 Dr. Louis Lalaurie and his wife Delphine were the toast of New Orleans during the 1830s. The doctor bought a grand Creole mansion for his young bride in the midst of the French Quarter at 1140 Royal Street and Delphine proceeded to decorate it in a lavish manner. The rooms were filled with the best European furniture and the ceilings were hung with cut-crystal chandeliers. The immense home was staffed by numerous African slaves that Madame Lalaurie dressed in the finest garments. She threw extravagant parties and quickly elevated herself and her husband to the pinnacle of New Orleans society. But the glamor and opulence hid a horrible secret.
Although well-educated and charming, Delphine also maintained a fanatical hatred for black people and was known to treat them with even greater disregard than most slave owners. Her sadism was said to be cultivated by the death of her mother during a slave uprising when she was a child. Whatever the case, her rabid hatred first began to create problems in 1833 when neighbors spotted Delphine chasing a small black girl across the roof of the home. Delphine cornered the girl and proceeded to lash her to a bloody mess with a whip. The child's pain was so intense that she actually threw herself off the three-story building to her death. Delphine hid the child's body in a well, but the New Orleans police found the remains and ordered the wealthy woman to sell off all her slaves. Unfortunately, the Lalauries were so well connected that their wealthy friends quietly bought up all of her slaves and returned them to Delphine. The savagery continued unabated.
A year later, the true scope of Delphine's brutality was uncovered for all of New Orleans to see. A fire broke out in the kitchen and swept through the house. Some said that the Lalaurie's African cook intentionally set the fire in order to escape her own intolerable situation... and maybe to kill Delphine in the process. Once the fire brigade had doused the fire, the community was horrified to find seven mutilated slaves shackled to a variety of torture devices in Delphine's attic. Some of the victims were dead, the rest were probably wishing for death. Some of the poor souls had been dismembered, others were impaled on metal spikes or had their bones broken and intentionally reset at odd, gruesome angles. One woman had her mouth sewn shut.
 News of the horrors spread quickly and a lynch mob quickly formed in the Quarter, but the Lalauries took to a carriage and escaped to the waterfront. What happened to them after their successful flight from the city is a matter of debate. Some accounts suggest that the couple fled by ship to France, where only a few years later the evil Madame Lalaurie was gored to death by a wild boar during a hunting excursion. A separate account indicates that the couple resettled in Alabama and continued to torture black slaves, apparently without the knowledge or concern of their new neighbors. A final and very intriguing theory has the Lalauries settling in the Northshore woods of Louisiana where madame began to study voodoo and satanism as a way of further torturing the blacks in that community.
The Lalaurie Mansion, now abandoned, sat untouched until after the Civil War when it was partially rebuilt and turned into a school for girls, a music conservatory and finally back into a private residence. The home, which is often referred to as “The Haunted House,” by the locals has a long and colorful history of haunting phenomenon. Curiously, the memory of Delphine appears to be one of the most commonly experienced apparitions, although everyone agrees that she never died there. Other reports appear to echo the misery of Delphine's slaves, with disembodied cries for help, the sounds of chains dragging on the floorboards, and ghostly figures materializing in the stairwells or hallways. Considering the home's horrid past, it would certainly qualify as an ideal epicenter for haunting activity.
[This information was originally transmitted as an enewsletter on April 21, 2006.] |
