Samedi: Ghost Stories

The ghost story I'm about to tell is an old favorite down New Orleans way. It tells of a young woman who was the Devil's mistress, and the horrible fate that awaited her when she strayed from his bed. But the Devil gets a bit of his own back as well. Retold in writing a number of times, most famously in the Depression era collection of stories Gumbo Ya~Ya edited by the irrepressible Lyle Saxon, I was pleased to see it included in a library book brought home by my middle school daughter called Spooky South by S.E. Schlosser. The story is best told by someone who witnesses the haunting rather than by a detached third person, at least to my mind. So here is my version of "The Devil's Mansion" as told by young Arlette Panelle whose Maman knew a lady that lived there...

I'm old enough to sit at table with my parents, but not old enough to debut in society, and it's just now that Maman's best friend Madame Larendon moves into the biggest house on Rue St. Charles. There are rumors about the house and always have been. Folk say it's haunted and I have even overheard the servants' gossip about deaths and ghosts. Maman crosses herself and holds tight to the golden crucifix around her neck when our coach goes by the mansion. But no one will tell me what was wrong with the house. In the daylight, gleaming white and windows clean, it looks like a lovely place. I suppose I didn't think about it until Madame moved in.

Maman and Madame have been friends forever. My mother is from an old Creole family that claims men who stood on the line with Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. Madame Larendon is a Beauregard; her father is the famous General Pierre Gustav Toutant - the Little Creole. I was born after the war, but heard nothing but praise for the old man. When Madame's husband moved the family into the mansion on St. Charles, my mother was a bit upset. After all, Madame is in the family way at last. How could Monsieur make her move in such a state? Or is it the house that troubled Maman?

When the Larendons had lived in that old mansion awhile, our whole family is invited over for supper. I'm the eldest and of course expected to keep my four brothers in line. I imagined we'd be seated in the kitchen. Was I surprised when Madame had set a place for me at the head table. But what is even more shocking is that that table is set in the back dining room, a small rotunda where the family would normally break their fast in the morning. Madame called it cozy but it is, in fact, cramped what with Monsieur's older sons and all. When Papa inquires about the main dining room, Monsieur Larendon mumbles something about renovations. No one says any more on the subject.

We manage to finish without spearing one another with out meat knives, and we ladies retire to the back parlor for coffee and cakes. I'm not allowed coffee, but Madame makes up for is with warm milk. I'm bored with all the talk of fall fashions from France and who is marrying who and the scandalous painting of Madame Gatreau. When no one is making the least attention, I sneak out of the parlor. I'm determined - just red-head determined - to find  out if the main dining room really is being renovated. What if the haunting takes place there? I pass through the foyer and find a lamp at the bottom of the enormous staircase. Picking it up, I slide the dining room door open and enter the dark room.

The room is chilly and the furniture is covered with white sheets. Maybe Madame is renovating. The whole place smells musty and a breeze - seemingly from nowhere - makes the crystal chandeliers ripple and sing like a cold spring. I shiver; my late summer gown hardly covers my arms and goose flesh starts to rise. Nothing happens in the oppressive darkness, like sticky molasses. I turn to push the door back again and then I am made of marble. I literally can't move, other than to turn my head.

As if by a switch, the chandeliers glow with candles. The sheets are gone and a man and woman sit at the long table, the food before them making my mouth water despite the way I glutted myself at supper. The couple is dressed in ancient clothing; the man's cravat is so high he can hardly move his head, and the woman's gown is a scandalous sheath that accentuates every curve of her gorgeous figure. Her breasts spill over the lilac satin. The two are talking, but I can't hear a sound. Even the clink of china and silver is not to be heard.

As I watch, the woman's fair face darkens. Her onyx eyes flash and she stands up so abruptly that her chair falls to the ground. She is yelling now, screaming soundlessly at her supper companion while twisting her long, white, linen napkin in her hand. To my horror, she runs to him, whips the napkin round his neck, and chokes him clear to death. It is hard to believe her tiny hands can be so strong, but he falls to the floor as white as the linen around his neck.

A moment later and blood begins to drip from those slender hands. The woman, who has not seen me before this moment, begins to wipe her hands on her dress as her eyes cast their gaze on me. The blood keeps flowing, not from her but from some unseen source, and she wipes and wipes, staining the delicate satin with globs of purple gore. Finally she offers her hands to me, her mouth open in an unheard scream. It's worse not to hear than to hear. I drop the lamp and cover my ears but the specter just keeps screaming.

And then the world goes black.

I spend two weeks in bed, shivering with a fever no one understands. Finally, Maman answers my only question: what happened in that house?

A beautiful octoroon became the mistress of the Devil just after the Americans came to Louisiana. There was so much mischief for the Devil to do then, what with smugglers and pirates, bootleggers and new money, that he couldn't settle down with his gorgeous doxy. So he set her up in that mansion on Rue St. Charles and told her not to betray him. But she was bored and had a wondering eye. Soon enough she took a rich young Creole as a lover, and they supped in splendor every night in that grand dining room.

