-wide murder spree sent to local papers in 1919, in which he claimed he was “a spirit and a demon from the hottest hell.” In the fall of 2022, Bond bought her partners out. "Now I get to do things my way," she said.
A Hottest Hell tour group leaving Armstrong Park during an evening tour, photo by Ellis Anderson
Bond’s way differs from most walking tour companies in three primary ways.
Since she now holds a Master’s degree in history (she's also an adjunct history professor at the College of Charleston), Bond wanted her guides’ stories to be grounded in truth. During her years spent tour-guiding – both in New Orleans and in Charleston, South Carolina – Bond had noticed guests pulling out their phones, fact-checking the tales she spun. There was obviously a market for truth.
From the beginning of Hottest Hell, Bond committed to researching all the stories thoroughly. “I said we're going to blow their minds with the facts.”
Hottest Hell's informative tours intrigue and entertain, highlighting the fascinating truths, both golden and grim, of our city's past. They often repeat popular urban legends, countering the falsehoods with research and telling a version that’s verifiable through evidence - and often more spine-tingling or salacious than the original.
Secondly, Bond's initiatives are designed to create a satisfying work environment and a collaborative atmosphere at Hottest Hell. All full-time salaried guides earn an income that healthily exceeds what they would normally make by doing per-tour gigs. She plans on instituting profit-sharing in the future.
“When I began teaching, I realized that being in front of a classroom is the actual performance part of that job,” she explains. “But that’s a very small part of a professor’s job. Most of the work takes place behind the scenes - researching, writing, serving on committees, meeting with students.”
Taking her cues from university hierarchy structures, Hottest Hell’s salaried guides are also committee members responsible for building and facilitating company growth – including research and story development, training, and professional development. There's also a media committee currently working on a new podcast.
Hottest Hell guide Jeremy Trager gives a tour in mid-December 2023
Applicants for guides are asked how they feel about the Quarter and how they see it. Bond then explains her mission of building a team that's on “the right side of history.” If the applicant is a good match, they start training, and are given access the company’s archived research materials so they can write their own fact-based tours. They’re also taught about the Quarter as a living neighborhood.
“My main mission is to change the industry – and that starts with the way Quarter residents perceive our tour groups,” said Bond. “This place is a community built on hallowed ground. People were born here, married here, died here, suffered here, loved here and worshipped here.
'“People are still doing that here – it’s not simply a museum. We all need to keep that in mind and treat the French Quarter with reverence and respect. Those are basic company values.”
“This is a career company,” says Bond. “If you love being a tour guide and you want to be treated well, this is the place to do it.”
Hottest Hell Tours also offers benefits, which include paid holidays. In addition, Bond shuts down the tours during Lundi Gras, or if too many parades are coming through the French Quarter. Several of her guides are members of carnival krewes, people who roll with Krewe du Vieux and Chewbacchus. “You've got to experience New Orleans to be an ambassador. I want them to enjoy themselves.”
One other way the company sets itself apart: adult-only tours. At the very beginning, Bond and her fellow co-founders at Hottest Hell unanimously decided their tours would be restricted to adults.
“People wanted to focus on the tours and not their children,” says Bond.
Taking a Tour
On a bright spring Saturday a week after Easter, my boyfriend and I walked from Congo Square to Jackson Square, on Hottest Hell's “Gates of Guinee” tour (the term refers to the entrance to the underworld in the Voodoo religion). We met Doug Presley and after a short introduction and an even shorter list of rules, we were off.
Hottest Hell tour guide, Doug Presley in Jackson Square, photo by Kim Ranjbar
Ninety minutes slipped by like sand as Doug led us to Congo Square, the historic gathering place where the city's enslaved Africans would congregate on Sundays, enjoying a mandated day off according to King Louis XIV's code noir. Under the hoary oaks, our guide deftly explained the difference between Vodou, Hoodoo, and New Orleans Voodoo, and introduced us to the legendary Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau.
Amid a sprinkling of celebrity impersonations, Presley effortlessly entertained and educated us about Voodoo and Laveau's life, facts we'd never learned before. As a lover of ghost stories and the supernatural, I quickly realized I'd only been exposed to a narrow point of view, and while I don't want to give any spoilers, I will say I'll never look at Voodoo dolls the same way again.
Since it’s a widely held belief that Marie Laveau was a hairdresser, those wishing for good luck leave hair ties and clips at her house on St. Ann.
As we walked past the site of her Laveau's former home, and made our way through the neighborhood, Doug stayed on the blessedly shadier sides of the streets, beneath galleries and awnings, all the while reminding us to kindly make room for passersby. I noticed he also made a concerted effort to avoid standing in front of doorways, respecting residents’ privacy and historic properties – and encouraging us to do likewise.
Later, I asked Doug why he worked for Hottest Hell.
Doug said that Bond gave him his first job as a guide in the city and he jumped at the chance to work with her again. He understood she would hold the facts and how they’re presented to the highest standards – which clued him in from the start that Hottest Hell would be unique.
“She’s got the most brilliant mind for our business that I’ve ever encountered and I’ve worked all over the country,” he said. “I can’t tell you how thrilled I am with the direction this company is taking.
“We all have a passion for telling the stories of those who didn’t have a voice in their own lifetimes, and that’s what we’re going to continue to do.”
Bond agrees. And as a historican, preservation of the Quarter’s buildings is also important to her.
“On some tours, we explain how many buildings have been lost to neglect or short-sightedness. We explain how the Vieux Carre Commission was created in the mid-1920s to help oversee the Quarter and help ensure its survival.
“The French Quarter is the original heart of the city,” she said. “If we lose it to over-development or crass commercialization that turns it into a mutant Disney village, New Orleans will never be the same. Nothing lives long without a strong heart.”
Bond Ruggles at the gates to Armstrong Park, photo by Ellis Anderson
French Quarter residents interested in trying a Hottest Hell tour are invited to reach out to Bond Ruggles at manager@hottesthell.com.
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