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| Delphine LaLaurie |
With a long and diverse history, the many buildings in New Orleans, especially in the French Quarter, are known not just for their aesthetic beauty but also for some of their allegedly paranormal activity. One mansion in particular, known as the LaLaurie Mansion, is known not just for its supposed ghosts, but for the dark and violent history behind it.
The story of the mansion begins with Delphine LaLaurie, born Marie Delphine Macarty on March 19, 1787, in New Orleans, then the Spanish territory of Louisiana. Her first marriage on June 11, 1800, was to a Spanish royal officer named Don Ramon de Lopez y Angulo. In 1804, LaLaurie and Don Ramon were to travel to Spain, though he died in Havana while en route. LaLaurie, who was not with her husband at the time, gave birth to a daughter during the trip.
LaLaurie was married a second time in June 1808 to banker, merchant, lawyer and legislator Jean Blanque, who purchased a house at 409 Royal Street, New Orleans. Blanque later died in 1816, but not before the LaLaurie gave birth to four children.
LaLaurie married a third time on June 25, 1825 to physician Leonard Louis Nicolas LaLaurie. In 1831, she purchased a property at 1140 Royal Street, a three-story mansion with an attached slave quarters (this is the building that became the “LaLaurie Mansion”) that was known as the grandest home in the French Quarter. During this time, stories began to emerge claiming that LaLaurie was torturing or severely punishing her slaves. A neighbor of LaLaurie even said she saw LaLaurie chasing a slave girl (and LaLaurie’s personal slave) with a whip until the girl reached the roof, and subsequently jumped to her death.
One proposed cause of LaLaurie’s cruelty was the temporary period of extreme violence against slaves in New Orleans following the Haitian slave revolt from 1791 to 1804, the New Orleans slave rebellion in 1811. According to Daniel Rasmussen, author of American Uprising:
“The plantation owners were living in terror. They were terrified by Haiti. They had read the newspaper reports — once a week or so there’s some story about rapes, beheadings, brutality against whites in Haiti. And they think if they don’t crack down and keep their slaves under control, what happened in Haiti will happen in New Orleans.
“The forms of punishment were quite extreme. The 1811 revolt saw over 100 slaves beheaded. Their heads were put on poles stretching for 40 miles from the center of New Orleans out into the countryside. You’d see slaves’ corpses from the rebellion dangling from the city gates.”
These actions could have been the reason why investigators didn’t go to the LaLaurie Mansion despite reports that LaLaurie was mistreating her slaves, even though New Orleans possessed laws aimed at protecting chattel slaves. However, when witnesses saw LaLaurie burying the slave girl’s corpse underneath a cypress tree on her property, she was forced by the authorities to pay a fine of $300 and sell nine of her slaves. Unfortunately, LaLaurie arranged for her friends to purchase the slaves and return them to her, for which the friends were reimbursed by LaLaurie.
Others suggest LaLaurie may have felt prejudiced against slaves because all of the male figures in her life, including her father, had mistresses who were free women of color. It is known that at one point a lawyer was sent from the city of New Orleans to discuss the mistreatment of her slaves, so it can be assumed that LaLaurie wasn’t particularly friendly toward her slaves in private.
However, the full extent of LaLaurie’s cruelty would soon come to light following a fire that devastated the mansion in 1834, which was set by a slave woman who had been chained to the stove as punishment. Later, the woman said part of the reason she started the fire was because none of the slaves taken to the room in the top floor “never returned.” When firefighters arrived to extinguish the flames, some claim they discovered a secret barred door in the attic which allegedly revealed a terrible sight.
This is where what exactly LaLaurie did (if anything) gets more than foggy. Some of the more popular claims are that slaves, both men and women, were found sometimes chained to walls or strapped to tables. Punishments included slaves who had their arms and legs broken then set at unusual angles, while another slave had a hole cut in their head with a stick to “stir” their brains. In other parts of the room, buckets of organs and limbs could be found. Others claim one slave had their genitals cut off, or that a slave’s stomach was cut open and their organs tied around their waist.