The Devil heard of his cocotte's betrayal and he met the young man on the levee one fall afternoon. "You can have her," he told the startled boy. "Marry her; I'll make you a gift of ten million silver reales if you do. But you must promise to always live under the names of Madame and Monsieur Elle."

Delighted, the couple celebrated with a feast. It was only then that the girl's beau told her he had changed his name. She knew the awful truth of that name. It was not Elle but L; L for Lucifer, a name that would brand the couple as infamous no matter where they went. The gorgeous octoroon saw red and, in her uncontrollable rage, she killed the young Creole before supper was done.

Seeing her crime, she lost her sanity and imagined blood on her guilty hands. As she tried to wipe it away, the Devil appeared and killed her. He carried the bodies of the octoroon and her lover to the roof of the mansion. There, in the yellow light of a full bayou moon, he butchered and gutted them whence he proceeded to feast on every part of them but their skins. And here my mother spares me not a word, even telling me that the stray cats ate the lovers' discarded flesh.

But the Devil had forgotten one detail - and isn't the devil always in the details? He'd promised Our Lord and Savior in the desert long ago that he would never, ever do his worst under the light of a full moon. And so, as he ate with the fluids of his kill running all over his hands and arms, he began to stick to the roof. Before the Devil knew it, the bodies of Madame and Monsieur L had molded his visage to the top of the gable above the front door of the mansion on Rue St. Charles. And there he sat, a living, motionless gargoyle. A reminder to all of New Orleans how evil once ruled their glorious, sunken city.

I recover at last. Ten days later we hear the awful news; Madame Larendon has died in childbed. But Monsieur lives on in that nasty house until his own death just after my wedding. Then another acquaintance, Madame Jacques, moves into the mansion on Rue St. Charles. She too sees that horrible incident replay itself and yet she stays for some time. At last, after the birth of my first child, she vacates that hated house too. And so it stands empty, with the Devil grimacing down at all who pass, and the story only whispered from one person to another while the foolish octoroon and the Creole boy suffer night after night after endless night...

The story ends long after Arlette's time. Though no one can say exactly where on St. Charles the Devil's mansion really was, everyone is sure it was demolished in 1930. And isn't that a curiously specific detail for a so called fable?

Header: Mansion on St. Charles Street in New Orleans via Wikimedia

Samedi: Ghost Stories

I'm watching The Walking Dead marathon on AMC in anticipation of Sunday's season three opener. I'm a junky for this stuff. Anyway, it's late and big, fluffy snowflakes float down outside my window but a ghostly tale couldn't hurt. So here's a repost of a NOLA tale set in the infamous Parish Prison. What could be more appropriate?

For anyone who has studied, hunted or read about ghosts, it goes without saying that places like prisons are often more susceptible to haunting than other structures. The negative energy built up in prisons and penitentiaries cannot be denied and the wraiths that haunt these types of places are often as twisted and malevolent as they come. This is certainly the case in today's ghostly tale.

The story comes from Parish Prison which once stood at the corner of Saratoga and Tulane in New Orleans. This story made its way into the New Orleans Daily Picayune on my birthday, January 23rd, back in 1882. The brief article indicated that fourteen separate suicide attempts had occurred in the prison the prior year, all committed by inmates of cell number 17. Those who managed to survive told horrible stories of a pale woman - sometimes she was said to be a seductive redhead, other times a silent nun - who appeared in their locked cell and tortured them mercilessly all night long. She went about her grim work while wearing a pleasant expression and a tender smile.

When the prisoners' bodiees were examined, they revealed agonizing burns in the shapes of hands and fingers. The authorities, realizing something was up but unsure what to make of it, stopped using cell number 17. The haunting calmed, but only for a few weeks. Soon enough the redheaded haint was back, this time in cell number 7. Six women killed themselves over the course of a three month period.

Now the officers who worked at Parish Prison began to claim they had seen the ghost, but she appeared to them as a beautiful, regal woman. Employees dubbed her "The Redheaded Countess" and it was at this time, when the article was written, that the warden of the prison claimed to have met up with her on the back stairs. Captain Bachemin swore he passed the Countess; she smiled at him and touched his arm, searing his flesh right through the sleeve of his uniform.

While the story is certainly intriguing, it is impossible to verify over 100 years later. As the storyteller in Gumbo Ya~Ya ends the tale: the captain met the specter, or so he claims...

Header: Red-Haired Man from Swank Magazine c 1958; art by Charles Copeland via Mid-Century ~ it really has nothing to do with the story but it has a nice, creepy vibe, don't you think?

Jeudi: Weather-Wise

Superstions die harder in some areas than in others.  In a place like New Orleans and the bayous that surround it, weather signs are so engrained as to be almost second nature.  Here are just a few summertime weather signals and superstitions from that wonderful catalogue of all things Louisianan, Gumbo Ya~Ya; Lyle Saxon, editor.

Bullfrogs sing when rain is coming (the old Cajun saying is Laplie tombe ouaouaron chante.)

Killing a cat or a reptile will bring hard rain.

Good weather is coming in summer only if the night before was clear.

Heavy dew is a sign of fair weather.

