Haunted houses are everywhere in Louisiana, or so they say. What self-respecting plantation house or French Quarter garçonnière doesn’t have a benign ghost or two biding its time somewhere up in the garret. None, however, are more famous, or infamous, than Madame Delphine Lalaurie’s early 1830’s mansion, or haunted house, seen here in 1889 on the corner of Royal and Hospital streets in the Vieux Carré. By the way, in 1909 the city changed the name of Hospital Street to Governor Nicholls to honor the “valorous conduct” of Francis T. Nicholls, Louisiana’s two-time governor and Confederate general who fought at the Battle of Bull Run.
Who was Madame Delphine Lalaurie and what’s the story behind her “haunted house?” Herbert Asbury, in his delightfully written 1938 “informal” history of New Orleans titled The French Quarter, described Madame Lalaurie, born Marie Delphine Macarty in 1787, as a “bewitching and engaging creature.” She was, he continued, “a member of a very powerful New Orleans family, and herself so prominent in society that when Lafayette visited the city in 1825, she entertained him at dinner. Delphine was famous throughout Louisiana as a charming and gracious hostess, and is said to have been one of the most beautiful women of New Orleans of her time.” As to her third husband, Dr. Louis Lalaurie, Asbury pictured him as a “meek, mousy little man, wholly under her domination.”
Behind the façade, this “bewitching and engaging creature” apparently lived a Jekyll and Hyde life in the dark recesses of her mansion. Rampant stories of Madame Lalaurie’s barbaric cruelty to her enslaved servants prevail to this day – and, according to legend, so do their spirits. According to historian Carolyn Morrow Long, “rumors of her atrocities had been circulating for years.” It all came to light on April 10, 1834, when the house caught fire and seven enslaved people were found “starved, tortured, and chained.” Long continues the story in the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ 64 Parishes Encyclopedia: “As the day went on and the sheriff did not arrest the culprit, an increasingly angry crowd gathered around the Lalaurie home. Finally, her carriage burst out of the gate and sped to Lake Pontchartrain, where she boarded a schooner. The mob, enraged by her escape, nearly demolished the empty house.”
Lalaurie and her family fled first to Mobile and then to New York and finally Paris, where she remained the rest of her life. According to Long, Delphine died on Dec. 7, 1849, and was buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre, Paris. Two years later her body was returned to New Orleans and entombed at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.
More recently, Madame Lalaurie’s haunted house was briefly owned by actor Nicholas Cage. And this past July, its current owner put it up for sale with a price tag of $10.5 million. The ghostly legend, however, is free.
