Louisiana ghost lore seems to be of two persuasions.
Deep in Cajun country, for example, far removed from the steamy alleys and crushing tourism of New Orleans, ghosts can be gentler sorts who would rather gaze idly through wispy drapes at the occasional passerby than to wrap their bony hands around the nearest warm neck or to scare the bejeebers out of a wandering sightseer. That’s not to say those sudden frights don’t occur, it’s just that they seem a bit rare.
New Orleans tales, however, have a definite strain of the macabre with overtones of the undeniable, albeit fictional, romanticism of the antebellum South. Perhaps that schizophrenia attests to the city’s multiple personalities—the birthplace of blues and jazz and its modern incarnations in the bawdy revelries of Bourbon Street; the historic terminus of riverboats carrying gentlemen gamblers, plantation overseers, and crinoline-clad belles to the genteel society of the old city; the uninhibited glamour and excitement typified by Mardi Gras …
… and the mysterious, chilling legacy of voodoo and slavery.
Though not all of the stories originate in the French Quarter, that most exotic of all American neighborhoods does seem to have more ghosts per square block than any other part of any city.
There is, for example, Marie Laveau.
When she died on June 15, 1881, Marie was New Orleans’s most famous voodoo priestess. Her grave in St. Louis Cemetery Number One, on North Rampart Street, is on a popular tour sponsored by the aptly named Voodoo Museum. Curiously, her tomb is often marked with little “x’s” drawn in the brick dust, while shells, coins and beads are strewn around its base, along with occasional flowers and scribbled notes all seeking Marie’s intercession in some temporal difficulty.
Unfortunately, their devotion to the dead voodoo queen may be misplaced. Many folks believe that Marie is actually buried in an unmarked grave in St. Louis Cemetery Number Two; it’s really Marie’s daughter in the tomb at the first cemetery.
Whichever grave holds the remains of Marie Laveau, mere, it is indisputable
that her life has passed into New Orleans legend. Fact and fiction have blended to create a figure of almost mythic proportions.
Those New Orleans historians who believe there were, indeed, two Marie Laveaus—mother and daughter—say mama Marie died in the early 1880s. Her place was taken by her daughter, also named Marie, who had her own voodoo practice until the turn of the century.
But others cling to the belief that only one Marie Laveau existed.
Their Marie was born sometime in the early 1800s and was practicing voodoo as early as 1830, in Congo Square. Her home was at what is now 1020 St. Ann Street. African-Americans, Cajuns, and Anglos flocked to her door to ask special favors. From charms that cured diseases, to love potions, poisons and spells, Marie could accommodate almost any request. A portrait of her in the House of Voodoo, 739 Bourbon Street, depicts her as a wrinkled old hag with blazingly white hair. One long strand curls down the side of her face and ends in a serpent’s head at her neck.
What may be most fascinating, however, is the legend that Marie never really died, in a paranormal sense anyway.
Reports have placed her ghost in the vicinity of St. Louis Cemetery Number Two on several occasions. One man said she slapped him as he walked by the graveyard.
Her old home on St. Ann Street has been the subject of tales of wild voodoo ceremonies practiced by the ghostly Marie and her followers.
Curiously, another house may also harbor Marie’s ghost. In the late 1980s, a family that lived on Chartres Street told reporters that their house contained “a diaphanous form” that seemed to hover in the living room near the fireplace. The house was built in 1807 by Pierre de La Ronde. According to legend, Marie Laveau lived there for some time. Also, a murder may have been committed under its roof, according to psychics consulted by the owners. The owner of the house told the newspaper writer he wasn’t sure the ghost was that of Marie Laveau. “In New Orleans, the ghosts are part of the package. We just move in and they usually make room for us,” he noted serenely.
However, it may not be all that difficult to contact Marie Laveau. One legend has it that she turned herself into a large black crow when she sensed that she was dying. That bird can still be seen flying noisily around her final resting place.
If you’re fortunate enough to see Marie herself, and want her to perform a small miracle, be forewarned. She will expect to be paid well for her services. But whatever you do, don’t disappoint her. Death does not rob a voodoo priestess of her powers over the forces of darkness.
There are two well-known New Orleans stories involving the old French Opera House. Though each takes place in the last century, their tales of love and loss resonate through the decades.
The young man was paying a visit to his first Mardi Gras celebration. His childhood in a large Eastern city had not prepared him in any way for such an uninhibited, colorful pageant as he saw unfolding before him. All during Carnival, he had taken in as much as he could and now, on Shrove Tuesday night, he sat transfixed in the French Opera House watching the Mardi Gras Ball swirl across
the stage. Tomorrow there would be fasting and prayer as Lent began, but tonight was still for revelries.
Then the young man saw her—the loveliest woman he had ever seen—and sitting only a few rows away. His gaze slid lovingly over her slim form, and her dark Creole features, both contrasting sharply with the shimmering white silk gown she wore. From that moment on, the gaudy spectacle on stage might as well have been taking place a thousand miles away, so taken was he by her ravishing beauty.
At some point during the evening, and the young man could never quite remember when, their eyes met. He smiled. She smiled, slightly. His friends barely noticed when he excused himself to go to the lobby.
A few minutes later, the Creole girl swept through the curtained doorway into the grand foyer of the Opera House where he waited patiently. Somehow he knew she would join him there.
He did all the talking. She seemed very shy, a not unappealing blush creeping up her neck as he began to speak. All that he recalled of that first encounter is that he asked her to accompany him on a walk in the spring night air. She demurely nodded her assent.