A whirlwind in the dust of the street heralds dry weather.

Rain or tears at a wedding brings bad luck.

“If the oak is out before the ash, it will be a summer of wet and splash.  If the ash is out before the oak, it will be a summer of fire and smoke.”

All of these may work anywhere, although the one I wish most for is the first.  We’ve no bullfrogs here, and I remember their singing fondly…  Bonne chance ~

Header: The Old Absinthe House by Louis Oscar Griffith via American Gallery

Samedi: Ghost Stories

The excitement of NOLA Navy Week has me thinking about my ancestral home and the many legends of ghostly ships, seafarers and – in particular – pirates that linger there to this day.  With all that swirling around in my head, I realized that we haven’t had a good ghost story here at HQ for awhile.  Despite the brightness of spring, or warmth of fall depending on where you are on our dear Earth, I invite you to draw the blinds and allow yourself to slip away to an ancient, Louisiana bayou, where the frogs are chirping and the drown just won’t stay dead…

There was a quadroon man named Louis who lived on Bayou Grand Caillou in Louisiana.  He was a fisherman and sometimes he was happy with his trade, sometimes not.  Louis heard, from the other fisherman, that on a nearby island which was not much more than a muddy chenier, the Baratarian pirate known as Gambi had buried some of his treasure.  Now the talk went that Gambi was the most ruthless and treacherous of the pirates who aligned themselves with the famous Jean Laffite.  He would slit a man’s throat for no reason, and it was said that if anyone tried to steal his treasure, his ghost would slit his throat, too.

Louis was a brave man if, it must be admitted, not very bright and he began to enquire after this pirate’s treasure.  Where was it, he asked his friends, and when was the best time to go to the island and dig it up?  His friends told him he was crazy but Louis persisted.  Finally one old Cajun told him that the only way to find Gambi’s treasure was to go to the little island at night, under a full moon, and look for a patch of moss that glowed silver in the moonlight.  That was where the pirate had hidden his long lost horde.

As we said, Louis was brave, so on the night of the next full moon he packed up his little pirogue with a shovel and canvas and everything he thought he’d need to bring that pirate treasure home.  He quietly sailed out to that deserted island where there was nothing but a broken down old boat shed, one or two sad cypress trees and big patches of green moss all over everything.  Louis pulled his boat up high onto the broken shells of the shore, turned and almost immediately saw the silvery moss over by one of the trees.

The fisherman set directly to his task, the chuff and hiss of his spade, his own breathing and the croaking of frogs the only sound beside a mournful wind off the Gulf.  But then Louis heard another sound, like something being dragged across the shells at the water’s edge.  He turned and he was surprised to see his pirogue down in the water when he was sure he had dragged her high up on land.  He threw his shovel down and marched into the water.  Retrieving his boat, he dragged it up on shore again but this time he tied her up to that other sorry cypress tree.

Louis marched back to the hole he had started, grumbling about the wind and tide, but just as he was putting shovel to dirt again he saw two ugly, hairy feet appear, their toes just hanging over the chasm of his little ditch.  Suddenly, Louis felt cold.  He gulped even though his mouth was as dry as sand, and with all the courage he had he looked up from his spade.  There before him stood two horrible, grinning pirates.  They were sodden with water and seaweed, while little shrimp crawled in and out of their clothes and hair.  They each held a cutlass, both dripping with either rust or blood – Louis did not want to know which – and they stared at him with eyes as cold as gleaming silver.

Now Louis was brave, if not very bright, but he was also a good Catholic and he knew what to do when the Devil jumped up.  He fell to his knees, clasped his hands under his chin after crossing himself and began to recite the Hail Mary over and over and over again.  After the seventh sincere recitation of the prayer to the Virgin, Louis finally opened his eyes.  Sure enough, those silver-eyed, watery pirates had disappeared and Louis, well, he was still alive. 

Even as Louis let out a sigh of relief, he heard that awful scraping sound behind him once again.  Turning, he saw a third pirate sitting on his pirogue.  This one wore a long dagger, held a fine ivory handled pistol and his bristling, black mustache dripped red with blood.  He too was dripping wet, covered with crawfish and seaweed, but he wore fine, leather boots that marked him as a captain.

“Gambi?” Louis asked.

“The very one,” the phantom replied.  “And if you don’t get in this pathetic dinghy and row for your life, I’ll shoot you or slit your throat for no good reason.”  The pirate smiled, and one gold tooth gleamed like fire in the moonlight.

Louis didn’t have to be told twice.  Abandoning his tools, he untied his boat and jumped in rowing as hard as he knew how as far away from the island as he could. 

Once the pirogue was a few leagues out into the bayou, Gambi’s ghost put away his nasty pistol, slipped over the side of the boat and disappeared into the inky water.  Louis would later tell his friends that he knew for sure the creature was not of this Earth as no bubble rose to the surface when it sank below the waves.

So Louis went straight home and there his wife nearly shot him herself, he looked so different.  His hair had turned stark white and he would never smile again.  Though he told his story to anyone who would listen, it wasn’t long before Louis went to bed one night and died, perhaps joining those phantom pirates on that little chenier off Bayou Grand Caillou.

