The LaLaurie Mansion

This chapter is different from the others in this book, and I want to say why before you begin.

Most haunted-house stories are built around a mystery. This one is built around something we know happened, because people saw it with their own eyes and wrote it down. The horror of the LaLaurie Mansion is not a legend about a ghost. It is the true story of human beings who were enslaved, tortured and starved in an attic on one of the most elegant streets in New Orleans — and of a city that, for a long time, looked away.

The ghost stories came later. They are part of this chapter, because they are part of how the house is remembered. But I’ll ask you to hold onto one fact as you read them: the people at the center of this story were real, and almost none of their names survive.

Madame LaLaurie

Marie Delphine Macarty was born around 1787 into one of the most prominent Creole families in Louisiana. She was married three times. Her third husband, a younger French physician named Leonard Louis Nicolas LaLaurie, was the man whose name she carried when, in 1832, the couple moved into a grand three-story mansion at the corner of Royal and Governor Nicholls streets in the French Quarter.

Madame LaLaurie was, to New Orleans society, a gracious hostess: cultured, wealthy, the mother of several daughters, famous for her elegant parties. The house was filled with fine furniture, imported china and art. And, like the homes of many wealthy families in the city, it was run by enslaved people.

Even in a society built on slavery, there were whispers about how Madame LaLaurie treated the people she owned. Neighbors noticed that the household’s enslaved servants looked thin and haggard. They seemed to disappear and be replaced. The whispers turned into something more serious in 1833, when a neighbor reportedly saw a young enslaved girl, often named in later accounts as Lia or Leah, running across the roof to escape a beating. The girl fell to her death in the courtyard.

An investigation followed. Under Louisiana’s slave laws — which offered only the thinnest protections to the enslaved — LaLaurie was found guilty of cruelty and forced to give up several of the people she held. They were sold at auction. According to later accounts, she arranged for relatives to buy them and then quietly brought them back into her house.

The Fire

On April 10, 1834, a fire broke out in the kitchen of the LaLaurie mansion.

The person who started it was the household’s cook, an elderly enslaved woman, who was found chained to the stove by her ankle. She told the rescuers that she had set the fire deliberately. She said she would rather die than face being taken up to the attic — to the room, she said, where those who went never came back.

Neighbors and townspeople rushed to fight the fire and save the house’s valuables. They asked about the enslaved people. Madame LaLaurie and her husband, according to newspaper accounts, refused to hand over the keys to the attic. So the rescuers broke down the doors.

What they found was reported in the city’s newspapers within days. Several enslaved people — the accounts vary on exactly how many, most often seven — were in a condition that the witnesses struggled to describe. They were starved, some to the point of being skeletal. Some were chained. Some had been wearing iron collars. Several bore wounds from severe beatings. One account described people bound in positions that made it impossible for them to move. The witnesses, who lived in a slave society and were not easily shocked, were shocked.

The survivors were carried out and taken to the city jail, the Cabildo, where they were put on public display — not to shame their owners, but so the people of New Orleans could see for themselves. Thousands came. Some of the survivors died soon afterward from their injuries and starvation.

The Mob

As word spread, a crowd gathered outside the mansion on Royal Street.

The mob broke in and ransacked the house. They smashed furniture, tore down curtains, broke windows and threw the family’s possessions into the street. Some accounts say they nearly destroyed the building entirely before authorities intervened.

But Madame LaLaurie was gone. During the chaos, she and her family escaped in a carriage. They made their way out of the city, and eventually she sailed to France. She lived the rest of her life in Paris, never facing any criminal charges for what happened in her attic. She died there around 1849, though for decades rumors persisted that she had returned secretly to New Orleans, or that she was buried in the city under a false name. In the 1930s, a cracked copper plate was reportedly found in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 bearing an inscription that identified “Madame LaLaurie, née Marie Delphine Macarty,” and claiming that she had died in Paris in 1842. Historians have never been able to reconcile the dates.

The Legends

Over the following century, the story of what happened at 1140 Royal Street grew. In 1946, a writer named Jeanne deLavigne published a book of New Orleans ghost stories that described the attic in lurid, grotesque detail: medical experiments, surgical mutilations, bodies arranged in grotesque tableaux. Those details have been repeated in countless books, websites and television shows since — and, most famously, in a popular television series in 2013.

Historians who have gone back to the newspapers of 1834 say most of those embellishments do not appear in the original accounts. The original reports are terrible enough: starvation, chains, collars, beatings, people too weak to stand. The later inventions turned real suffering into a horror movie. I’ve chosen to stay close to the record here, because I think the people who died in that attic deserve to be remembered for what they actually endured, not for what someone imagined about them a hundred years later.

The Haunting

The mansion was badly damaged in 1834 and was later rebuilt and expanded; much of what stands today dates from after the fire. Over the following century and a half, it served as a public high school for girls, a briefly integrated girls’ school during Reconstruction, a music conservatory, a gentlemen’s club, a furniture store, a bar, a tenement and, later, luxury apartments. In 2007 it was bought by the actor Nicolas Cage, who lost it to foreclosure a couple of years later.

Through every incarnation, people have reported strange experiences.

Residents and passersby have described hearing screams and moans coming from the upper floors at night. Some have reported seeing the figure of a young girl on the roof, running, then falling — and vanishing before she hits the ground. Others describe a man in chains appearing in the house, sometimes on the stairs, sometimes in the old servants’ wing. Tenants in the apartment years reported being attacked by an unseen force that left scratches and bruises.

French Quarter ghost tours stop on the sidewalk outside every night. Guides tell the story, sometimes with the lurid embellishments, sometimes without. People take pictures of the upstairs windows. Almost no one gets inside.

The Names

In the end, what haunts me about the LaLaurie house is not a ghost.

It is that we know the name of the woman who did this, the name of her husband, the names of her daughters and her house and her street. We know the name of the woman who wrote the ghost story a century later, and the actor who bought the house. But the people who were starved and chained in that attic — the cook who set the fire, the girl who fell from the roof — appear in the record almost entirely without names. Ages. Conditions. Injuries.

That silence is the real horror of 1140 Royal Street. It is the silence of a whole system that treated human beings as property. And if anything still walks the upper floors of that house, I think it is that.