Once on the sidewalk, however, her demeanor changed quite dramatically. He had compelled her to leave her opera seat, she said, though she couldn’t quite explain how that might have occurred since she left of her own volition. Further, she stated, her fiance, with whom she was seated, would be very upset to know that she was talking to this impertinent young man.
If that was the case, the chivalrous suitor said, then it was incumbent upon him to marry her to save her reputation. What her words were in reply are not known, but she never returned to the ball.
So this strangest of all Mardi Gras courtships began with the simplest of words, the recitation of their names, and moved swiftly forward as he suggested they might have dinner at a nearby Royal Street restaurant. Again, she agreed, not yet quite understanding how she could fall so swiftly and completely under the spell of this handsome stranger.
At the restaurant, the couple exchanged the kind of personal information most lovers reveal over the course of weeks or months. Quiet conversation mixed with gentle laughter over childhood memories as they revealed their family backgrounds and their dreams for the future. The hours passed quickly, food and wine satiating their more earthly hunger.
Dawn found them on the steps of St. Louis Cathedral for Ash Wednesday services. They would not wait any longer to exchange wedding vows and sought out a priest who proceeded to marry them that very morning.
The couple then went to her home to assure her worried parents that she was safe and, to their surprise, married to a man whom they had never met. Despite the highly unorthodox courtship, her family grew to accept the young husband as part of their family, even though they knew the couple would be living in the east so that he could continue in business.
The story does not have a fairy-tale ending. Within weeks of the couple’s return to his home and business, the young wife succumbed to an unknown illness. She was buried far from her grieving New Orleans family.
At the next Mardi Gras, the owner of the Royal Street restaurant where the couple had first dined received a letter from the sad young widower. In it he asked that the same dinner be set out as was served to him and his Creole bride on their first, and only, Shrove Tuesday together in New Orleans. He included a check
to cover the costs. The restaurant manager complied with the request in all its details. No one showed up to eat the elaborate meal.
For more than two decades, the man sent a check so that a similar meal could be prepared at the restaurant. When he died a wealthy widower, his will contained a bequest that the tradition continue “as long as the restaurant remained in business.” In this way he could celebrate his enduring love for the woman who died too young.
Is the story true?
Cynics suggest it is fiction, but the restaurant on Royal Street continued to set out its most delicious dinners at two empty places for many decades. A centerpiece of bright flowers and Carnival decorations complemented the fine food. The attentive wine steward filled the goblets with the finest French champagne, while a silent waiter didn’t think it odd that course after course was never consumed. No one at the restaurant even knew the couple’s names.
The ghost dinner became a commemoration of a love that transcended death and time.
She was an ancient hag, with white hair and blazing red eyes looming from a bony, ashen face. In 1907, witnesses swear she descended the front steps of the French Opera House, walked to the intersection of St. Ann and Royal Streets and thence into a rooming house. Boarders who met her in the hallway found new accommodations the next day!
The ghost was thought to be that of a woman who had fallen in love with a much younger man. When she discovered that her beloved had made love to a younger woman, she committed suicide.
Soon thereafter, the young couple was mysteriously asphyxiated in the rooming house when a gas jet was somehow turned on in their room. It was the old woman’s ghost who did the dirty deed, several residents avowed.
The wraith haunted the neighborhood for many years until the serendipitous discovery of an old letter. It seems that a boarder in the couple’s old room found the missive, a love letter from the old woman to her youthful lover, secreted between the chimney and mantel. After she read it, the boarder threw it on the fire.
Suddenly, the ghost materialized and tried unsuccessfully to retrieve the letter from the flames. With a vengeful cry, she swirled about the room and vanished. Forever.
The ornate mansion at 1319 Saint Charles Avenue was to be avoided at all costs. At this address, the Devil once took up residence in New Orleans.
Built sometime in the 1820s, the so-called Devil’s Mansion took form, according to legend, literally overnight. Satan needed the house for his beautiful lover Madeleine Frenau.
So quickly did the house go up, however, that each room was at a different level—steps led up or down to every room. Even so, the mansion was outfitted with the best Satan’s money could buy. Crystal chandeliers hung above carved
mahogany furniture, while the finest dinner china and silverware were set for visitors who never came. Strangely, no servants were ever employed there. Not even dust dared gather in the Devil’s own kingdom.
Mademoiselle quickly tired of being left alone to wander the lifeless rooms while the Devil plied his “trade” on the wicked streets. Sometimes he would be gone for several days at a time.
Eventually, she found another lover. His name was Alcide Cancienne, a vain and handsome Creole man who found in Madeleine such physical pleasure as he had never known. Again and again he came to Saint Charles Avenue to lose himself in Madeleine’s charms. Alcide was unaware that he had a rival who would stop at nothing to destroy the illicit liaison.
One day Alcide was particularly morose. As was the couple’s habit when the Devil was away, they were eating dinner in the elegant dining room. Madeleine asked him the cause of his melancholy. He told her of his experience a few hours earlier. On the sidewalk outside the mansion he had been accosted by a dark-haired man attired in a great cape and top hat. The stranger asked him if he knew Madeleine Frenau. Alcide said truthfully that she was his lover. He was on his way to see her at that very moment.
The stranger laughed merrily and said that he, too, was her lover but that he had grown tired of her. Alcide could have her, but on one condition. The couple would leave with a million pounds of gold, the stranger promised, if Alcide promised to change their names to “Monsieur and Madame L.”