This story is told with many different variations around southeastern Louisiana and is especially remembered in the book Gumbo Ya~Ya edited by the incomparable Lyle Saxon.  In that version, however, the island is identified rather than the pirate; it is called L’Isle de Gombi.

Header: Phantom of Bayou des Mortes by Lew Lehrman

Samedi: Ghost Stories

I realized the other day that it has been some time since we’ve spun a good ghostly yarn here at HQ.  With St. Valentine’s Day in the offing, I thought I’d pull one from that wonderful source of old time Louisiana folklore, Gumbo Ya~Ya, edited by storyteller extraordinaire Lyle Saxon. 

As before, I’ve got my own spin on the story from friends and family down NOLA way.  In Gumbo Ya~Ya the young husband died in the first World War.  The way a similar story was told to me by Cordelia la Tour, may the angels rest her soul, the story is about an ancestor of hers who died shortly after the War of 1812.  Either way, it is both chilling and sentimental.  Here then is the story of a young widow and her search for answers at the grave of her lost husband one night in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.

The young and beautiful Madame Sidonie de la Tour was despondent after the death of her beloved husband Jerome.  They had shared only a scant few years together before his untimely death in the yellow fever epidemic of 1818.  Sidonie was inconsolable and would often visit her love’s grave in the evening to place fresh flowers, light the lantern and commune with his soul.

This ritual did not change when a new love came into Sidonie’s life.  The dashing stranger from the East Coast courted the lovely – and wealthy – widow in a whirlwind romance.  In the spring of 1819 he proposed, promising her the world.  Despite her joy, Sidonie had not forgotten her first love and so, flowers in hand, she went to his grave not only to remember him but to ask for his advice.

When she was done straightening up, placing the flowers just so and lighting the lantern, Sidonie began to talk to Jerome.  Nearby sat her chaperone, a burly slave named Aries who went with her everywhere, dozing with his hat over his face.  As the sun went down Sidonie spoke of her new beau and asked Jerome point blank: “Should I marry him?”

Silence filled the sunset air.  Aries began to snore, insects buzzed, the leaves of nearby trees rustled in the breeze, but no answer was for coming.  Sidonie ran her long, elegant fingers over the raised lettering on her husband’s tomb and began to think that maybe no answer meant she was free to marry again.

“Oya, Madame!” 

Aries’ booming voice made Sidonie jump nearly out of her skin.  She looked over and saw him pointing up to the velvet blue sky, his eyes wide.

“Do you see, Madame?  It is certainly a great owl,” Aries continued.

Sidonie looked up and sure enough, an unusually large owl was circling just overhead.  “Don’t worry, Aries,” she said.  “He is only hunting.  The mice are as numerous as – ”  She could not finish her thought as a beautiful long-stemmed rose, the very color of blood, dropped into her taffeta skirt.

While she and Aries watched, completely speechless, the owl dropped ten more red roses into Sidonie’s lap. 

“What ever does it mean, Madame?”

“I’m sure I couldn’t say,” she replied.  “How very queer.”  Sidonie was gathering up the fresh blossoms – quite out of season and full of perfume – when another rose fell onto her skirts.  This one was pristinely white, so pale in fact that it appeared luminous.  It was followed by a rain of eight more, their perfection and scent as lovely as the eleven red roses before.

“Madame,” Aries’ voice was shaking now.  “That there is powerful strange.  I tell you, it must be a sign.”

Sidonie, who hadn’t had time to think of what the roses might mean, looked to her husband’s tomb.  Again her hands went to the lettering and she began to read aloud: “Here lies Monsieur Jerome David de la Tour…”  At that moment a veil seemed lifted, and she read the meaning as clearly as looking through glass.  “Oh Aries, you are right.  The eleventh letter is N while the next ninth letter is O.  N. O.  No.”

“Madame,” Aries stood and brushed himself off before looking back to the sky.  “The owl is gone.  We should be too.”

Sidonie did not argue but gathered her roses, kissed Jerome’s name and allowed Aries to help her to her feet. 

Upon further investigation, it was revealed that Sidonie’s fiancé was a con man with a long trail of now poor and previously widowed wives behind him.  To her dying day she credited her Jerome, in the shape of an unnatural owl, for warning her against a horrible mistake.  Amour toujour ~

Header: St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 via hauntedamericatours.com

Samedi: Ghostly Tales

Today finds HQ closing out the October series of New Orleans ghost stories from and inspired by the book Gumbo Ya~Ya.  Since we are at our conclusion, I thought I would end on a happy note with a story of love that is stronger than death and happiness found in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.

The story goes that a young woman of old New Orleans suddenly found herself a widow.  Her short marriage had been the happiest time of her life and her husband was her true soul mate.  She would spend her days at her husband’s grave in St. Louis Cemetery, sweeping, cleaning, putting out fresh flowers and weeping for her loss.  After weeks of this ritual, the young wife began to contemplate suicide.  She asked her husband for guidance and then sat down next to his resting place and fell asleep.

