Mad Madame LaLaurie

by Victoria Cosner Love

  The following quote appears in Jeanne DeLavigne’s aforementioned 1946 book, Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans:

  Workmen employed to repair the old cypress floors began digging up human skeletons from under the house. The owner of the property, in an attempt to down the mansion’s gruesome reputation, announced that the house had been built over an ancient Spanish burying-ground, and that over an Indian graveyard. Which was quite true, only—the bones were too recent to have been deposited there before 1803, and they were too near the surface to have been at any time buried in graves. They were found in all sorts of positions, helter-skelter, some barely covered with soil, shreds of fabric still adhering to some of the bones; and whenever hair was found near a skull, it was Negro hair. Some of the skulls had great holes in them. The authorities said that at least some scraps of wood or metal would have been found with or among the bones, had they been interred in coffins. As they were not in a trench, their burial could not have been in consequence of an epidemic. So it all simmered down to one conclusion—they were bodies of Lalaurie slaves, buried thus in order that their manner of death should not become known.

  It seems likely that the story of the bodies discovered during the 1970s renovation stemmed from DeLavigne’s account. But there is no documentation—police reports, newspaper reports or coroner’s reports—to indicate that there was a discovery of bodies beneath the floor of the Lalaurie house before the 1970s, either.

  Yet again, this would appear to be a colorful yet less-than-accurate horror story from Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans.

  Myth: Madame and Dr. Lalaurie fled New Orleans the night of the fire. Some stories say that they stayed in Louisiana. Some stories report the appearance of the Lalauries in Mobile, Alabama. Still others believe that they lived the rest of their days out in Paris, where Madame was living in exile and shame. At one point, a preacher recognized her at an estate in the French countryside, and she was forced to flee in the night to avoid discovery.

  Fact: It is true that the Lalauries left town that awful night. We have documentation on the Lalauries’ flight and much of Madame’s life after she fled. Madame resided in Paris for a while and returned to New Orleans for the last decade or so of her life. There is no indication that she was in hiding in France or that she ever tried to hide her identity while there.

  Dr. Lalaurie separated from her at some point, and his life after 1842, as well as the date of his death, is undocumented.

  Myth: Dr. Louis Lalaurie was experimenting on slaves with “zombie drugs” in order to make them more obedient.

  Fact: Just the mention of zombies gives many people a chuckle. Shambling dead people are not exactly in the realm of the possible. But contrary to popular belief, zombies were not invented by George Romero. (Lorelei’s note: I love George Romero.)

  The word “zombie” (or “zombi”) originated in Haiti. Voodoo (or vodu or vodun) is an offshoot of a West African religion practiced throughout the island. There is a common belief among citizens of small villages and rural areas that a voodoo priest has the ability to raise a dead person from his grave and force him to become the priest’s slave, according to Dr. Louis P. Mars.

  Obviously, that is impossible. But in the early 1980s, a Harvard ethnobiologist named Wade Davis traveled to Haiti to try to discover if there was any truth behind the zombie myth at all. After extensive investigation, he claimed that a living person (not a dead one) could be transformed into a “zombie” by the introduction of two powders into the bloodstream. One is coup de poudre, which allegedly contains tetrotodoxin (TTX), which is the poison found in puffer fish. The other powder is made up of a cocktail of dissociative drugs, like those found in the datura (deadly nightshade) family. Supposedly, this combination of toxins produces a deathlike state. The voodoo priest “resurrects” the victim and tells him that he is now a zombie, and the zombie becomes his servant. The “zombie” is known by his stiff gait, his distant stare and his unquestioning obedience of his master, according to Davis.

  Toxicologists have disputed the idea that TTX could put a person into a permanent or semipermanent trance. Symptoms of TTX poisoning can range from vomiting to paralysis to death but not complicity or a suggestible trance, according to W. Booth.

  However, toxicologists are not taking deeply rooted cultural beliefs into account. If a person is raised to believe that a voodoo priest can bring people back from the dead as his personal slaves, and that person awakens to find himself in a coffin with a voodoo priest telling him he is a zombie, he just might believe he is a zombie. Psychosomatic conditions have caused stranger physical reactions.