Alcide told Madeleine that he was puzzled as to what the “L” stood for. She evaded answering for a few moments, but at last she acknowledged that the “L” symbolized Lucifer. To leave St. Charles Avenue they would have to become the “Devil’s couple.”
Despite the conditions, Madeleine begged to leave with Alcide. She had had enough of the Devil’s insatiable depravity.
Alcide just laughed at her. He had no intention of taking Madeleine anywhere. The Devil was right. He, too, was growing tired of her. And she was growing old, he added. There were many other younger and more beautiful women he could have. Besides, a mistress would never make a proper wife.
Mademoiselle Frenau was furious. She grabbed a long cloth napkin and before Alcide could act she had twisted it about his throat, crushing an artery. Blood spewed from the dying man’s mouth, soaking Madeleine’s hands and gown. Alcide slid off the chair and fell in a heap on the lush carpet, a pool of blood forming beside his head.
For the rest of the night, Madeleine tried to wash the blood from her body and clothing. It would not go away. At last the Devil returned from his rounds. Madeleine told him of the events, but he simply chuckled in merriment. His plans were progressing nicely, he thought.
He hoisted Alcide’s corpse over his shoulder, grabbed the struggling Madeleine by the arm, and climbed to the roof. Grinning, he told Madeleine that he had not had a decent meal all day. With that he began to devour Alcide’s body, leaving only a few bloodied shreds of skin. He threw those to the alley below for the neighborhood cats. His hunger was still not satiated. He turned to Madeleine …
For many years the three-story house stood vacant, its bottom windows barred, moss growing on the pillars. A family finally moved in during the 1840s, but with
them came the ghosts of Madeleine and Alcide. It was always the same. In the dining room, a large table would materialize. Seated at it were the diaphanous figures of the young couple. Soon there was a scream and Madeleine’s ghost lunged for the deceitful Alcide. As she twisted the napkin around his throat, the entire scene faded away. That family, and many others after it, found the horrible scenario too upsetting to stay for long.
The only family to stay was Charles B. Larendon and his wife, Laura (Beauregard) Larendon, the daughter of Civil War General Toutant-Beauregard. The Larendons saw the ghostly murder take place many times, but grew to accept the Uninvited Ones. They loved the house and remained for many years. Sadly, the Larendon’s infant daughter died there. Mrs. Larendon passed away soon after. Charles remained a virtual recluse, keeping meticulous diaries of his experiences there. It was he who was responsible for gathering the house’s incredible early history.
A Mrs. Jacques and her family later lived in the Devil’s Mansion but the haunting overwhelmed them. Not only did the spectacle in the dining room frequently turn up, but often there was the acrid smell of smoke when no fire was set in one of the numerous Italian carved fireplaces, doorknobs would be twisted by unseen hands and disembodied footsteps raced up and down the hallways.
To passersby familiar with the house, the weirdest sight of all was the head of the Devil himself embedded in the gable. Some said it was simply a hideous gargoyle made of stone or bronze, but those who really knew said it was the head of the living Devil himself. How did they know? If you watched carefully, the eyes would follow your path and its lips would pull back in a snarl, revealing long, spiked teeth soaked in human blood.
The house was razed long ago.
Would you knowingly buy a haunted house?
And if you did, how would you go about appeasing the resident specters?
In New Orleans, making peace with the nearly departed can be an allconsuming chore because, it seems, almost every old house in the city harbors its share of ghostly tenants. Quite a few have become designated historic sites or museums, so the ghosts can wander unimpeded, knowing their routines won’t be upset.
The strikingly austere Le Pretre House, at the corner of Dauphine and Orlean Streets, for instance, would come with a sultan and his five translucent wives—if it were on the market. In 1792, the unlucky Arab and his comely retinue were all murdered in their sleep. Despite that definite end, their ghosts continue partying well past midnight on certain dismal nights.
At the French Quarter’s Hermann-Grima Historic House, 820 St. Louis Street, resident ghosts are of a kindly nature. On chilly winter mornings, they will light the fireplaces and scatter the pleasant essences of lavender and roses about the parlor.
For the sheer number of ghosts in residence, however, the Beauregard-Keyes House, 1113 Chartres Street, is the clear winner. It’s hard to ignore the clattering footsteps of an entire phantom army regiment!
Gen. Pierre Beauregard leads the invisible Rebels in a re-enactment of the Battle of Shiloh in the various rooms of his magnificent house. The soldiers materialize out of the paneled walls on those foggy, moonlit nights reminiscent of the bloody Civil War battle. Gen. Beauregard, of course, went down to bitter defeat in the final minutes of the Shiloh bloodletting.
Why the good general chooses to re-enact his worst hour in his former New Orleans mansion rather than at the original battlefield is anyone’s guess.
A local historian said there is another legend at the Beauregard-Keyes House. Dancers and a fiddle player stage ghostly soirees in the ballroom.
Interestingly, caretakers deny that anything unusual has ever been documented. Nevertheless, the Beauregard-Keyes House is a strong contender for the city’s most haunted mansion.
A house in the 700 block of Royal Street is noted for the beautiful female ghost that walks across its roof. And she’s an x-rated wraith at that!
The girl was a young slave who fell in love with a handsome Creole lad. He promised to marry her if she would prove her love by spending the night on the roof of his house naked.
On a cold December night, she obeyed his bizarre demand, for she was hopelessly in love with the man. She stripped off her clothing and walked back and forth on the roof. Her fiance found her frozen to death the next morning.
