Legend will tell you the Tuesday evening March 18th 1919 was one of the loudest and

routiest nights in a city that promised to be loud and rowdy every night.

The story say that every saloon from St Claude to Gertown, from Bayou St. John to the

quarter, and across the river to Algiers was a drunken buck and all.

Neighbors boasted of the wild parties they threw that night.

Newspapers reported that you could hear the trumpets from the jazz clubs on Frenchman

Street all the way to Gentilly.

The tales will tell you that the parties all made sure to go past midnight, well past

1225 AM to be exact. Why? Because the Axeman demanded it.

He had returned to the shadows of New Orleans and restarted the hysteria he began the

previous summer.

Mercifully the Axeman had spared the city further corpses while it weathered a breakout

of the influenza pandemic, celebrated the end of World War I and lamented the dead.

He let the people of New Orleans cherish their revels during Marty Gawd season and eat

their king cake all without reports of overnight butchery.

But then the letter came. It was postmarked from hell and mailed to the editor of the Times

Piccassoon newspaper. He read,

At 1225 o'clock, earthly time, on next Tuesday night, I'm going to pass over New Orleans.

I'm going to make a little proposition.

I'm very fond of jazz music and I swear by all the devils. Every person shall be spared

in whose house a jazz band is in full swing. One thing is certain and that is some of

those persons who do not jazz it on Tuesday night will get the Axe.

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