When she awoke, darkness had fallen.  A mist covered the ground and an eerie silence hung over the cemetery.  Just as she stood to leave, a ghostly form stepped out of her husband’s tomb.  To her astonishment, the young woman recognized the love of her life.  Before she could even utter his name, the couple was surrounded by other shades.  They welcomed the young wife and laughed and joked with one another as if nighttime in the cemetery was the best party of all.

When she managed to look away from her husband, the young woman realized that she could see right through the tombs, markers and even the very walls of the cemetery.  Through these, she spotted a frightening number of skeletons.  They were all hurrying forward to some unknown destination, stepping over one another without regard as if their time and effort was all that was important.

Seeing his wife’s horror, the young man took her hand and said: “That is what the living look like to us.  We are happy while they scramble on to no end other than the one we have already achieved.  They are the dead; we are truly living.”

At that moment, the young woman felt the weight of her grief lifted.  She spent the rest of the night with the shades and then went forward into a happy and fruitful life.  She was known as serene and philanthropic and unshakable in her faith of a joyful life at the end of this one.  When she passed on, she was laid to rest next to her long dead love.  Amour toujour ~

Header: Danse macabre from an Italian manuscript c 1450

Samedi: Ghostly Tales

Last week’s ghost story saw the horrors of abuse leading to residual, angry energy haunting a New Orleans house on Rue Royal.  In the case discussed, the abuse was visited upon innocent slaves by a cruel mistress.  Cases of such misery were not at all unusual, sorry to say, but what if the roles were reversed and the inter-personal dynamic was not so cut and dried?  Would the lingering energies be as pronounced as they are said to be at the Lalaurie House?

The answer may lie in the case of Monsieur Boullemet and his violent passion for one of his slaves.  Boullemet was married to a strict woman of high morals who would not brook any errors from her slaves.  Madame Boullemet established a reputation for personally punishing even the slightest mistakes.  She was not well liked in her home.

The illicit object of Monsieur Boullemet’s affection was a quadroon of exceeding beauty whose given name was Pauline.  The brief notation of this incident in Gumbo Ya~Ya says that Pauline was “… a statuesque … beauty with flashing black eyes and pale golden skin.”  Monsieur Boullemet’s infatuation with Pauline knew no bounds and they quickly became lovers after she entered his household on Bayou Saint Jean. 

Pauline was both manipulative and ambitious.  After capturing her master’s heart she encouraged him to distance himself from his wife and children.  Boullemet moved his wife out of her bedroom and put Pauline there in her stead.  By degrees, Pauline became mistress of the mansion while Madame Boullemet and her three children were moved to a small cabinet off the kitchen. 

When Monsieur was called away to the east, Pauline made her final move.  She stripped her former mistress and her three little ones of their clothes and chained them to the walls of the little cabinet.  She tortured them mercilessly with hot coals and a bullwhip, according to what Madame Boullemet would later tell authorities.  Pauline denied the family food and they wasted away in their hot, airless prison.

Eventually, friends of Madame Boullemet began to wonder about her when she did not appear in church or make her usual calls.  The New Orleans police paid a visit to the home and, though Pauline insisted that the entire family had gone east with Monsieur, a search of the house revealed the wretched state of Madame and her children.  Pauline was taken into custody and hanged in the city.  Saxon tells us that five thousand of New Orleans’ citizens turned out to see her die.

What became of the Boullemet family, aside from the imposition of a relatively steep fine upon Monsieur, is not known.  Pauline, though, is said to haunt the shores of Bayou St. John, her long hair flowing out in the breeze, a noose around her swanlike neck and her eyes glowing like the hot coals she had once applied to her lover’s wife.  The story goes that seeing this specter can cause a pregnant woman to miscarry and a man to lose his “ability to perform”.  Thus they say that even in death Pauline continues to assert her ambitions on all who witnessed her demise and their posterity.

Header: The Octoroon by John Bell

Samedi: Ghostly Tales

The house at 1140 Rue Royal is known to New Orleanais as “The Haunted House”.  The tales told about the house and its original owners, those true and those not so much, are shocking in the extreme.  Like mushrooms, these stories have grown and spread over the course of nigh-on to 200 years and they don’t seem to be stopping any time soon.

The house, built in the Spanish colonial style, is said to have stood in the same spot since 1780 when it was allegedly built by les frères Remarie, Henri and Jean.  According Stanley Clisby Arthur, that story is hogwash.  In his 1936 book Walking Tours of Old New Orleans, Arthur tells us that the house was built in 1831 specifically for Dr. Leonard Louis Nicolas Lalaurie and his bride of six years, Marie Delphine. 

Madame Lalaurie, who is now quite infamous, was the delicate and accomplished daughter of French-Irish landowner Louis Barthelemy McCarty and his first wife Marie Jeanne Lovable.  By the time she married the doctor, Delphine had buried two husbands, the first a Spanish Don and the second noted merchant and Laffite associate Jean Blanque.  While Delphine was, to all outward appearances, the very picture of Creole respectability and gentility, she seems to have held a very dark secret in her otherwise healthy psychology.