Neighbors say the young woman re-enacts her fatal devotion whenever December nights turn especially chilly; her nude form is clearly visible against the moonlit sky.
Nakedness also plays a role in another famous New Orleans ghost story, although the perpetrator was very human. But the cause was quite clearly something else again.
In this case, a policeman watched wide-eyed as a young man, naked as a jaybird and covered with soapy water, raced by him on St. Peter Street. After a short chase, he caught the streaker a few steps up Royal Street. The cop hastily threw an overcoat about the man’s shoulders … and then asked what in blazes was going on.
Doctor Deschamps was at fault, the young man stammered to the cop. It seems that he was lounging in his bath when the doctor dropped by his old apartment.
That is to say his head did.
In midair.
And directly above the terrified bather.
The startled cop and most of New Orleans knew all about the ghost of Doctor Deschamps. He was the dentist from hell.
Some years before, at his apartment/office at 714 St. Peter Street, Doctor Deschamps had carried out a hideous plan. He had somehow become obsessed with a treasure he claimed was hidden somewhere nearby. He enticed a young girl to act as a medium so he could find the treasure. He hypnotized her day after day, but each time failed to get from her any of the information he demanded. Hypnosis gave way to torture and, finally, murder when he smothered her with a towel doused in chloroform.
Doctor Deschamps was found guilty of murder and hanged.
For decades, occupants of the doctor’s old apartment said his ghost and that of the innocent young girl played out their fateful scene. Doctor Deschamp’s ghost was “a burly, muscular man with hairy, apelike arms,” one witness said. The girl’s ghost cringes in a corner as her torturer rages about the room. At one time, the haunting supposedly frightened the author Oliver La Farge.
What of the young man who encountered the incredulous police officer? After he told the authorities what he had seen, he never again set foot inside 714 St. Peter Street. Friends bravely cleared the apartment of his clothing and furniture.
The French and Spanish in the old Quarter knew the place all right. La maison est hantée, they whispered. The house is haunted. And not just any house. This address, 1140 Royal Street, is the most notorious haunted house in all of New Orleans, and perhaps in all of Louisiana as well.
On Royal Street was the 1830s home of the Madame Delphine Macarty Lalaurie, a monstrous purveyor of torture and death, wrapped in the guise of a beautiful, sophisticated society belle known throughout the city for her lavish entertainments and grand balls.
The most famous names in early New Orleans frequented Madame Lalaurie’s salon. New Orleans’ raconteur and author Lyle Saxon said that as late as the 1920s Madame’s old mansion was “the largest and finest in the neighborhood, rich and beautiful in detail.”
But her public demeanor was a hideous charade. Lurking behind the charming smile and crinoline skirts was the soul of a sadist, a woman who reveled in unspeakable cruelties and slow, agonizing death; the exact number of helpless slaves ripped and sliced apart on her instruments of torture will never be known. Madame Lalaurie may have been the most prolific murderess in early American history.
Those unlucky enough to have heard or seen the ghosts of her victims claim they are far removed from anything else the supernatural world might inflict upon the living. The twisted, translucent forms are missing limbs, or a length of intestine might dangle from a gaping stomach wound, maybe an eye or a pair of lips might be sewn shut with heavy black thread. Blood spews from the severed buttocks of one particularly hideous specter.
For a few unfortunate pedestrians, a casual stroll past 1140 Royal Street has included witnessing the suicide of a young black girl as she plummets from the mansion’s roof, her dying screams lingering in the still, humid night air. Knowing it is all a ghostly reenactment of an actual suicide does not lessen the terrible suddenness of the event. Some say it was murder.
The house of Madame Lalaurie is old enough to harbor many ghosts. One tradition is that Jean and Henri de Remairie built it in 1773 on land they received through a royal grant from the French Crown. The forty-room mansion passed through various hands until Delphine de Macarty inherited it. She was married three times, the last to Doctor Leonard Louis Nicolas Lalaurie in 1825.
Other historians, however, point to conflicting legal records. A court record seems to show that Madame Lalaurie bought the site in 1831 and had the house built and ready for occupancy in 1832. Old City Hall records declare that Louis
and Delphine (Macarty) Lalaurie bought the house from Edmond Soniat du Fossat on August 13, 1831.
Believe what you will of the mansion’s origin, Doctor and Madame Lalaurie’s magnificent house was all that early New Orleans society could have wanted in a center for lively galas.
The exterior of the three-story mansion, though almost plain to the point of severity, is graced by delicate lace ironwork around the second-floor balcony and by street-level arched windows.
If the outside was undistinguished, the interior was lavish even by the excessive standards of the antebellum South. The house was made for grand parties. Mahogany doors with hand-carved panels of flowers and cherubic, human faces opened to parlors and dining rooms lighted by crystal chandeliers aglow with hundreds of candles. Fireplaces taller than a man warmed almost every room, while the finest products of Eastern and European furniture-makers rimmed the walls. Fabrics of satin and velvet were draped in dazzling array from the walls. Guests dined from delicate, European china.
The charming and beautiful Madame Lalaurie knew how to impress New Orleans society and they, in return, made her mansion on Royal Street reverberate with hundreds of voices laughing in earthly delight. Night after night the pampered rich in their slippered feet strode through the front portico and across the marble floor of the entrance hallway and preened before the great, gilded mirrors. Their attentive hostess bustled about the rooms seeing to their comforts.
But beneath the veneer of sophistication was the cursed institution of slavery, practiced with special gusto by Delphine Lalaurie.
