The house of unspeakable horrors
The grisly legend of what once went on inside the house at 1140 Royal Street has haunted generations of New Orleanians and is the inspiration for the hit TV series American Horror Story. In the 1830s, Madame Delphine LaLaurie, a New Orleans socialite, and her husband, Dr. Louis LaLaurie, were by all outward appearances a well-respected couple in the community. But behind closed doors, they exercised their savagely sadistic inclinations: Madame LaLaurie is said to have tortured and murdered an untold number of slaves in the most horrific and unthinkable ways.
The couple’s heinous acts were finally revealed on April 10, 1834, when their house cook purposefully set a blaze and firemen were called to the mansion. According to Jeanne deLavigne’s Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans (written in 1946), the responding firemen found “male slaves, stark naked, chained to the wall, their eyes gouged out, their fingernails pulled off by the roots; others had their joints skinned and festering.” Journey Into Darkness: Ghosts and Vampires of New Orleans (written 52 years later, in 1998) by Kalila Katherina Smith, added even more explicit details about the state of the victims, including one who “had her arms amputated and her skin peeled off in a circular pattern, making her look like a human caterpillar,” and another who had had her limbs broken and reset “at odd angles so she resembled a human crab."
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Address 1140 Royal Street, New Orleans, LA 70116 | Hours Not open to the public; viewable from the outside only| Tip Though Nicolas Cage lost the LaLaurie mansion to foreclosure in 2009, his home for eternity remains in New Orleans. His burial site can be found in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. Though his name is not on the tomb, the bright white stone pyramid is easy to spot.
Since the LaLauries’ escape to France, subsequent owners have reported many ghost sightings. The house’s most famous proprietor was actor Nicolas Cage, who possessed the mansion for years but supposedly never lived there. One evening, a tour guide was standing before the property relaying the nasty tales to an assembled crowd. When the guide mentioned that Cage had never dared to stay overnight, the concealed actor leaned over from the upstairs balcony and yelled down, “Oh yeah? Well, I’m HERE tonight!”
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