The woman known as Madame LaLaurie walks among a throng of socialites at the party she’s put on at
her New Orleans mansion. Dressed in an exquisite puffed-gown, its skirt intricately embroidered
with blood-red roses, she sips from a crystal flute containing imported champagne. Oh what
“joie de vivre” is on show, she remarks, as her drunken guests chortle in agreement.
Not a few feet below them is a torture chamber. There, African slaves are chained to the walls.
Some of their necks are fitted with spiked collars. Their limbs have been stretched and
broken. As they moan in pain, occasionally a slither of light exposes their horribly
mutilated faces. One man sits in silence as maggots fester in the hole in his head.
It’s only a matter of time before they are dead, and so with their last vestige
of strength, they plot their escape. Welcome to a real American horror story.
Born on March 19, 1787, as Marie Delphine Macarty, she took her first breaths in New Orleans, which
was then part of Spanish Louisiana. With a silver spoon firmly planted in her mouth, she understood
from a young age that her well-connected family was almost like royalty in those parts.
She also understood the contempt some her extended family had for their slaves, a contempt that would
result in an uprising and the death of her uncle. As she moved among the finely dressed adults in
her house, she would listen as people talked about brutes and how they should not be spared the whip.
Delphine was just 13 when she married Ramon López y Ángulo de la Candelaria, an officer to
the Spanish crown. At 17, pregnant with his child, she became a widow after his ship hit a sandbar.
On her 20th birthday, she married a rich, some say ruthless, businessman named Jean-Paul Blanque. Her
mother had just died, and she inherited among other things, a plantation and 52 slaves. As
a marriage gift, the couple also received another plantation that came with an additional 26 slaves.
In the eight years they were married they had four kids, and then Blanque also died.
Delphine was now known as a woman of great wealth, a socialite with properties and plantations,
and a woman who seemed to curse her husbands. She was 38 when she met her last one, a physician by
the name of Leonard Louis Nicolas LaLaurie. It was with him she built her mansion on Royal Street,
a palatial house replete with slave quarters. It was in those quarters that inhumanity breathed
its rancid breath over innocent people forced to work for those wicked white imperialists.
Delphine was not a happy woman, her marriage described in letters as an acrimonious affair.
In those missives, she said she was beaten by the doctor, but she also mentioned from time to
time how sometimes she was cruel to her slaves. This was an understatement of the highest degree.
She was not only fond of torture, but she killed, serially. Rumors spread
around town that this woman had a penchant for cruelty. Some people took a dim view of this,
even though in those days maltreating slaves was normal in some people’s eyes.
Nonetheless, some of those socialites stopped frequenting the parties she held at her mansion.
She was also prone to acting out in public, talking to her friends about how she was so
very concerned about the well-being of her slaves. This was a lie. One woman who later
wrote about Delphine and her slaves said what she saw were haggard and wretched people not
showed a modicum of human kindness. Harriet Martineau, who once attended
one of Delphine’s parties, wrote that the host “would hand the remains of her glass of wine to
the emaciated negro behind her chair,” and say, “with a smooth audible whisper, ‘Here,
my friend, take this; it will do you good.’” It was all show, a canard to hide what she was
really up to. Down below in the slave quarters, there were locks on the doors seven inches in
diameter. The widows of that hellhole were covered with iron shutters. There was no way out.
And then slaves kept dying. Funeral records showed that in just four years from the period
of 1830 to 1834, 12 slaves were taken out of that mansion dead. One of the deaths was the cook,
a position in that house as you’ll see was one to be mortally feared.
What’s more, four children of the cook also died. The cause of death was unknown, given that slaves
dying in those days wasn’t exactly a cause for investigation. How they died we’ll never know,
it could have been from infections, but given what you’re about to hear, maltreatment could
have easily been their downfall. Stories of Delphine’s wickedness
towards her slaves became so widely circulated that it was agreed by the authorities that her
mansion should be searched, and her slaves looked at. The lawyer appointed to do this
said he found no wrongdoing, but you have to ask where he was looking and if he was
star-struck by the fabulously wealthy socialite. It seems that Delphine wasn’t only a master of
deception but also a grand manipulator. She did such a job on that lawyer that he wrote
in a report that he was “full of indignation against all who could suspect this amiable
woman of doing anything wrong. . .She could not harm a fly or give pain to any human being.”