Attending to the house and its luxurious furnishings were dozens of slaves. A small black girl helped dress Madame; another dusted the downstairs rooms and served the petit fours. A large black man whose name may have been Carlos fetched Madame’s foodstuffs. Another slave was the wine steward and still others washed Madame’s clothes, or swept the courtyard. One had the exclusive task to bathe Madame’s favorite poodle!
Ironically, it was Madame Lalaurie’s personal maid whose suicide gave the public its first inkling of her mistress’s secret life.
Her name was Lia. She leaped from the mansion’s roof one afternoon. Her body smashed into a long banquette on the sidewalk outside the house, missing by only inches a startled passerby who alerted authorities.
Before Lia’s suicide, there had been some quiet conversations about how Madame’s servants seemed to never stay long in her employ. A new young girl would replace the parlor maid with no explanation as to her whereabouts, or the slave who groomed Doctor and Madame’s horses suddenly disappeared from the stable—never to be seen again.
Understandably, Madame Lalaurie had a very difficult time explaining away Lia’s death. Suspicions were raised, but after all, Madame insisted, the girl was nothing more than a piece of property to be used or gotten rid of. And yet … the first whisperings of unease from Madame’s old friends were being heard. A few party invitations declined, a dinner abruptly cancelled, a night at the theatre called off …
On April 10, 1834, however, all doubts about Madame Lalaurie were expunged. The full story of Madame Lalaurie’s cruelties were revealed in particulars so disgusting that people from the shores of Lake Ponchartrain to the Old Spanish Trail talked about it for decades.
On that otherwise pleasant spring day, a small fire brought the city’s fire brigade
to the mansion. An elderly black woman, who herself may have started the fire in a desperate attempt to attract attention, begged the firemen to unlock the door leading to a garret apartment. Human beings were captives up there, she cried.
At the top of the uppermost flight of stairs they found the room—Madame Lalaurie’s chamber of horror. Even the most hardened of the firemen cried out in anguish at the depravity of anyone who could have created such an abomination.
The April 11, 1834 edition of the New Orleans Bee reported the event in the typically verbose style of nineteenth-century journalism:
“The flames having spread with alarming rapidity, and the horrible suspicion being entertained among the spectators that some of the inmates (sic) of the premises where it originated were incarcerated therein, the doors were forced open for the purpose of liberating them … Upon entering one of the apartments, the most appalling spectacle met their eyes—seven slaves more or less horribly mutilated, were seen suspended by the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other. Language is powerless and inadequate to give a proper conception of the horror that 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.”
“ … They had been confined by her (Madame Lalaurie) for several months in the situation from which they had thus providentially been rescued, and had been merely kept in existence to prolong their suffering and to make them taste all that the most refined cruelty could inflict … .”
It was left to witnesses other than the Bee’s anonymous reporter to catalogue the tortures found in Madame Lalaurie’s secret chamber.
All of the victims were naked and chained to the walls. Some of the women had their stomachs sliced open and their intestines wrapped around their waists. Other females were covered with black ants, supping on gobs of honey spread over their bodies. One had had her mouth stuffed with animal excrement and then sewn shut.
The men were in even more hideous condition. Fingernails had been ripped off, eyes poked out, or buttocks and ears sliced away. One poor soul hung lifeless from his shackles, a stick protruding from a gaping hole that had been drilled into the top of his skull. It had evidently been used to “stir” his brains.
Several had their mouths pinned shut.
One man had his severed hand stitched to his stomach.
All of the prisoners wore heavy iron collars about their necks and their feet were in shackles, according to one newspaper account.
The torture had been carefully administered so as not to bring quick death. Nevertheless, some of the slaves had apparently been dead for some time. Others were unconscious. One or two were crying in incomprehensible pain, begging to be killed and thus relieved of their agony. At least two of those rescued died of their injuries later in the day.
Just how many slaves were found in Madame’s torture chambers during and after the fire is not certain. Some of the servants who had “vanished,” or supposedly been sold to other owners, actually never made it out of the house.
While Madame Lalaurie’s grisly hideaways were being searched, and the small fire doused, she apparently stayed in the mansion. But even in the slave-holding South of the 1830s, her barbarism was too much for the city.
The New Orleans Daily Picayune detailed what happened next in an 1892 history of the events:
“A silence fell upon the faubourg, but it was the ominous silence that precedes the outburst of the smoldering wrath of an outraged public. During the morning, an idle crowd hung about the Lalaurie mansion, the numbers increased toward midday and by evening the throng was so dense that standing room was almost impossible upon the pavement. They hissed and hooted and some cried out for satisfaction. Madame Lalaurie did not mistake the meaning and conceived and executed a bold plan for flight.
“Promptly at the hour at which she was accustomed to take her usual drive her carriage drove up before the door and Madame, dressed in her usual elegant style, stepped out upon the sidewalk and entered the vehicle. In a second more the horses were going at full speed over the clean, smooth shells of Bayou Road. Madame was taking her last drive in the fashionable quarter, and it was a drive for life itself. It took but an instant for the crowd to recover from her masterful stroke of audacity, and in another moment they were at her back, yelling and hooting and screaming: ‘Stop that carriage!’ ‘She is running away!’ ‘Drag her out!’ ‘Shoot her!’ ‘Shoot the horses!’ but in vain; the coachman drove furiously on; the horses went at a break-neck speed; they had borne their mistress before and would not fail her now, and fashionable New Orleans stopped its carriages and watched in blank amazement …
“Mrs. Lalaurie, it is said, took refuge for ten days near the spot where the Claiborne cottage stands in Covington, whence she made her way to the Mobile and thence to Paris.”