  Supposedly, Dr. Lalaurie thought that by administering the potion in the proper doses one could get a person to just do what you wanted with no resistance. The downside to this is that the potion used highly toxic ingredients, and if the potion was not prepared correctly it could kill someone. Because the zombie potion recipe is passed on from one voodoo priest to another, there was no exact written recipe to create and administer the stuff. The conclusion one might draw from this information is that Dr. Lalaurie went through many test subjects in his attempt to create the perfect zombie.

  If this tale is not wild enough, some people say that Louis Lalaurie was assisted in his experiments by Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen of New Orleans herself. The oral legends say that she brought him her personal enemies to experiment on.

  Claudia Williams, a voodoo “queen” currently residing on Royal Street, says that this aspect of the legend is entirely false. But she and her brother both agree that someone who was under the correct dosage of “zombie dust” could be induced to do “just do what they are told.”

  And what do your humble authors think of all this?

  We are open to the idea that people can be drugged and convinced that they are powerless, even dead, particularly in cultures that strongly believe in that possibility. However, there is no proof, nor even a hint that Louis Lalaurie was involved in “zombification” experiments, with or without Marie Laveau—no rumors at the time, no stories of zombies roaming the French Quarter and no mysterious slave poisonings. If he was involved in any kind of medical experimentation on slaves, it would most likely have been related to his work in attempting to cure spinal deformities.

  To put it simply, we call baloney on this myth.

  Myth: Brought to her by Marie Laveau, Madame Lalaurie stood as the Devil Baby of Bourbon Street’s godmother and raised it with the help of her husband, Dr. Louis Lalaurie.

  Fact: Looking at this wild and entertaining story, it is easy to dismiss it out of hand as a folktale. But is it possible that there was a grain of truth to the legend? Well, anything is possible.

  The Devil Baby story is a classic. A baby deformed, cursed from conception, is taken by the voodoo queen Marie Laveau and raised in the dark, screaming and drooling until the miserable little creature’s death. According to legend, Marie Laveau asked Delphine Lalaurie to stand as a godparent for the unfortunate mite. The benevolent Delphine Lalaurie responded that someone had to look after the soul of the grotesque child.

  A Harlequin baby medical drawing, 1886. Harlequin-type ichthyosis is a birth defect that may account for what some people referred to as “devil babies.”

  The child allegedly lived five years before the shrieking finally stopped; a family gathering, not including Madame Lalaurie, was seen at the St. Louis No. 1 Cemetery, interring the poor creature.

  Let’s look at the idea of the baby. Obviously, if it existed, it was not a demon or the spawn of Satan but rather a child with severe birth defects. The description given in stories and the image created by Ricardo Pustanio are similar to what is commonly called a Harlequin baby. This rare birth defect, Harlequin-type ichthyosis, is an extreme thickening of the keratin layer in the baby’s skin. This causes huge, diamond-shaped scales on the baby’s body. The spaces in between the scales are an angry red, because the baby’s thick skin cracks instead of folding. The constant open wounds on the baby’s skin l
eave it open to bacterial infection and other illnesses.

  Harlequin babies also suffer severe facial and cranial deformities, as well as malformed arms and legs. They are susceptible to bleeding and dehydration. The babies are in constant pain, mostly because of the nerves exposed by their constantly splitting skin, according to William James and others.

  A Harlequin baby in the 1830s would be extremely unlikely to survive to five years old. Such infants rarely lasted more than a few weeks before they succumbed to some form of systemic infection, exsanguination or dehydration. (As an interesting aside, modern medical science has greatly improved the treatment of children with Harlequin-type ichthyosis. The oldest living survivor is currently twenty-six years old and in good health, according to the Birmingham Post newspaper.) And where would Marie Laveau have come up with such an infant anyway?