Though ghastly, there is much to suggest none of this is true. Many stories of such torture didn’t appear until the 1940’s, so if they were true then such descriptions should have appeared in legal documents or reports at the time. So where did these claims come from?
Most newspaper accounts at the time reported that slaves were merely being kept in “poor conditions,” though the New Orleans Bee was the paper which exaggerated the stories to torture and medical experiments. The Bee‘s sole informant was LaLaurie’s neighbor Monsieur Montreull, who interestingly had a spurned love affair with LaLaurie. Many of the claims which arose in the 1940’s were later repeated and exaggerated yet again in Journey Into Darkness: Ghosts and Vampires of New Orleans in 1998, written by the operator of a local ghost tour business. However, the book’s claims were either unsourced or contradicted by the sources provided.
Regardless of what exact conditions the slaves were found in by firefighters, they were apparently bad enough that an angry mob of residents began to form outside the mansion demanding vengeance, some carrying hanging ropes. Before any action could be taken against the LaLaurie family, a carriage emerged from the mansion’s gates, sped past the crowd and disappeared. With no one to bear the brunt of the mob’s anger, the mansion was ransacked and heavily damaged by the crowd.
What happened to LaLaurie after she and her family fled the mansion is up for debate. Local superstitions claimed the family lived in the nearby forests, or that relatives in Louisiana took them in, although it is known LaLaurie’s family returned to Paris, France. LaLaurie’s ultimate fate however is unknown, though French records state she died on Dec. 7, 1849. One claim is that she died in an accident hunting boar, though it is unlikely that LaLaurie was type to go hunting herself.
Some believe LaLaurie may have returned to New Orleans under an assumed name, which is very unlikely. Some New Orleans residents believe LaLaurie is buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, after an old, cracked copper plate was discovered in Alley 4 of the cemetery reading “Madame LaLaurie, née Marie Delphine Macarty, décédée à Paris, le 7 Décembre, 1842, à l’âge de 6–.”
The most likely explanation is that LaLaurie died in Paris. In letters between LaLaurie and her children (who lived with her in France), LaLaurie often mentioned wanting to return to New Orleans, though her children expressly forbade her from doing so.
After the fire, the LaLaurie Mansion was used for multiple different purposes. The building was ransacked and vandalized by the angry mob as soon as the family fled, though people claimed to hear agonized screams coming from the empty house and see the ghosts of slaves wandering the balconies and yard of the estate. Vagrants who stayed in the house were believed to never be heard from again.
In the 1890s, the house became the center of rumors surrounding the death of Jules Vignie. From the 1880s to 1892, Vignie lived secretly in the house and, despite being the eccentric member of a wealthy New Orleans family, he was found dead on a tattered cot. Vignie lived in poverty, even though police found a bag containing several hundred dollars near his body and several thousand dollars in his mattress. A collection of hidden antiques and treasures were hidden in the surrounding rooms as well.
Eventually the mansion was used for apartments, where a tenant was found brutally murdered in his room in 1894. Police investigators determined the murder had been a robbery due to his belongings being ransacked, although nothing valuable was found to have been stolen. One of the victim’s friends told police during the investigation that he was having trouble with “sprites,” and that the friend had been told by the victim that there was a demon in the house who “wasn’t going to rest until he had met his end.”
Other uses in the mansion included a bar called “the Haunted Saloon” and a furniture store, although the furniture store allegedly did not last long. The merchandise was reportedly discovered on several occasions covered in a dark, stinking liquid which the owner attributed to vandals. One night, the owner waited for the vandals with a shotgun, and even though no humans entered the store, the furniture was once again covered in the strange liquid.
Today, the LaLaurie Mansion has been renovated and used for luxury apartments. Ghost tours are also held for those looking for those seeking some scary history and paranormal activity, with some reports including apparitions resembling slaves, women and articles of clothing being tugged or pulled. Though the history is more sinister than most buildings, the LaLaurie Mansion continues to be an important part of New Orleans and a popular destination.
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