Madame Delphine Lalaurie’s eventual fate is in dispute. The Daily Picayune’s history of the Lalaurie mansion states that she lived all her final years in Paris, in a handsome mansion that, like its New Orleans predecessor, grew to become a favorite of the cultured and elite of the city. She died, the newspaper said, “in her own home, surrounded by her family.”
Another account, however, published in the 1940s, alleges that Madame Lalaurie secretly returned to New Orleans some years later and settled in a home “on the Bayou Road.” She called herself “the Widow Blanque.” A record may actually exist showing a “Mrs. N. L. Lalaurie” freed a slave in 1849 in that same district.
Wherever the fiend of Royal Street finally came to rest, there is no record of any legal proceedings being taken against her for the crimes she so wantonly committed. And nothing shows that she ever again saw her New Orleans mansion.
The same cannot be said of those she butchered.
The ghosts swirling about 1140 Royal Street have been the stuff of legend virtually from the day Madame Lalaurie’s carriage pulled away from her front door for the last time.
A local agent, apparently on the instructions of Madame herself, placed the mansion on the market. Records indicate that it was sold in 1837 to a man who kept it only three months. He was plagued with strange noises—cries and groans and rattling chains—so that he was unable to spend a single peaceful night there. The nameless gentleman also tried to rent out several of the two-score rooms, but tenants only stayed a few days. Neighbors reported seeing the front door swing open on its own, and windows rise up and down without assistance.
A furniture store and barber shop may have also occupied the premises, but again, for just a very short time.
One particularly unnerving episode took place above the old stables some years after Madame Lalaurie fled for her life. A black servant was spending the night there when he was suddenly awakened by someone choking him. Bending over him in the dim light was a pale woman with black hair, a terrible look of anger on her face. She had his throat firmly in her grasp. As he was nearing unconsciousness, another pair of hands, black hands, appeared and pried the woman’s fingers from his throat. Both the assailant and the servant’s savior faded away in the murky darkness.
Following the Civil War, Reconstruction found the Lalaurie Mansion turned into an integrated high school “for the girls of the lower district.”
In 1874, the notorious White League succeeded in forcing the black children to leave the school. Later, a segregationist Democratic school board made the school for black children only, but that lasted only a year.
After a period of vacancy, the Lalaurie mansion again found itself the center of society when an English dance teacher opened a “conservatory of music and fashionable dancing school” in 1882.
However, the resident ghosts seemed to have other ideas.
All went well for several weeks. The teacher was very popular, drawing the best young ladies and gentlemen of New Orleans society. A newspaper wrote of that wistful time: “Music and light and laughter filled the great apartments, and it was pretty of a spring evening … to watch the girls in their light and graceful costumes flitting about the great rooms and over the broad balcony to the measured strains of music, while the voices of a tenor or contralto trilled through the apartments and floated out upon the dreamy street.”
The dream ended abruptly. A local newspaper apparently printed an accusation against the teacher, perhaps alleging improprieties with one of his young charges, just before a grand soiree was to take place at the mansion. Students and guests stayed away and the school closed the next day. The spirits hanging about the old mansion undoubtedly danced well into the night at such wonderful news.
Not everyone was driven out of the haunted mansion. Rumors of lost treasure at 1140 Royal Street surfaced in 1892 after the death of Jules Vignie, the eccentric offspring of a prominent French family.
Vignie lived in the Lalaurie house virtually unnoticed in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Indeed, those who had known Vignie after the Civil War were surprised at the news; they had assumed him dead long before. He was a studious collector of antique furniture, fine paintings and bric-a-brac of all sorts, and had worked for a prominent New Orleans auctioneer for years.
Vignie’s body was found on a tattered cot in the attic by neighbors curious at recent signs of activity in the house. They were amazed at the beautiful furnishings Vignie had managed to acquire. A bag containing several hundred dollars was found near his body. Quick searches revealed another $2,000 secreted in his mattress.
Vignie’s possessions were sold off and the house stayed vacant until immigrant Italian families sought housing in the Old Quarter. The Lalaurie Mansion became an apartment complex for several dozen families. For many of them, their lives in the Lalaurie mansion were anything but peaceful. The ghosts would not be stilled:
• A towering black man wrapped in chains confronted a fruit peddler on the staircase and then vanished on the bottom step;
• Strange figures wrapped in shrouds flailed away with riding crops;
• A young mother screamed when she confronted a white woman in elegant clothes bending over her sleeping infant.
• Stabled mules died mysteriously after being visited by a white-robed woman; dogs and cats were found strangled and torn in two. And always, always the groans and screams from the attic rooms.
It was never easy to keep tenants in the old house, and that was made even more difficult after one owner decided to perform some remodeling.
Workmen discovered several skeletons under the old cypress floors. The remains were found not in orderly graves, but as if they had been dumped unceremoniously into the ground. Well, the owner tried to reason, the house had been built on old Spanish and Indian burial grounds. True enough, but his response was dismissed when authorities said the bones were of relatively recent origin, certainly buried after the house was built.
What was found, officials concluded, was nothing less than Madame Lalaurie’s own private graveyard. She had removed sections of the house’s floor, dug shallow graves and thrown the bodies of her tortured slaves in them so as to avoid having to answer for their deaths. The mystery of the sudden disappearance of Madame’s slaves was finally solved.
The twentieth century has seen the mansion on Royal Street renovated and become, for now, a favorite sight on tours of the Old French Quarter.