  The details of Laveau’s life are shrouded in mystery. Some say that she was a midwife, an abortionist or both. Others say that she ran a brothel at one time. Any of these vocations could have caused Marie to encounter a sadly deformed baby. Marie Laveau was a voodooienne, a highly respected (and feared) voodoo priestess. She was known for her acts of kindness to people in her community, particularly to black and “colored” individuals, whether they were slaves or “free colored.” It is conceivable that Marie might have taken pity on such an infant and tried to save it.

  Haunted Louisiana’s website states that Laveau cursed a couple when the man wanted his wife dead. The curse included the deformed baby, whom she whisked away to use in the future for her own purposes.

  Why Delphine Lalaurie would be brought into the story is unknown, other than the fact that Marie Laveau and Madame Lalaurie were arguably the two most interesting women in New Orleans at the time, and any good spinner of tales would find it irresistible to pair them up.

  And their meeting is not impossible. Marie was born in New Orleans in 1801, and she died there at the age of eighty-one in 1881. In the early 1830s, Marie Laveau was a hairdresser to wealthy and privileged Creole ladies. She certainly could have met Delphine at some point. And it is almost certain that Marie Laveau had encountered Delphine’s aunts, who lived within blocks of Laveau’s beauty shop.

  However, Marie’s strong suit at that point seemed to be extracting valuable information and gifts of clothing and jewelry from her wealthy clients. Randomly deciding to hand over a Devil Baby to a highborn Creole lady seems pretty unlikely.

  Marie Laveau’s tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. Photo by Victoria Cosner Love.

  But then there is the wild card of Louis Lalaurie. A physician educated in France, he was interested in physical deformities. At one point, he claimed to have found a cure for hunchbacks. Might he have been interested in a child with a highly unusual birth defect? Almost any doctor with any medical curiosity would be.

  But when all is said and done, what is left regarding the Devil Baby story is a lot of hearsay, wild speculation and unlikely coincidences. We do not believe that the story of the Devil Baby of Bourbon Street has any basis in fact, at least not where Madame Lalaurie is concerned. However, we will admit that it’s one of our favorite legends connected with the story.

  Myth: Madame Lalaurie hated slaves and tortured them because her parents were murdered during a slave uprising in New Orleans or Haiti.

  Fact: This is a theory you will often hear from New Orleans ghost tour guides. The story has been bandied about over the years, even in print, like in the May 6, 1975 States Item: “Legend has it she tortured slaves to wring from them information about her mother, the fabulous Madam Macarthy, who was murdered on a Carrollton plantation during a slave uprising.”

  Did Madame hate slaves? There is documentation that she freed a slave in 1819 and another in 1833. Those wouldn’t appear to be the actions of someone who hated all slaves on principle. That being said, Delphine’s family was affected both directly and indirectly by the Slave Revolt of 1811, and one of her uncles was murdered by two of his own slaves in 1771.

  There is a letter written by Barthélémy Macarty to his son-in-law’s father, Lebreton, regarding the latter incident:

  These two Negroes, murderers of their own master, used the cover of night to set fire to the hangard {at the end closest to the mill canal?}. The determined Mirliton, after having appeared at the fire, seeing his master up above in the gallery facing the hangard, gave orders so that the fire would not reach any further point, left the fire to go to the top of the gallery stairs, and from there moved his poor master, who then fell under the shot landed by the cowardly and infamous Dimba, falling on the big lemon tree in the garden…he fired a second shot in case Mirliton had missed.

  This was Delphine’s uncle, not her father. It is unknown how close she was to him. An incident like this undoubtedly threw a scare into slave owners and their families throughout the area. But it seems unlikely to have inspired an undying vendetta against all slaves in Delphine. There was, in fact, a bloody uprising in 1811 outside of New Orleans. Jean François Trepagnier, Delphine’s first cousin, was one of two documented deaths of whites during the uprising. Again, Delphine’s relationship with her cousin is unknown, although losing a family member was probably frightening and unnerving. An extremely romanticized telling of Jean François’ stand against the marauding slaves was written at the time. This story depicts him as a valiant defender against evil, which was the popular perception of the whites killed in the uprising at that time. It’s likely that Delphine shared that opinion.