It is a notorious truth that women slave owners tend to be more cruel to their chattel then like-minded men, and Madame Lalaurie seems to bare this out.  Though Arthur claims that all the gossip against her was and is false, others like Lyle Saxon beg to differ.  Saxon notes that charges for cruelty toward her slaves were brought against Madame after she and her husband moved into the house on Royal and that she was fined for same.  The fine was nominal but the documentation still exists.  The true extent of Madame’s sadism came to light in 1834.

In the spring of that year 1140 Rue Royal suffered a fire, which broke out in the kitchen near the carriage house.  At the time, New Orleans had only a volunteer fire department and before they arrived, neighbors hurried in to help the Lalauries move people and valuables out of the house.  One neighbor, whom Saxon names in Fabulous New Orleans as M. Montreuil, questioned the doctor as to the whereabouts of his slaves.  Neither Madame nor Dr. Lalaurie would give their neighbor a straight answer, nor would they allow anyone on the fourth floor of the mansion.

The volunteer firefighters put the fire in the kitchen out quickly but were horrified to find an elderly slave woman chained near the stove with heavy manacles at ankles and neck.  She told them that she set the kitchen ablaze, preferring to end her life in flames rather than continue to suffer Madame’s torture.  They unchained her and took her out of the kitchen; then they entered the house proper.

Thick, black smoke still drifted up the main stairwell and screams were heard in the fourth floor garret.  Despite the Lalauries, the firefighters hurried up to the top of the house and found a locked door, bolted on the outside, behind which the screams could be heard.  They broke the door down and found more chained slaves in such horrible condition that one of the young firefighters actually vomited.  Some had broken, unset limbs, others horrible oozing sores from repeated lashings and still others deep and bloody head wounds.

The slaves were taken from the house and the story appeared in the paper L’Abeille the next day, stirring up public opinion against the Lalauries.  Meanwhile, the doctor and Madame left New Orleans and, again according to Saxon, set sail for Mandeville.  Other historians claim that Madame lived the rest of her days in Paris.

Over the years, more and more horrific atrocities including crude sex-change operations and flaying alive have been tacked on to Madame Lalaurie’s already heinous doings.  One story in particular, that of a 12 year old slave girl jumping to her death in the courtyard while Delphine chased after her with a bullwhip, continues to this day.  It is said that the girl is buried in the courtyard well and that her specter is still seen running up the multiple flights of stairs in the house, attempting to escape the merciless Madame Lalaurie.

Other ghosts include a heavily chained and headless African, who carries his head as he rattles back and forth in the courtyard, a disembodied and skeletal hand at the front door latch, a bloody phantom that wanders the third floor balcony and screams in the dark of the night.  Whether or not any of this is true is open to debate, but if ever there were a house that should be haunted, it is 1140 Rue Royal.

An entirely fictional account of what became of the spirits of Madame Lalaurie’s slaves is told in the movie The St. Francisville Experiment which imagines the Lalauries settling in St. Francisville north of New Orleans, acquiring more slaves and continuing their unspeakable tortures.  Ghostly terror ensues when a group of modern ghost hunters spend a night at the Lalaurie plantation.

Header: 1950s postcard showing 1140 Rue Royal

Samedi: Ghostly Tales

As anyone who has studied, hunted or read about ghosts will tell you, it goes without saying that places like prisons are often more susceptible to haunting than other structures.  The negative energy built up in prisons and penitentiaries cannot be denied and the wraiths that haunt these types of places are often as twisted and malevolent as they come.  This is certainly the case in today’s ghostly tale.

The story comes from Parish Prison which once stood at the corner of Saratoga and Tulane in New Orleans.  This story made its way into the New Orleans Daily Picayune on my birthday, January 23^rd, back in 1882.  The brief article indicated that fourteen separate suicide attempts had occurred in the prison the prior year, all committed by inmates of cell number 17.  Those who managed to survive told horrible stories of a pale woman – sometimes she was said to be a seductive redhead, other times a silent nun – who appeared in their locked cell and tortured them mercilessly all night long.  She went about her grim work while wearing a pleasant expression and a tender smile.

When the prisoners’ bodies were examined they revealed agonizing burns in the shapes of hands and fingers.  The authorities, realizing something was up but unsure what to make of it, stopped using cell number 17.  The haunting calmed, but only for a few weeks.  Soon enough the redheaded haint was back, this time in cell number 7.  Sx women killed themselves over the course of a three month period.

Now the officers who worked at Parish Prison began to claim they had seen the ghost, but she always appeared to them as a beautiful, regal woman.  Employees dubbed her “The Redheaded Countess” and it was at this time, when the article was written, that the warden of the prison claimed to have met up with her on the back stairs.  Captain Bachemin swore he passed the Countess; she smiled at him and touched his arm, searing his flesh right through the sleeve of his uniform.

While the story is certainly intriguing, it is impossible to verify over 100 years later.  As the storyteller in Gumbo Ya~Ya ends the tale: the captain met the specter, or so he claims.

