Mad Madame LaLaurie

by Victoria Cosner Love

  Unfortunately, in this day of TV shows like Ghost Hunters and Most Haunted Places, no one has been allowed access to the Lalaurie Mansion to investigate with modern ghost hunting equipment. And why is that? One reason cited by two paranormal societies is that the last owner, actor Nicolas Cage, is hard to contact and that the realtor handling the property needs permission from the owner to let anybody in. (As of October 2010, the house had been on the market for almost a year until Mr. Cage recently lost it due to financial difficulties, carrying on the theme of the house bringing bad luck to its owners.)

  Located in what is now the Sixth Ward, this house has mesmerized people for nearly two hundred years. After the Lalaurie estate sold the house, a long and bumpy ride of tenants, businesses and private owners paraded through and were usually driven out by the alleged hauntings and happenings. The history of the house is a testament to the power of the Lalaurie legend. On Google, you only have to type in “New Orleans Haunted House,” and you get the Lalaurie Mansion. You can almost always find postcards on eBay of the “Haunted Lalaurie Mansion,” as well as the Warrington House, a school for wayward boys that the mansion housed in the 1920s and ’30s. These images are of the iconic three-story building from the now famous catty-corner angle across the street from the house. The postcards range from turn of the twentieth century to the 1950s.

  Thousands of people return from New Orleans with photographs that have ghostly qualities. Even the authors succeeded in capturing orbs. Photo by Victoria Cosner Love.

  The Warrington House, circa 1930. For a while, the cursed house was home to wayward boys and men, primarily those who were no longer able to be handled by their families. Historic postcard. Authors’ collection.

  As the Lalaurie Mansion was sold to one owner after another, the tales of hauntings grew and changed, building on the stories that had come before. In the years immediately following the fire, the widespread belief that the place was haunted was enough to keep the superstitious from walking by the house after nightfall.

  Most of the following was organized from websites and articles about the mansion.

  THE LALAURIE HOUSE AND ITS ALLEGED HAUNTINGS: A TIMELINE

  1831: Madame Delphine Lalaurie and husband, Dr. Louis Lalaurie, buy the house at 1140 Royal Street from Edmond Soniat du Fossat. The house was constructed as a two-story, Creole-style house with an enclosed courtyard. The galleries along the rear of the house were used as slave quarters, and the rest of the house was living area for the owners.

  1833: Rumors spread about Madame Lalaurie’s cruelty to her slaves. She is allegedly seen whipping a child slave on the roof of the house before the young girl falls to the courtyard and is killed instantly.

  1834: A fire breaks out at the house, allegedly started by a female slave chained in the kitchen. (Some versions of the story say that this woman is the slave child’s grandmother.) Rescuers discover tortured, starved slaves locked and chained in rooms in the attic. The slaves are taken to the Cabildo, and anger at their horrifying state spreads as fast as the fire. A mob gathers and destroys the house. Only parts of the exterior walls are left. All furniture and movable goods are stolen or destroyed.

  Firemen and policemen supposedly report hearing scratching and moaning in the house but are unable to locate anyone. The rumors of the hauntings begin.

  The Lalauries escape New Orleans and sign their business affairs over to Auguste Delassus. He maintains their property until he sells it in 1837 through the city.

  1837–1865: The house is rebuilt in its current three-story configuration and purchased in 1837 by a man who only keeps it for three months. He tells friends and family that the house plagued him with awful noises, cries and groans in the night and that he was driven to flee the place. He tries leasing the rooms, but the tenants only stay for a few days at most. Finally, he gives up, and the house is abandoned once again.

  Pirate Alley, where victims of the Lalauries were taken to enter the Cabildo for safekeeping. Photo by Victoria Cosner Love.

  The house is rented out. A furniture store occupies the basement for a short time. The house is a barbershop for a few months. No tenant or business stays there very long. It is rumored that there is a curse on the location and that no endeavor can or will succeed there.

  1860–1865: The Civil War rages throughout the country. During Union occupation, it is rumored that the Lalaurie house plays a part. The 1938 New Orleans City Guide claims that “[d]uring the years of the Civil War the house was used as Union headquarters.” (We have been unable to verify that General Butler used the Lalaurie Mansion as his headquarters.)

  Circa 1872: During Reconstruction, the house becomes a public high school “for girls of the Lower District.” This school enrolls both white and black students. New Orleans is more open to desegregation than the rest of the South, but a great deal of prejudice remains, simmering beneath the surface. In 1874, the White League forces the black children to leave the school. The vigilantes line the girls up and question them about their family backgrounds in an attempt to discover who is “colored” and who is not. (The children’s races are not always immediately obvious. Some of the mixed-race girls are more fair than some of the “whites.”) Girls determined to be “colored” are forcibly removed from the school.

