NOLA Ghosts

1. The LaLaurie Mansion

New Orleans, LA

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Welcome to the LaLaurie Mansion. Known to many simply as the Haunted House of the French Quarter, it is also regarded as the most haunted house in New Orleans. For nearly two centuries, this infamous grey mansion has fascinated and terrified residents and visitors in New Orleans. This 12,000 square foot mansion was built in 1831 for Marie Delphine Macarty LaLaurie, and her third husband, the French-native Dr. Louis LaLaurie. Together Louis and Delphine were the toast of New Orleans society, until a fire exposed the dark, sadistic streak in these glittering socialites. Born to the prestigious Macarty family, Delphine's family owned vast tracts of land up and down the Mississippi River and on the north shore of Lake Pontchatrain. Her cousin Augustin was even mayor of New Orleans from 1815 to 1820. Her first two husbands, politically well-connected, would die sudden deaths, leaving her with added prestige and wealth. The toast of 1830s Creole society, the LaLauries were renowned for the extravagant parties and lavish entertainment hosted in their mansion. Many considered Mrs. LaLaurie gentle and sweet, and her younger husband a respected doctor. However, the celebrated couple lived a secret double life. The mansion's long and accursed history first erupts into public view on the night of April 10, 1834. Delphine and Louis were renowned in New Orleans for their parties, and this night was no exception. The house is packed to overflowing with revelers when a fire breaks out in the kitchen, quickly spreading to the slave quarters. The LaLauries seem unconcerned, assuring their guests that the building is empty. They direct the guests and slaves to bring all the home's finery out in to the streets. The band sets up in the intersection, and the drinks and party continue to flow in the streets as the slave quarters burns. Eventually some of the guests become concerned about the possibility that some slaves may have been trapped in the quarters. Brushing past the LaLauries and their crude objections, they burst in to the slave quarters, smoke billowing into the street outside. One by one, slaves stumble out of the building, revealing the horrid conditions they had been kept in. Beaten and starved by the LaLauries, a dozen or so mutilated slaves gather on the sidewalk on Hospital Street, to the horror of the guests still assembled outside. The slaves' bodies are bruised and broken, bearing the marks of whips and other torture devices. One man is even has a hole in his head from which maggots are crawling in and out of his brain. While their guests are distracted by the hellish scene unfolding on the street, Delphine and Louis will slip back into the home and lock themselves inside. In the kitchen they discover an elderly slave woman bound to the hearth with heavy chains. She curses her rescuers out, saying that she had set the fire on purpose, wishing to burn to death rather than spend one more day in bondage to Delphine LaLaurie. She claims that Delphine had been responsible for the death of her darling granddaughter, Leah. In an incident two years earlier, hushed up by Delphine's money and influence, the poor young woman had died after plummeting from the rooftop of the slave quarters into the courtyard below, dashing her brains on the cobblestones below. Leah had jumped out of desperation, seeing no other way to escape Delphine and her relentless bullwhip. The infraction that had led Delphine to beat the young slave girl until she committed such a desperate act: she had yanked a tangle in Madame's hair while brushing Delphine's flowing red locks. When firemen arrive at the house, the cook rushes to greet them and proclaimed that they need to help the poor souls still trapped within the home. She leads the men to a heavy oak door with no handle at the top of a narrow staircase. When they fight past a resistant Madame LaLaurie, they force the door open and proceed to the attic to check for embers. They are overcome by the odor of decay and death. According to an excerpt from the New Orleans newspaper "The Bee," given the next day on April 11, 1834, "...the doors were pried open for the purpose of liberating them. Predisposed to taking this liberty, (If liberty it can be detailed) several gentlemen impelled by their feelings demanded the keys, which were refused them in a gross and insulting manner. Upon entering one of the apartments the most appalling spectacle met their eyes. Several slaves more or less horribly mutilated, were seen suspended from the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other. Language is powerless and inadequate to give a proper recollection of the horror, which a scene like this must have inspired. We shall not attempt it, but leave it rather to the reader's imagination to picture what it was! The slaves were the property of the demon in the shape of a woman whom we mentioned in the beginning of this article. They had been confined by her for several months in the situation from which they had thus been rescued and had merely been kept in existence to prolong their sufferings and to make them taste all that the most refined cruelty could inflict. But why dwell upon the particulars! We feel confident that the community share with us our indignation, and that vengeance will fall, heavily full upon the guilty culprit." Some believe that Dr. Louis LaLaurie and his wife were conducting horrific medical experiments on the slaves. According to accounts, the victims were men, women, and children and included a caged woman who had her limbs broken and set at unnatural angles as to resemble a crab; a mutilated