LaLaurie Mansion

Marie Delphine Macarty was born in New Orleans in 1787 into a wealthy and influential Creole family. Widowed twice, she managed large estates and the people enslaved on them, and in 1825 married a much younger physician, Louis LaLaurie. In 1831 she bought a corner lot in the French Quarter and built a two-storey mansion with attached quarters for the enslaved household. Rumours of cruelty followed her: the English writer Harriet Martineau, who visited in 1836, later recounted an earlier incident in which an enslaved girl fell from the roof while fleeing LaLaurie’s whip, and wrote that LaLaurie had been found guilty of cruelty and forced to forfeit enslaved people – whom relatives quietly bought back. Church funeral registers record twelve enslaved people dying at the house between 1830 and 1834, among them a woman named Bonne and three of her children; the causes are not stated.

On 10 April 1834 fire broke out in the kitchen. Responders found the cook, a 70-year-old woman, chained to the stove; she told them she had set the fire herself in despair, and that people taken to the upper rooms never came back. When the LaLauries refused to hand over keys, neighbours broke into the quarters and found seven people who, according to the New Orleans Bee, had been starved, chained and horribly injured. The survivors were taken to the city jail, where the Bee reported that as many as 4,000 people came to see them. Delphine LaLaurie was not arrested; she escaped by carriage to a schooner on Lake Pontchartrain, and an enraged crowd gutted the house. She settled in Paris, was never brought to justice, and died there in 1849.

The building standing today is largely not the house she knew. It lay in ruins for several years and was rebuilt after 1838 by Pierre Trastour, with a third floor added later. Over the following century it was a public high school, a music conservatory, a tenement, a refuge for young delinquents, a bar and a furniture store, and later luxury apartments. Actor Nicolas Cage bought it in 2007 for $3.45 million; it was lost to foreclosure in 2009. It is a private residence.

The ghost stories began in the nineteenth century, when the building was already known locally as “the Haunted House,” and grew with each telling. Jeanne deLavigne’s 1946 book Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans and later tour books added elaborate tortures and grotesque medical experiments that no primary source supports, and modern retellings sometimes claim a hundred victims. The documented crimes – the chained cook, the seven survivors, the twelve deaths in the registers – are horrifying enough, and they happened to real people. Historian Carolyn Morrow Long’s Madame LaLaurie, Mistress of the Haunted House (2012) is the most careful account of what the records actually show.

Passers-by and former residents have described screams and moans from the upper floors, the sound of chains, apparitions of enslaved people on the balcony and in the windows, a girl falling from the roof, and a woman in period dress said to be LaLaurie herself. Residents of the apartment era told of unexplained noises and of furniture moved overnight.

Accounts centre on the attic and upper rooms where people were found in 1834, the rear courtyard and former quarters, and the balcony and roofline. Today the house is seen only from the street, usually on evening French Quarter ghost tours.

The LaLaurie story inspired George Washington Cable’s “The Haunted House in Royal Street” (1888), Barbara Hambly’s novel Fever Season (1999), and Kathy Bates’s Emmy-winning role in American Horror Story: Coven (2013). The house is a stop on almost every French Quarter ghost tour.