But sad Lia still plummets from the towering roof on moonlit nights, the groaning of tortured souls can be too much to bear, and no one stays long in this evil house. The ghosts of the innocent men and women Madame Delphine Lalaurie sent to premature graves may be too numerous to ever go peacefully from this world.
The marsh known as Honey Island Swamp is the reputed hunting ground of a legendary creature known as the loup garou, the swamp thing. If not precisely a ghost, it is certainly an oft-reported creature not known for its sociability.
The mysterious wetlands near Slidell have given rise to all sorts of tales—people who have gone for a day hike never to return and, in the nineteenth century, of escaped slaves building new lives somewhere in the impenetrable water wilderness.
The swamp thing, a sort of big-foot creature said to look much like the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest, was even once reported along Interstate Highway 10 after severe flooding of the Pearl River. Hunters have claimed the thing chased them until they were nearly prostrate with exhaustion. More level-headed observers, however, claim the reports are the product of too much drink and too little skepticism.
But the stories of loup garou will not go away. Popular hikes into the swamp—with a guarantee of a safe return—always include tales of Louisiana’s own missing link.
Far removed from the steamy alleyways and boulevards of New Orleans reside other wraiths known for gentler, kinder hauntings.
Just why this should be the case is a mystery. Perhaps these courteous old plantation revenants were taught in life to respect the privacy of others. Why shouldn’t the wellborn retain their dignity even if they have been dead for over a century?
Take kindly old Mr. Holt for example.
For most of his life, he was secretary to Frederick Conrad, the popular owner of The Cottage, a lush plantation that once graced the Great River Road landscape south of Baton Rouge. In the decades before the Civil War, Conrad entertained the likes of Zachary Taylor, the Marquis de Lafayette, Jefferson Davis, and Henry Clay. Francis Parkinson Keyes wrote The River Road while living there. Long before it burned down three decades ago, and even today, various ghostly tableaus have been played out in its stately rooms.
The most well-known tales concerned Mr. Holt himself. He was born in 1802 and died in 1880, but that’s not the least of it. As far as is known, he is the only Louisiana ghost to have had his photograph taken … a half-century after his death!
But first about the man himself.
Mr. Holt was devoted to Frederick Conrad, so that when Federal troops occupied The Cottage in the waning days of the Civil War it isn’t surprising that both men were tossed in prison. Conrad died there, but Mr. Holt was at last released and returned to The Cottage to live out his remaining years.
Prison apparently warped Mr. Holt’s mind. In the dozen years or so that he lived at The Cottage, he developed a pathological fear of poverty. As the lone tenant of the old mansion, he saw to it that each shred of cloth was carefully stored away, unused pieces of twine wrapped on a spindle, and even spare biscuits tucked away for some future repast. Long after his death in 1880, Mr. Holt’s insurance against indigence was being discovered by The Cottage’s subsequent owners.
Added to his odd behavior was the appearance of Mr. Holt himself. The occasional visitor would report that the old man was an insomniac who wandered through the plantation’s hallways all night long in a tattered white nightshirt, his scraggly beard splayed across his narrow chest. All the while he took great pains not to alarm guests or call undue attention to himself. A true gentlemen’s gentleman.
Beginning in 1880, shortly after Mr. Holt’s demise, his ghost reenacted his nocturnal wanderings. Right up to The Cottage’s conflagration in 1960, the old man’s countenance peered mournfully from the mansion’s ancient windows. It was at one of those windows that a photographer caught what was said to have been the ghost of shy Mr. Holt staring through the glass. The picture was published in The Elks Magazine.
Mr. Holt may not have been the only spirit at The Cottage. Vague dancing forms and faint fiddle and banjo music occasionally graced the generous front verandah on quiet, humid evenings. But these were musicales performed by
ghostly slaves at some ethereal soiree. Long after The Cottage was nothing more than a charred ruin passersby noted the occasional laugh or patter of tapping feet coming from what was once a grand and glorious place.
Louisiana is home to at least four topless wraiths that haunt three different plantations.
Lacy Branch Plantation, near Natchitoches in northwest Louisiana, can be thankful the ghost who haunts the nearby road hasn’t yet made an appearance near the mansion grounds. Those who have seen him, it, don’t forget the sight—a headless body appearing suddenly from the ditch to scare the wits out of motorists and late-night pedestrians. Sometimes the thing is on horseback. No one seems to know under what circumstances the ghost lost its head, or even who the hapless victim was.
An aimless, headless man shuffles about Skolfield House, near Baton Rouge, harmlessly looking for the rest of his being. His identity, too, is unknown. An earlier Skolfield specter was so nice—she was the wife of a former owner who resented her husband’s new bride. Around the kitchen this woman-ghost scorned would rattle, knocking pots and pans to the floor and slamming doors. She vanished when death claimed her former husband. Their battles on “the other side” are probably dreadful affairs.
Kenilworth Plantation, below New Orleans, is a poignant reminder that true love knows not even earthly bounds.
A man and a woman, ghost lovers, stroll hand in hand through the rooms and hallways. Sometimes his arm is about her corseted waist. Both are dressed in elegant antebellum clothing. Neither speaks a word, nor can they. Each is absent its head!
At least two Louisiana plantations have intriguing stories of legendary buried treasure connected with them.
A bevy of specters haunt ancient St. Maurice Plantation, outside St. Maurice, between Shreveport and Alexandria, including an intriguing fellow who hovers a few yards from the house, supposedly over the location of secret treasure.