sex change operation; a woman whose limbs were removed and odd circular pieces of skin removed to resemble a human caterpillar; faces removed to resemble gargoyles. Signed witness statements further proclaim that tongues, noses and ears were hacked off and sometimes crudely reattached, eyes gouged out, both eyes and mouths sewn shut. Many of those that survived the treatment died of smoke inhalation. Angry residents quickly gather into a lynch mob, demanding blood. They grow more agitated by the moment, but give up a cheer when they see an official-looking carriage approaching, believing it is the police arriving to arrest the wicked couple. Instead, it is the getaway vehicle: the LaLauries' own carriage, driven by their faithful coachman Bastien. He charges his way through the crowd, drawing the carriage to the front door. Delphine flings open the door with such authority that the crowd parts, allowing her, Louis, and her three youngest children to quickly climb inside and gallop off in to the night. The LaLauries make their way through the dark to the Bayou St. John in Mid-City, boarding a boat that will take them to France, where Delphine lives the rest of her days in a luxurious apartment in the heart of Paris. She dies nearly two decades later in 1853, interred, at least temporarily, in the Montemartre Cemetery in Paris. Delphine's spirit, though, will not rest peacefully for long. Her home is torn apart by the vicious mob gathered outside when they realized the LaLauries had fled. It would sit, a hulking ruin, for decades. Almost immediately, the mansion becomes the scene of ghostly tales, as people reported hearing the tortured shrieks of the LaLauries maltreated slaves echoing through the streets surrounding the home. In the 1850s, the mansion was refurbished, but it would never shake the curse of the events that had transfixed the city of New Orleans. Owner after owner would come to ruin, with none seeming to last more than a few years at most. Soon, no one wants to reside in this once-grand mansion. By the 1870s, the mansion is cut up into dozens of tenement apartments, mostly occupied by immigrant dockworkers and their families. Their children immediately begin to hear unexplained moans and groans. Disembodied screams, burning human flesh, dragging of chains, and scratching noises under the floorboards would bedevil the children's sleep. Their parents experience none of these mysterious phenomena, and write it off as simply their children's overactive imaginations. That is, until an immigrant dockworker comes home late one evening, and finds his way up the stairs blocked by a large black man bound in chains. He screams at the man in his native tongue to move, but when the apparition does not budge, he uses his hands to push the figure out of his way. His hands pass right through; the spirit dissolves into a cold mist! By sunrise the mansion was empty once more - all its residents fled in the night. It appears on postcards of the city as early as the 1880s, identified simply as "The Haunted House of New Orleans." People spending the night in the home report waking in the middle of the night to find a woman with long red hair glaring down at them as they slept. This same figure is reported by passersby on the streets below, seeming to stare right through them as they walk by. Many believed this was the spirit of Delphine LaLaurie, returned to New Orleans when her children had disinterred her remains in Paris, returning her bones to her native soil once more. The turn of the last century would see dozens of horrific tales become associated with the mansion. Anything the human mind could conjure had happened here: dead limbs sewn on living human bodies; lamp shades were being made of human skin. In the hours before the LaLauries fled the city the floorboards of an upstairs bedroom had been pulled up by the LaLauries. There they shackled a dozen or more of their servants, still alive, with their mouths sewn shut. When their muffled moans and the clanking of their chains were heard, it was assumed to be ghosts. Their remains would only be discovered decades later during a renovation of the home. It would become the depository of all the worst that humans could imagine other humans capable of. This notoriety makes the building something of a prize possession, but like the Hope Diamond, its beauty and majesty seem to exact a painful price. One owner after another comes to a bad end. One would open a "haunted pub" which he would be forced to close a few short years later, but not before bequeathing the house it's last documented spirit. A suite upstairs was rented to a curious old man who dies just days after taking possession. Amongst his belongings: $10,000 in gold. His spirit still haunts the hallways of the mansion, seeking his misplaced fortune. Owners through the decades find their health, sanity, and wealth ruined by the touch of this accursed building. One owner ends his days in an asylum; another slips into a coma after a bar fight. The most famous owner of all, Nicholas Cage, purchases the home just after Hurricane Katrina. Just a few years later he loses the home in a bankruptcy that would strip him of all his possessions in New Orleans, except his tomb in St. Louis No. 1 cemetery. Its current owner, a Texas energy trader, is using the mansion as a weekend home to entertain clients and friends. Here's wishing him the best of luck! During the tenure of the LaLauries in this home, 35 to 40 of their slaves disappear or die from unexplained causes. If all the others whose lives have been ruined or cut short from their association with the LaLaurie Mansion are included, however, its toll may well reach into the hundreds.