New Orleans: Ghost Tour

So, anyone who's been around for a while knows that I have a slight addiction to ghost tours.
And New Orleans, especially the French Quarter, has a bit of a spooky reputation (IblameAnneRice). So I figured, what better place to hear some creepifying stories?



The tour started behind the St. Louis cathedral, with an image the guide calls "Touchdown Jesus." I'm sure you can see why!
Apparently the churchyard used to be the unofficial duel-site of the French Quarter, back when dueling was a popular way to resolve arguments. Normally duels here were fought with a sword, not a pistol, and they were to first blood, not to the death. But still, accidents happen, as they say.
Supposedly early in the pre-dawn hours, the most common hour for duels, passersby can sometimes still hear the clash of swords in that yard, and the scuffling of feet as the fighters battle...



Our tour guide was so excited he was a little hard to catch on film!



The next place we stopped was the obligatory creepy hotel. This one burned down during the Great New Orleans Fire, which burned over 800 of the almost 1,100 buildings in the city (yikes!). Lots of people died, including a few young children who had bunked down in this hotel for the night.
One couple stayed here for a weekend trip, and did not notice anything out of the ordinary during their stay. They went out a lot during the day, took plenty of photos of Mardi Gras on their disposable camera, and returned home after thoroughly enjoying themselves.
But when they developed the film on their camera, they immediately called the hotel to complain. The last two photos on the role were of the two of them, sound asleep in their beds, from a height of about 4 feet over their heads... As though someone had been standing on the bed straddling them and leaned over to snap the pic...



My totally blurry image doesn't do it justice, but our next stop was Jean Lafitte's Blacksmith Bar. Not too many scary stories here -- just reports of voices arguing in French and Spanish, and the occasional clash of swords when the bar is empty. But the coolest part about this stop was the history. Jean Lafitte was a privateer (read: pirate) in New Orleans, licensced by the French government to sack Spanish ships whenever he pleased. This bar used to be the blacksmith's shop he used to fence his stolen goods (which is probably why the spirits around there are still arguing/dueling!).



Our final stop was the very creepiest. It's not a ghost story, but it's plenty horrifying. If you've got a weak stomach, you might want to stop reading here...
This was the house of Madame Delphine LaLaurie, a prominent creole socialite in the early 1800s. Her first two husbands died mysteriously just a few years after she married them, leaving her, by this point in our story, one of the wealthiest people in the country, let alone New Orleans. She was worth 3 million dollars, back when the entire US treasury was worth about 10 million.
Her new husband, Dr. LaLaurie, a physician, lived in this mansion with her and two of her daughters.



Madame LaLaurie held huge balls at this house, parties that were the talk of New Orleans high society. A suspicious lawyer at the time had heard rumors of maltreatment of the slaves in the household, and tried to investigate. She banned him from the property, so he sent one of his employees -- who returned to the office absolutely charmed, and ready to duel with anyone who misspoke of the lovely lady.
Then, during one such party in 1834, a fire began in the kitchens. The fire brigade arrived to find everyone out on the street, continuing with the festivities, the servants still passing around hors d'oeuvres and pouring wine. Inside, as they battled the flames, they found the cook chained to the stove, unable to escape. They cut her free (later, it was suspected that she may have set the fire herself, to alert the outside world to the plight of those trapped in the mansion).
At the back of the kitchen, they found a heavy door, bolted shut. They tried to push through it, but it was locked and barred. One of the firemen ordered Madame LaLaurie to give him the keys. She and her husband refused, saying it was private property.
Afraid someone might be trapped inside, the men broke through the door. They were not prepared for the sight that met them on the other side.*
The first thing to hit them was the smell -- of rotten, dying flesh. A slave hung from the ceiling, manacled by his neck and one arm. His other arm hung limply, rotting -- you could see where it had been cut off and reattached, as though the physician and his wife wanted to see whether it would reanimate.
Another woman crawled across the floor by her chin, for it was the only means of motion left to her. Both arms and legs had been amputated at the joints, and great strips of flesh were missing from her torso.
In a box at the back of the room, they found a woman with every joint in her body broken backwards -- knees, elbows, wrists. She could only scuttle across the floor, crab-like, moaning in pain as she tried to escape the flames.
The firemen, horrified, began to carry the tortured slaves from the room, through the flames, and out into the street. There, the partygoers reeled with shock at what they were seeing. Many of them fled the scene, either terrified at what the LaLauries were capable of, or perhaps worried they would be implicated just by being at the party.
But as the story spread through the town, a veritable mob arose. Once the fire had been extinguished, the constable waited at the head of the street, keeping watch over the mansion as he awaited the order from the judge to arrest the couple.
Just as the mob was ready to break through the barriers, the gates to the carriage-house opened. The physician entered first, followed by Delphine, who, it is rumored, waved farewell to the crowd before she boarded.
Then, with the constable chasing after them, they fled the scene in their carriage.
The moment the constable left his post, the mob burst onto the street and flooded the house, ransacking it for every valuable in reach. Over the next three days, everything but the wallpaper and light fixtures had been removed.
And over the next three days, the ghost stories began. People told of blood-curdling screams and moans, heard throughout the house. They whispered of scratching sounds, cries for help... As soon as the valuables had been cleared out, the house was abandoned.
So it wasn't until years later, when a man purchased the mansion in the mid-1900s, that the rest of the story was unveiled. He dug into the floorboards of the carriage-house, planning to renovate it into a garage. Beneath the floor, he found human remains. Sixteen skeletons that showed signs of cannibalism. On the underside of the floorboard, nail-marks had been gouged into the wood.
Those moans and screams the looters heard during the first few days after the LaLaurie's departure were not the cries of vengeful spirits, but the screams of the house's remaining slaves. After the fire, imagine: your mistress orders you to the carriage-house, to ready her wagon for departure. Just as you've finished, you turn to find her and the master, pistols in each hand, trained at your heart. They kick open a trap door, order you under the floorboards. As soon as every last one of you has entered, they nail it shut above you. Then you hear the clip-clop-clatter of their carriage departing, and the stampede of feet as a mob attacks the house... But nobody heeds your desperate cries...

Unrelated fun fact: the LaLaurie Mansion is the house Nicholas Cage purchased in 2007, and which he was forced to sell back to the bank when he went bankrupt a few years later. More dirt on him in my next post on the cemeteries of New Orleans...

* Here the story grows a little sketchy -- many of these details were apparently embellished later, and probably aren't all true... But this is the version of the tale the guide told us.