  The other death also had a Delphine connection. He was Gilbert Andry (or Andre), whose niece, Felicite Amanda Andry, would marry Delphine’s son, Jean Pierre Paulin Blanque. One of her aunts married into the Andry family as well, making it a close connection for Madame. However, the later matchup did not happen until after 1850.

  The uprising marched along the German coast of the Mississippi and could conceivably have reached the Macarty plantation. It was stopped only two plantations away. It was reported in the local paper that women and children in the path of the angry slaves were fleeing for the safety of town. But there is no documentation whatsoever that Delphine’s parents were killed in this uprising.

  The slaves responsible for organizing the 1811 uprising were captured and slaughtered in a frenzy of brutality.

  One slave uprising that does not have a comprehensive list of victims is the Haitian Revolution. This was the first documented slave rebellion that actually succeeded, resulting in a free Haiti run by a government of former slaves.

  The Haitian Revolution was bloody and brutal, as all revolutions are. However, we have not found any documentation, or even a story or rumor, that Delphine’s mother was tortured and killed in this slave uprising, or any other. In fact, Delphine’s mother’s death preceded the Haitian Revolution by at least twenty years. Her father’s death is documented in New Orleans in 1846.

  There is no evidence that Delphine lost anyone close to her in the Haitian Revolution. Even if she had, torturing her probably American-born slaves for information more than twenty years later, in the 1830s, doesn’t make a lot of sense.

  We have no way of knowing what was in Delphine Lalaurie’s head when she tortured her slaves or allowed her husband to torture them. But these authors do not believe that any kind of grudge or vendetta was involved. The Lalaurie atrocities appear to have been more a crime of opportunity and oppression than revenge.

  Myth: Madame Lalaurie died in France in about 1840 after being gored by a wild boar during a hunt.

  Fact: This is a great story, but it just isn’t true. There is no telling how this tale got started, but it sounds like wishful thinking on the part of someone who wanted to see Madame get her just desserts. It must have been comforting for some people to think that, even if she escaped the justice of the court, she died horribly on the tusks of a savage beast.

  Myth: Madame Lalaurie died in 1842 and is buried in the St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.

  Fact: There was a plaque found in the 1940s in St. Louis Cemete
ry No. 1, Aisle 1, bearing the name of Madame Lalaurie and showing a death date of 1842. Although the plaque was real (there is a photograph of it), there is no guarantee that it was authentic. We have proven that she died sometime between 1855 and 1858.

  A house in the French Quarter similar in style to the way 1140 Royal Street would have appeared in 1830. Photo by Victoria Cosner Love.

  Myth: The Lalaurie Mansion was rebuilt after the fire to its original plan.

  Fact: Sadly, the building gazed upon by modern tourists is not the design of the house the Lalauries purchased. It was renovated extensively after the fire of 1834. Both contemporary reports and historical documents show that the house was a two-story, Creole-style mansion in the 1830s The current, three-story house is in the style of the 1840s and 1850s. The Williams Research Center has documents verifying both the contemporary reports and the original structure.

  Myth: Firemen and police heard scratching and moaning coming from the house for twenty-one days after the fire, but they were unable to find anyone. The haunted stories thus began. In the 1970s, the floorboards were replaced, and bodies were found, with evidence that they had been buried alive.

  Fact: As early as 1858, there were reports that no bodies were found in the well or on the property. No newspaper or court records show the discovery of bodies in the 1970s.

  Myth: The Lalaurie Mansion is the most haunted building in New Orleans.

  Fact: Discover that truth or myth for yourself.

  Chapter 11

  And What About the Haunted House?

  It’s all about the haunted house, isn’t it? That is why people visit the epicenter of the legend—they’re hoping to see a ghost. Website after website suggests that the hauntings are well documented and prolific. The quotes to the press are endless, and interviews with residents seem to ring eerily true.