Header:  Worshipers by Louis Oscar Griffith via American Gallery

Samedi: Ghostly Tales

Today's story is probably familiar to many residents of the French Quarter.  It was so well known at the turn of the century that according to Gumbo Ya~Ya it appeared in an article, written as a pure reporting of fact, in the New Orleans Daily News of July 4, 1907. 

The tale is told that an apparition was being seen nightly walking from the Old Opera House on Rue St Anne and heading toward Royal.  The spirit was in the shape of a woman dressed in the old fashioned style of mourning.  She was a ghastly sight with long, flowing hair like spun silver, a sunken, ashen face and deep set, empty eyes like those one would see in a skinless skull.  Her destination was a rooming house, of very ancient history, on Rue Royal.    People who met her there, usually on the stairs, were sure to move out the next day.  Because this ghost always took the same route, she was whispered of as the “Witch of the French Opera.”

Further digging turned up the history of the house.  It was owned by an old Creole widow in the 1890s who took a young lover in her dotage.  The two were happy for a time until the widow found that her paramour – whom she had been keeping in style at a Rue Bourbon address – was sleeping with a beautiful and very young quadroon.  The widow, more experienced if not wiser than her feckless beau, did not let on that she knew what he was up to.  One night, she crept into his apartment using her key and turned on the gas while her lover and his girlfriend slept.  They died of asphyxiation.

The widow, according to neighborhood gossip, went mad.  She dawned the mourning she had worn when her husband died and never went out except to attend the Opera until her death at the end of the century.

One evening in 1907, a new tenant who occupied the room that had once been the widow’s bedchamber found a delicate old love letter hidden behind the marble mantelpiece.  As the tenant read the letter, the old widow’s ghost appeared.  Her bony fingers reached for the letter and – terrified – the tenant threw it into the fire.  The specter let out an otherworldly shriek and disappeared.  According to the neighbors, the widow’s spirit was never heard from or seen again.

Header: The Widow by T.F. Simon c 1906

Samedi: Ghostly Tales

Many of the ghostly tales of old New Orleans feature the secreting away or burying of treasure.  Perhaps it is the idea of sudden and uncomplicated wealth that appeals, or the idea that pirates once walked the streets and alleys of the Vieux Carre.  Most likely, it is just the imaginings of those who would like very much to find a cache in their own backyard.  What ever the reason, today’s story taps into that time honored tradition.

The gossip on Saratoga Street says that after the Civil War a rich but stingy old bachelor lived there.  Though he made money hand over fist he lived on the edge of cruel poverty, taking his joy from the closeness of his wealth which he kept in the form of gold coins and called his “children”.  Before this man died he buried his “children” in his backyard but he never told anyone exactly where.  He went to his grave, conveniently located in the cemetery across from his house, and his secret when with him.

Now it is said that the old miser returns on dark moon nights and runs about his former yard in spectral form, anxious to retrieve his gold.  While watching the decrepit haint dig with his bony hands in the cold dirt is spine tingling enough, more terror may pop up on any given inky night.  Sometimes the miser brings other phantasms with him.  The most frightening is an ancient hag with white hair, long nails and decomposing flesh that drags along on the ground behind her.  When she looks up from her digging it is said that she has no face but a pair of glowing, red eyes.  The miser calls out to his “children” as his unfortunate companions dig, and the moaning of these pathetic creatures keeps the neighborhood awake.

Some people stand and watch this spectacle, hoping to see where the old man buried his hoard of gold.  Though someone will periodically dig up the backyard, no buried treasure has yet been found.  It is probably safe to say that it never will, and yet the specter of the miser and his ghostly companions – especially the horrifying hag – will doubtless continue to return.

Header: New Orleans Street by Louis Oscar Griffith via American Gallery

Samedi: Ghostly Tales

I hope everyone is ready for another haunted tale because I’ve been eager to tell this one all week.

The story is set in a charming townhouse on Rue Royal which was built during the Spanish era.  It was the “in town” home of a wealthy Creole family in the first decade of the 19^th century and the handsome young man who inherited with the death of his father was the most eligible bachelor in New Orleans.

He remained a bachelor, rumor had it, because of the dazzling beauty and undeniable charm of his quadroon mistress whose name I have heard given alternatively as either Colette or Guimauve (which rather amusingly means “marshmallow” in French).  Guimauve was vain and haughty, but the young heir was cruel and enjoyed playing with her emotions by coming home periodically with the announcement that he had at last found the perfect Creole bride.

Finally Guimauve put her foot down and demanded that her man put up or shut up.  She was very light skinned and could easily pass for white, she reminded him.  Therefore she would no longer consort with him until he agreed to rip her name from the “colored” baptismal book at St. Louis Cathedral, marry her and call her his Creole bride.

The young man thought for a while.  Marriage between white and black persons was not just forbidden but illegal.  If Guimauve’s scheme was found out they would both suffer dire consequences.  He pondered his mistress’ demands while growing more and more frustrated – on more than one front – by the day.  Finally he thought of his own solution and approached Guimauve with a deal.

