They say Vampires are entombed within the sealed attic of this convent.
This is the famous legend of the casket girls of New Orleans, and it is based on the old
Ursuline Convent on Chartres Street, smack dab in the busy French Quarter.
Today I’m going to give you two sides of the story, and you can determine for yourself, what
you choose to believe. Other than that, just enjoy this tale in the spirit of the Halloween Season.
Now, there are many variations of this story, but I have selected the one that seems the
most realistic, however unlikely it may be. It begins with the founding of La Nouvelle
de Orleans in 1718, if you’d like to learn how the city was founded and how the French Quarter
managed to survive after all these years, I have a separate video for that. But going back to the
story, the French government helped to populate the area by sending over France’s unfavorable men,
some of who were there simply because they were banished from the country for various crimes
and indecencies. The King even sent a group of nuns to establish the Ursuline Convent in 1721.
The founders of the city began to worry that they wouldn’t be able to sustain the population without
women for the men to marry. So from 1719 through 1721 France had begun putting eligible women
on voyages to New Orleans, besides the obvious issues with this, there was more to the story.
Legend has it that some of these women were undesirables themselves, some were prostitutes,
some were beggars, and some were young girls taken from France’s orphanages by force.
It wasn’t until a new shipment of women arrived in 1728 that finally,
the scoundrel bachelors of New Orleans felt that quality females were being offered.
But many claim this particular group of ladies appeared sickly and pale. And according to some
of the legends told today, they each came with large wooden trunks carrying their belongings.
The ladies became known as the Casket Girls because of the striking similarity their wooden
trunks were to the size and shape of coffins. The ladies needed a place to stay, so the
Ursuline Nuns offered them housing, keeping the girls in the third-floor attic of the convent.
But soon after arrival, a strange and deathly affliction swept through the city. Infants were
dying in greater numbers, and the bodies of men were being found, drained of their blood.
The nuns suspected the young women, and searched each of their trunks only to
find there were no belongings inside, the trunks were empty.
The details vary but by some accounts, it is said the women and their coffins were
locked in the upper attic. The doors were closed and the wooden shudders were drawn,
over 800 silver nails, each blessed by the Pope himself had sealed up that attic.
Some say it was only the coffins that were sealed up there, to prevent the vampires from returning
to them. But we’ll probably never know. Because the attic has been sealed tight ever since.
Allegedly, during his 1987 visit to New Orleans,
Pope John Paul II even showed up at the old convent to re-bless the nails.
Many speculate whether the Casket Girls themselves were the vampires,
or that they had smuggled vampires into New Orleans with the coffins they traveled with.
Maybe they looked sickly upon arrival because the long voyage to the new world required
regular blood offerings to their precious cargo. It’s been said that in the 1970s or 1980s various
ghost hunters who tried to monitor the building were found the next day with their blood drained.
Again the stories vary, either way, none can be confirmed.
However, for the sake of trying to get the story straight and be more factual rather
than just repeating legend, let’s look at some of the ways this story does not hold up.
This is where I punch a bunch of holes in the logic of the story,
so if you don’t want to hear it, turn away now. First, let's talk about the caskets. The original
casket girls were referred to as “fille a la cassette”, cassette referring to the wooden
trunks they carried. The name was anglicized into the name Casket Girls, but let’s be clear
cassette does not directly translate to coffin or casket, for that, the French say cercueil. As for
the cassettes themselves, if you look at similar ones for female arrivals in Canada, you can see
that the creepy boxes are actually quite small and can be carried by hand like luggage. The only way
they could have smuggled a vampire in them would be if he had first transformed himself into a bat.
Next, let’s also get our timelines correct, supposedly the last Casket Girls arrived in 1728,
perhaps they were housed by the Ursuline Nuns, but we don’t know, because back then,
the convent we see in New Orleans today, hadn’t been built yet, instead there was a smaller
convent on the other side of the Quarter that had existed from 1727 until the newer more permanent
structure was completed in 1752. Therefore you’d assume, with that 24-year difference,
the women would have moved away from the nuns by then, after all, their housing
was only temporary until they had established themselves in the city. But that’s not to say,
the vampires weren’t sealed into the attic of the old convent and moved into the new one 24 years
later…except that this photo taken in 1910 shows no shudders on the attic windows,
which kind of debunks the story of the window shudders being nailed shut for two centuries.
The third and final nail in the coffin, has to do with what exactly is in the attic today.
I mean for many decades shudders have been kept tightly closed over the attic windows, and people
will tell you that the attic is permanently closed to visitors. So is it possible they really are
keeping coffins up there? Well not according to these photos taken by digital camera. You can
see that electricity was installed in the attic, presumably long before these photos were taken,
so it's not the first time someone has been in this attic since it was supposedly nailed shut.
So then you might ask, why is the attic kept shuddered?
Well according to these photos there are old artifacts up here, no caskets or coffins,
perhaps they just want to prevent sunlight from ruining what they have. After all,
many museums worry about the effects of direct UV sunlight on preserved artifacts.
And now for a brief backstory on the history of the Ursuline Convent, perhaps I’ll go into better
detail in the future, but for now, what I can tell you is that this particular building was completed
in 1752, it is of stucco-covered masonry, this was one of the first buildings in New Orleans
that was not made primarily of wood. It survived both major fires of 1788 and 1794, this makes the
convent the oldest building in New Orleans and possibly the oldest in the state of Louisiana.
The fire-safe features of the convent’s architecture inspired the Spanish Government
who ruled over New Orleans during that period, to mandate the use of stucco masonry and slate roofs.
The nuns of the convent had cared for wounded soldiers from the War of 1812
and from the Civil War. The nuns operated a small orphanage and school on the bottom level,
while the second level contained living quarters for the children and nuns.
The attic space had some room for living quarters but mostly functioned as a storage space.
In 1824, the nuns needed a larger convent and so they handed over the old convent to the bishop and
it remained the bishop’s residence until 1899. During that time the bishop added a chapel in
1848. Throughout the 20th century, the convent was reused for various other purposes, even serving as
an office for the archdiocese. Today it remains part of the Catholic Cultural Heritage Center of
the Archdiocese of New Orleans and is operated as a museum. All ghost stories aside, the building
has an amazing history and is worthy of a visit. And speaking of ghost stories, whether or not you
believe the vampire legend of the convent, it is widely believed the building is haunted by ghosts
of nuns and of the soldiers that didn’t survive their wounds of war. Hundreds of the dead were
processed on the grounds of this convent, and perhaps that leaves a mark of its own.
Whether or not the legend of the Casket Girls is true, there is no doubt about the fact that there
have been a lot of vampire sightings and stories left behind in the French Quarter and in the city
in general, perhaps there might be some degree of truth to the tales. In any case, now you have
heard the story of the Casket Girls and know the legend of the vampires of the Ursuline Convent.
Did you all make it through the video alive? I hope none of you were turned into a vampire...
But if you were...just in case you were... get in touch with me, I wouldn't mind being
a vampire as well. I mean you get powers, and you can live for a very long time.
If not, be sure to like, comment and subscribe for more videos. Thanks for watching!