However, a number of years ago the plantation’s owner tried digging in the earth there. His metal detector indicated the presence of metal. A few feet down he found … a pickax.
The visitor may have more success in spotting one of St. Maurice’s other ghosts—a lady in the attic, several playful children and a former caretaker. The plantation has been open for tours in recent years.
Saint Bernard Parish is on a desolate peninsula southeast of New Orleans. The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet Canal slices through the area, while the Biloxi Wildlife Area stretches across the parish’s thumb near Lake Borgne. There are no settlements east of tiny Yscloskey.
One of Louisiana’s most gruesome lost treasure tales arises from this dismal
region, at the old Mercier Plantation, and dates back over a hundred years.
An old black woman who worked as a cook there nearly collided with the ghost of her former owner, Mr. Mercier himself, when she stepped out onto the porch one humid summer night. He called her by name—“Sarah”—and told her to meet him behind the milk house that night. He would show her where a fortune in gold was buried.
Not only did she not want to meet him anywhere, but she screamed her head off at the sight of the dead man, summoning nearly everyone else in the household to her side. As she stammered out her story, everyone else’s eyes blazed with the thought of hidden riches.
News of the episode soon reached the ears of a black minister who volunteered to lead a delegation to the milk house treasure. The group met at eleven o’clock at night—the ghostly Mr. Mercier’s stated time—and the preacher began to dig. Suddenly, he dropped his shovel and screamed in pain. He said the Devil had grabbed him; witnesses said they could hear the sound of a whip striking the poor man. Awful welts rose on his back; blood oozed through the fresh rips in the preacher’s shirt.
Sarah pushed through the throng. She could “see” Mr. Mercier, she cried out, it was he who wielded the whip. He was angry that Sarah had disobeyed him and allowed others to search for the treasure.
Within minutes the minister was unconscious. He died of the terrible injuries a few days later. No one knows what became of the gold supposedly buried at Mercier Plantation.
Not all of Louisiana’s ghosts live in antebellum homes and ancient plantations. Some mysterious things have been seen in the desolate countryside of the Pelican State.
The old Roddy Road in Ascension Parish, about twenty miles south of Baton Rouge, was once called the Lighted Lane of Gonzales. Fascinating, dancing lights were often seen there late at night. Witnesses said they saw what looked like a match being struck, with the light then moving alongside the roadway. One legend maintained that a young woman was buried along this road and a light placed over her grave to keep the night away.
Sheriff Hickley Waguespack reportedly saw the strange light in April 1951, according to newspaper accounts. He said it had a “yellowish cast” but didn’t create a distinct beam. The light wouldn’t let anyone approach it.
Swamp gas, or phosphorous fire, is said to be prevalent in this part of Louisiana. Caused by rotting vegetation, the swamp gas is sometimes seen as a shimmering light in rural areas.
Ponchatoula is a small town in southern Tangipahoa Parish, thirty miles north of Lake Pontchartrain. There is a haunted gum tree there that weeps with the pearl-like tears of a young woman who committed suicide under its branches.
The ghosts of soldiers buried in unmarked graves haunt the woods near Marksville, on the Red River in east central Louisiana. An old legend holds that a Civil War battle was fought on the road near the woods and the dead buried in a trench. At night the men still march among the trees … headless.
An avenue of oak trees leading to Parlange Plantation in Pointe Coupce Parish is the setting for a particularly poignant ghost story.
The Marquis Vincent de Ternant of Dans-ville-sur-Meuse built the mansion. He obtained the land from the French crown.
The Marquis’ son, Claude Vincent de Ternant, had four children with his second wife, Virginia Trahan. One of their daughters, a beautiful girl named Julie, went mad on her wedding night. As hundreds of guests looked on, she started screaming and ran hysterically down the oak alley pursued by her distraught husband. She collapsed and died several hundred feet from the house. Her sobbing specter is seen on moonlit nights running down that very same path at Parlange.
Madisonville boasts two ghosts on its old streets.
A depressed druggist rented a room at a St. Mary Street boardinghouse operated by a Mrs. Puis. Sometime in 1911, he retired to his room and promptly shot himself in the temple. Students at St. Anselm’s Church school reported for many years that they could see his ghost through the window of his old room or walking back and forth in front of the boardinghouse.
The Silk Lady appears only at night and only at the western end of Johnson Street, in the Palmetto Flat area. Sadly, no one knows her origins or what she seeks.
Is it any wonder that a man who built his own coffin and regularly slept in it at night haunted his old home?
That was precisely the case at Oakland Plantation, near Haughton, in Boosier Parish. Ex-Confederate Colonel Sutton believed firmly in the importance of providing for one’s own future. He placed the burnished wood casket in his own bedroom and regularly passed the nights in peaceful slumber within its cozy interior.
Don’t believe such a thing could happen? Neither did the two handymen employed at Oakland years ago. That changed when they swore old Colonel Sutton’s regular stroll across the squeaky floorboards of his bedroom ended when he climbed in the coffin. From that night on, the men slept behind locked doors with an ax and a pick as their only companions.
Colonel Sutton doesn’t seem to have any connection with the other legendary ghosts at Oakland Plantation, a quartet of ghostly horsemen who charge their mounts around the grounds. An amazing sight it must have been one evening after nightfall when the horsemen clambered onto the verandah still mounted, pounded through the doorway, down the long hall and out the back door. The veracity of the story may be questioned owing to the fact that the horses have never left behind any telltale reminders of their unpredictable visits.