  General “Beast” Butler ruled occupied New Orleans during the Civil War, quelling negative public taunting by enacting a law that proclaimed that if a woman insulted a U.S. soldier, she would be legally considered a prostitute. Legend has it that he lived in the Lalaurie Mansion, but this has not been verified. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

  1873: The house is listed as a leaf tobacco business owned by Joseph Barnes. However, according to the 1938 New Orleans City Guide, “in the 1870s the building became a gambling-house. Stories were told and retold of the strange lights and shadow objects that were seen flitting about in different apartments, their forms draped with sheets, skeleton heads protruding. ‘Hoarse voices like unto those supposed to come only from the charnel house floated out on to the fog laden air on dismal and rainy nights, with the ominous sound of clanking chains coming from the servant’s quarters where foul crimes are said to have been committed.’”

  1876: The May 28, 1876 Daily Picayune runs an article about the house being up for auction. It is described as “admirably adapted for a large boarding school, asylum, a first class boarding house or spacious summer residence. The building is leased for the summer renting at the rate of $150 per month.”

  1878: The New Orleans school system is officially segregated. The house becomes a high school for black girls only. The school lasts for one year.

  1882: The mansion is turned into a “conservatory of music and fashionable dancing school.” The owner is a well-known English teacher, and the school thrives with students from the finest local families. Shortly before a grand recital, a local newspaper apparently prints an accusation against the owner, claiming staff improprieties with female students. As the owner stands outside, dressed in formal evening wear, students and guests shun the place. The school closes the following day.

  That night, it is rumored that the spirits of the Lalaurie house hold a wild carnival to celebrate their triumph.

  An interesting note is that the school’s manager, W. Warrington, later buys the house and establishes the Warrington House for wayward boys.

  1889: An apartment in the house is occupied by Joseph Edouard Vigne for a little more than three years. Neighbors believe that he is a poor, crazy man. Vigne keeps to himself.

  1892: Vigne is found dead upstairs. According to rumor, black crepe is seen on the doors of the house. An inspection of Vigne’s apartment reveals more than $10,000 in cash and family heirlooms stashed in various places around the dwelling. The contents of the house are auctioned off. No one admits to hanging the black crepe.

  1893: According to the June 4, 1893 Times Democrat, “F. Greco purchased the haunted house at Hospital and Royal…yesterday he posted large flowing
placards upon the walls of the building announcing in both Italian and English, ‘The Haunted House.’ There is an end to everything, so there is with ghosts. Come and be convinced. Admission ten cents.”

  Circa 1900–1923: The house changes hands five times in twenty-three years. Castellanos stated, “A year or two ago, it was the receptacle of the scum of Sicilian immigrants, and the fumes of the malodorous filth which emanated from its interior proclaimed it what it really is.”

  In this time of mass immigration to America, many Italians come to live in New Orleans. Landlords quickly buy up old and abandoned buildings to convert into cheap housing for this new wave of renters. The Lalaurie Mansion becomes such a house. But for many of the tenants, even the low rent isn’t enough to keep them there.

  Jeanne DeLavigne cited this period as the first occurrence of bodies being found under the floor: “Workmen employed to repair the old cypress floors began digging up human skeletons from under the house…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.”

  As compelling as this account is, there is no other documentation to back it up, such as from police reports or newspaper articles.

  1920: The house is a tenement by this time. There are many reports of ghosts. “There were no other families living here and one night, on the third floor, I saw a man walking carrying his head on his arm,” reported one resident. Another resident saw a large black man wrapped in chains on the main stairs, confronting an Italian tenant. The chained man disappeared on the last step. A young Italian mother found the apparition of a wealthy white woman bending over her sleeping baby. The ghostly woman was later identified as Delphine Lalaurie herself. In some versions of the story, Delphine is attempting to suffocate the infant.

  1923: The mansion is bought by William Warrington, and it becomes the Warrington House for wayward boys until 1932. Warrington House is listed in the 1930s Soards’ New Orleans City Directory under “Hospitals and Sanitariums.” The Warrington House would last a full eleven years before closing. William J. Warrington had up to thirty “madcap” boys in his custody at any given time. Many of these children had first been sent to the parish prison before they were released into Warrington’s care.

  The lack of paranormal activity reported during the Warrington House’s decade in business is interesting, especially considering that many paranormal researchers believe children to be more sensitive to the supernatural than adults. Perhaps the rowdy, noisy boys were too much for the Lalaurie house ghosts, and they retreated into seclusion until the lively lads were gone.

  1932: The house is sold to the Grand Consistory of Louisiana. (A consistory is an organization that confers the degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.) The consistory sells the house in 1942. Whether the house ghosts and the Freemasons got along is unknown.

  Circa 1945: The house becomes a bar. Taking advantage of the building’s ghastly history, the proprietor calls the place the Haunted Saloon. The owner knows many of the building’s ghost stories, and he keeps a record of the many strange things seen and experienced by his patrons. (Of course, reports of floating objects and blurry figures must be taken with a grain of salt during this time, considering that the reporters may have had multiple shots of bourbon under their belts.)

  Circa 1950s: A furniture store opens but does not do well at this location. The owner first suspects vandalism when all of his merchandise is ruined and found in the morning covered with a foul, unidentifiable liquid. The merchandise is replaced and is ruined again, more than once. One night the owner waits in the store with a shotgun, hoping to catch the vandals in the act. At sunrise, he finds the furniture befouled again. He closes the store for good shortly thereafter.