He was wrong, so very wrong. Just after his visit, a neighbor said she
saw Delphine chasing a young girl while holding a whip in her hand. The girl was so petrified about
what might happen to her, she ran along a part of the roof. The shocked neighbor watched the scene,
as the girl lost her footing and fell to the floor. That same neighbor said she watched that
night as the slave girl was secretly buried in the courtyard. What had actually happened
before that no one knows, although rumors later surfaced that the girl, aged 12 and named Lia,
had been brushing Delphine’s hair when she tugged on a knot. This was enough
to provoke the satanic ire of her owner. It was after this that another legal inquiry
took place and this one did find that Delphine was mistreating her slaves. She was told that she must
sell those slaves at the market, to people who might not have such a proclivity for violence,
although Delphine secretly arranged that they were bought by members of her family.
The slaves were soon given back to her, where their treatment became even worse.
Soon people would see what happened to them, and it would become American history.
The historic day was April 10, 1834, when a fire engulfed part of the house. Delphine
became hysterical, shouting to her neighbors to come and help. What she didn’t know was that the
fire had been started on purpose, by a 70-year old slave cook she had chained to the stove.
This cook had been beaten on many occasions. She’d had enough, and so she set the fire, perhaps in
the hope that someone might discover Delphine’s secret. It was either that or die in the flames.
Delphine, still screaming, demanded people in the street come to help, except she didn’t
mention all the trapped slaves, and instead asked them to gather her precious valuables.
News reports at the time stated that the crowd of people ignored her, knowing slaves
were in the house. They told Delphine to hand them the keys to the slave quarter,
but she refused in what was called a “gross and insulting manner”. After that, they kicked down
the door. What greeted them was sheer horror. This is some text from The New Orleans Bee
newspaper, published a day after the fire: “The conflagration at the house occupied by
the woman Lalaurie... is like discovering one of those atrocities the details of which seem to be
too incredible for human belief… Seven slaves more or less horribly mutilated were seen suspended by
the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other.”
The newspaper wrote that the slaves were the property of a demon masquerading as a woman,
that some of them had been down there for months, that most of them were in the most
dreadful condition. The New Orleans Advertiser followed with another highly disturbing report.
Delphine’s mask was finally removed. People demanded justice. A giant mob formed.
But she wasn’t immediately arrested, for a reason we can only say was likely due to her wealth.
The next day she left her partly burnt mansion, having said she was going to
take a drive around the lake. Her carriage it was said was driven by a male mulatto slave.
She crossed the lake and from there she took a sailboat to Alabama. From Alabama, she sailed to
France. This was not the end of the story, though. Mobs formed in the streets outside her house. They
didn’t know where Delphine had gone, but it was written that “all classes and colors” came
out and according to one report “demolished and destroyed everything upon which they could lay
their hands.” There was little left of the house once they were done. “The rage of the crowd,
especially of the French creoles, was excessive,” wrote one observer.
As for the injured slaves, some people didn’t believe a woman could have done such things.
The New Orleans Bee reported that they were taken to a place so they could be publicly viewed,
so the audience could see the extent of the injuries they had suffered.
4,000 were said to have turned up. It was later agreed, Delphine was demented and sadistic.
Several weeks after the gruesome discovery the Pittsfield Sun newspaper wrote that two of the
rescued slaves had died from their injuries. It also wrote: “We understand ... that in digging
the yard, bodies have been disinterred, and the condemned well in the grounds of
the mansion having been uncovered, others, particularly that of a child, were found.”
But was it even worse than those initial reports suggested?
Books written later claimed that what those first people on the scene saw was worse than
had previously been reported. One of them was called “Journey Into Darkness: Ghosts
and Vampires of New Orleans” and inside those pages, there are stories of the utmost terror.
While there’s no doubt those slaves were treated in a disgusting manner,
some people think these more modern stories may have contained some amount of embellishment.
The author of the last book is after all the owner of a New Orleans ghost tour business.
Delphine stayed in France until her ashes were sent back to New Orleans after her death.
It’s thought she might have died in a boar-hunting accident, aged 62.
No attempt was ever made by the authorities to bring her to justice.
Scholars have since said locals talked so much about the crimes of Delphine
so they could paint themselves as benevolent slaveholders compared to her, but it doesn’t
change the fact the woman was a sadistic brute. As for that house, it is still there today. Well,
it isn’t quite the original, but an 1838 version based on the original.
Over the years it was a school, a block of apartments, a refuge for teenage delinquents, a
furniture store, a bar, and it was later purchased by the actor Nicolas Cage. It’s now owned by a
bank, a fitting tribute to a woman who lavished herself with luxuries bought with blood money.
Now you need to watch, “The Countess that Bathed in the Blood of her Victims!”. Or,
have a look at this gruesome tale, “Why Did The King Of England Execute His Wives?”