This was not long after the dramatic volcanic eruption at Krakataua.  Though no one in most of the world knew exactly why, volcanic ash caused a dramatic cooling of the climate that made even tropical areas decidedly less comfortable, particularly in winter.  The young man used the unusual cold to his advantage and told his mistress that if she would but spend a night on his townhouse’s rooftop completely nude, he would meet all her demands.

It was December, with three candles already lit on the Advent wreath, and temperatures dropping so low that snow had sprinkled New Orleans a week before.     Guimauve, both determined and proud, did not stop to consider these facts when she took her lover’s challenge.  The following night she ascended four flights of wrought iron stairs, set up a chair and a lamp on the roof and dropped her gown and small clothes to the floor. 

She sat completely naked in the chair for hours, her teeth chattering and her long fingers gripping her arms.  The bitter cold grew worse and worse.  Guimauve’s lantern was blown out by the wind.  Her hands and feet and lips turned blue and finally, as dawn just nudged the east, beautiful, haughty Guimauve breathed her last.

Her lover had triumphed.  Whether or not he felt remorse is never mentioned in the story but only days after Guimauve went to the grave he married a fourteen year old Creole girl who would give him a nursery full of children. 

All that success not withstanding, Guimauve with typical determination returned.  Her baleful but beautiful ghost in all its naked splendor walked the roof of the family’s townhouse each year from the first day of Advent to the last.  It was said that when a member of the family saw her, they caught a chill and died.  Perhaps Guimauve had her revenge after all.

Although the family no longer owns the house on Rue Royal, the beautiful quadroon is seen to this day.  She walks the rooftop naked, lit by a single lantern and as frightening as she is seductive.  The story goes that you can see her bones right through her charming flesh.  Bon Samedi ~

Header: Gailestis by Aubrey Beardsley c 1895 via Old Paint

Samedi: Ghostly Tales

As the weather cools down, the leaves begin to fall and the smell of fireplace smoke drifts on the evening air, my thoughts turn to my favorite holiday: Halloween.  That, in turn, gets me thinking about ghost stories; remembering the ones I’m fond of and hunting around for new ones.  I especially enjoy the many ghostly tales that originate in my favorite city in the world: New Orleans.

Recently I’ve gone back to the chapter entitled simply “Ghosts” in perhaps the most wonderful product of the 1930s WPA Louisiana Writers Project Gumbo Ya-Ya.  Louisiana slang for a group of people making noise or “everyone talking at once” Gumbo Ya-Ya was edited by Lyle Saxon, Robert Tallant and Edward Dreyer.   I’m a huge admirer of Lyle Saxon whose wonderful books about New Orleans past and present are a treat to savor again and again, so seeing his hand in these old, familiar ghost stories is particularly dear to me.  

From now until the end of October, I’d like to honor both The Ghede and Mr. Saxon by repeating some ghost stories found in Gumbo Ya-Ya every Saturday here at HQ.  I’ll tell you the ones I remember so I can put the spin I heard on them rather than just regurgitate what’s in the book.  Today let us investigate the story of Hans Muller, the ghostly sausage maker.  This story was evidently remembered by a lady named Rica Hoffman, whose parents were friendly with the doomed Muller but it is also one told to this day in the Big Easy.

Hans Muller ran a popular sausage factory in New Orleans.  He and his wife were German immigrants and it seems that once they settled down in bayou country Hans began to look upon his wife – whose name is never mentioned in the story – as a dowdy if hard working frau when compared to the local beauties.  Emboldened by success, Hans took a lovely young mistress and got it in his mind to do away with Mrs. Muller.

One day, while she was working over the enormous grinder in the factory, Hans pushed his wife into the machine.  She was ground up along with the sausage meat and her husband thought he was free to marry his paramour.

A few days later, customers began returning sausage they had purchased complaining of bits of cloth and hair in the product.  Gossip flew around NOLA, as it always will; soon Hans was out most of his trade.  Worse still, his young lovely got wind of the rumors and dumped him without remorse.  Hans was in despair, and neighbors said they saw him wandering his factory at all hours.

On one of these midnight jaunts Hans heard a loud thumping near the grinder.  Hurrying over to investigate, he was met by the gruesome and mutilated specter of his wife.  She lunged at him and he screamed so shrilly that one of the neighbors came to the door of the factory to see if he was all right.

Hans thought fast and claimed to have fallen asleep in his office and experienced a bad dream.  When the neighbor enquired after Mrs. Muller, Hans claimed she had gone back to Germany for an extended visit. 

Not long after that night, one of Muller’s few customers broke a tooth on a sausage.  Finding that the culprit was a piece of gold ring in the casing, the customer called the authorities.  When the police arrived at his factory, they found Hans unshaved and unwashed, curled up in a corner and starring wide-eyed at the meat grinder.  Questioned, the sausage maker could not reply coherently but only rave about the gory ghost of his wife rising from the grinder and trying to kill him.

Since Muller would say no more on any subject, he was finally committed to an asylum where he lived out the rest of his days.

Next week, the story of a beautiful quadroon, her cruel lover and a cold December night.  Bon Samedi ~

Header: Rue Bourbon c 1933 via Retro-Snapshots