  1964: The house stands empty. An article in the Times-Picayune dated April 17, 1964, reports that a preservation group, the Vieux Carré Commission, is trying to stop the deterioration and partial demolition of the house at 1140 Royal Street. Evidently, people had been looting the abandoned house down to its very bones. The preservation group reported that “the building has been stripped of floor boards in the upper balcony,” among other things. The thieving and vandalism had been going on for some thirty-eight months.

  Historic photograph of the Haunted Saloon, circa 1945. Authors’ collection.

  1969: Zella Funck—artist, resident of the haunted house and “ghost host”—is interviewed by the New Orleans States Item reporter Laurraine Goreau for her column “C’est la vie.” Funck says that her “poltergeists are just playful. They’re not around every day, but they do surprise visitors.”

  She describes an incident where a cat was seen in the room of a guest who did not believe in spirits. Funck did not own a cat. She also describes one of her ghosts as a “romantic figure of a man. I’ve watched him for several minutes in a full-length mirror before he faded away. He’s about 5’9”, about 170 lbs, has a reddish clipped beard, and wears a creamy beige felt hat turned up slightly, with a cord around it.”

  She ends the article with a story about her doors opening by themselves. “Contact,” she says, “usually comes when I’m sitting by the window, where Madame’s husband is said to have had his desk…I can tell you one thing positively. I’ve never heard clanking of chains.”

  A person who believes in ghosts might wonder if the handsome man she spotted was, in fact, Louis Lalaurie.

  Circa 1970–2000: The house is divided into about twenty apartments before it is purchased by a retired New Orleans physician. He restores the home to the state he believed to be original but was actually the second design of the house. It includes a living area in the front portion and five apartments to the rear of the building. He has no paranormal experiences while living in the house. Perhaps Dr. Lalaurie left him alone out of professional courtesy.

  During the 1970s renovation, the second round of rumors about bodies being found beneath the floorboards crops up. There is no documentation to prove this or even suggest that it is true.

  2007: Actor Nicolas Cage buys the property and is said to be living in one part of the house and renting out apartments along the gallery, where the slave quarters were located.

  2008: The Lalaurie Mansion is back on the market at a price of $3.5 million.

  2009: Cage loses this and two other New Orleans haunted houses due to delinquent taxes. Regions Financial Corporation purchases the foreclosed property for $5.5 million on November 13, 2009.

  2009: Claudia Williams—self-proclaimed voodoo priestess and proprietor of Starling Magickal Books and Crafts, located on Rue Royal, three blocks from the Lalaurie Mansion—asserts that the house is no longer haunted: “I have spent time outside the house enough to know that I have never had a sense that there was anything ghostly happening there.”

  She also emphatically states that the house is back to its original configuration, which sadly is not true. The New Orleans Bee reported on April 12, 1834:

  The whole of the edifice is demolished and scarcely any thing remains, but the walls. Whist the popular vengeance have consecrated with various writings expressive of their indignation and the justness of their punishment. The loss of property sustained is estimated by some as $40,000, but other think that is exaggerated. It must, however, have been very great indeed.

  The article goes on to report about fine furniture and decorations being thrown from the garrets to the street, “rendering them of no possible value, whatsoever.” Martineau relates, two years later, that people slashed feather mattresses from the house and that the streets were covered with down, making them treacherous to walk on for some time.

  Later visitors, including Cable and other early authors who wrote of the Lalaurie story, did not know that the house had been substantially altered. But does rebuilding and transforming a house chase away its ghosts? Not the ghosts of memory, obviously.

  A haunting, at least at the date of this writing, is impossible to prove or dispro
ve. You can wave all the electromagnetic field meters and recordings of supposed electronic voice phenomena in the world at a full-blown skeptic, and he will never believe you. Show him a photograph of a “ghost” and he’ll say it’s a smear in the emulsion.

  Conversely, shower a believer with scientific facts and rational explanations for seemingly supernatural phenomenon, but if that person truly believes in ghosts—especially if he feels that he’s had a firsthand encounter with one—he will not be swayed from his beliefs.

  There are plenty of people who believe that they’ve encountered ghosts and the supernatural within the walls of the Lalaurie Mansion.

  We, too, have stood outside this gorgeous structure, hoping to see something or feel something, anything. We came away disappointed. All we saw was a quiet, beautiful fortress with an evil history. If the hair stood up on the back of our necks, it was because we were thinking of the horrors that took place in the Lalaurie Mansion. We heard not a ghostly whisper, not a muffled cry.

  Certainly the house deserves its share of ghosts. It has been so many things: home to the infamous Lalauries; the site of an integrated school whose children were victim to a racial uprising; a miserable, wretched Italian tenement; a school for men with learning disabilities. If houses do, in fact, retain traces of their owners, or even the remnants of human energy, the Lalaurie house should be humming with ghostly emanations. So much emotion, so much suffering. This house represents the rise and fall and rise of this historic neighborhood, the struggle between the old French Creole ways and the new Americans, as well as the rich racial history of the Vieux Carré.