Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Due to the graphic nature of this killer's crimes, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of slavery, torture, and suicidal ideation. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. To get help on mental health and suicide, visit Spotify.com slash resources.
For most of her life, Madame Delphine Lalaurie was one of New Orleans' most dignified citizens. But that changed in 1834 when a fire revealed a hidden room in her mansion where she'd tortured and killed her enslaved workers.
Rumors about what happened in that room ranged from scientific experiments to dark voodoo magic. Even today, visitors claim to hear the chains of the accursed victims rattling in the attic. But every ghost story contains fact and fiction. And the truth of Madame Lalaurie is possibly more terrifying than the legend.
I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. You can find us here every Monday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram @SerialKillersPodcast. And we'd love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.
This episode is brought to you by Oli. Back to school means food changes, early breakfasts, school lunches, after school snacks, and let's not even talk about dinner. Oli's here to help you cover all the wellness spaces from daily multivitamins to belly balancing probiotics. Oli's got your fam covered. Buy three and get one free with code bundle24 at O-L-L-Y dot com. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
Hi there, Carter Roy here. If you're interested in true crime, especially unsolved murders, serial killers, and cold cases, you'll love my brand new show, Murder True Crime Stories. Each episode covers a notorious murder or murders with a special focus on those who were impacted the most. We'll always leave with the knowledge of why these stories need to be heard. You can listen to Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello there, I'm Mike Flanagan, and welcome to Spectre Vision Radio's production of Director's Commentary. Director's Commentary is a deep dive into a film through the eyes of the filmmaker or filmmakers who made it. It combines an in-depth interview format with a classic Director's Commentary track, the likes of which used to be common on physical media releases, but sadly are becoming more and more rare these days. Filmmakers talking about film with filmmakers. For people who love film.
and filmmakers. On April 10th, 1834, a fire ripped through the slave quarters of the LaLaurie Mansion in downtown New Orleans. But even as the flames spread, Delphine LaLaurie tried her best to keep volunteers away from the attic. She didn't seem interested in saving the slave quarters or its inhabitants. That's because she was protecting a secret.
But despite her efforts, the truth was about to come out. As the smoke thickened, Judge Jacques-François Canongé sent men to the attic to investigate. Within minutes, they reemerged carrying seven enslaved workers. The victims could barely breathe, let alone walk, and some had open wounds and horrid scars. Some of the shocked onlookers couldn't bear to look at them.
For those that could, it was clear to see these people had suffered more than just a fire. Though the city allowed slavery, there were laws against cruelty toward enslaved workers, so the sight of the victims horrified New Orleanians. What had happened to these enslaved workers, and more importantly, who had done it to them? As the crowd's shock turned to fury, Delphine barricaded herself inside the main house.
She was terrified that the outraged mob would break in and lynch her. She'd spent her life scared of an enslaved uprising against her. She never thought it would be her free countrymen coming for her head. Outside the mansion, the crowd grew and the rumors spread.
Some whispers repeated what they'd heard about Delphine's previous crimes against her enslaved workers. Others guessed at what foul torture she might have done to the seven victims rescued from the fire. Very quickly, everyone outside the mansion had a take on what happened in the LaLaurie attic. And whatever was said of the mistress, the mob believed.
So it's here that the legend of Delphine Lalaurie truly began. And since then, that legend has only grown and evolved. But what is the myth of Delphine Lalaurie based on? Only a few people actually went inside the infamous attic that night. But over the past 200 years, the scene has grown more graphic with every retelling.
In 1946, author Jeanne de la Vigne wrote in her book Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans, "The men who smashed the garret door saw powerful male slaves, stark naked, chained to the wall, their eyes gouged out.
De la Viña went on to describe horrific tortures, including victims slowly eaten by ants and others with holes drilled into the skulls so their brains could be stirred.
Other 20th century authors accuse the Lalauris of conducting bizarre medical experiments on their victims. The stories go that they tried to transfer sexual organs between men and women, and that they tried resetting bones to form a human crab. It was the stuff of nightmares. These 20th century stories paint a chilling portrait of Delphine: perverse, outlandish, monstrous.
But credible historians tell us that most of these accounts are totally made up. There were no ants, no sewing of limbs, no stirring of brains. De Lavinia and many other writers saw the mystery of the attic as a perfect jumping-off point to add their own gruesome twists, to embellish and heighten the horror of it all.
Knowing that, it can shift our understanding of Delphine's story. But before we continue with Delphine's psychology, please keep in mind that I'm not a licensed psychiatrist or psychologist, but we have done a lot of research for the show.
Philosopher Steven T. Asma explains that one defining feature of a monster is that it doesn't fall into one simple category. It seems impure to us because it combines characteristics from different creatures or has one important part lacking. This makes the monster both terrifying and disgusting, the perfect formula for horror.
For this reason, Delphine makes the perfect monster. The more disgusting her crimes, the more they scrape against her demure personality, terrifying us even further. And while that spawns great fiction, it makes studying her a difficult task of untangling the myths. Behind the myths that grew out of the fire, who really was this mistress of evil?
To understand the real Madame Lalaurie, we have to find the facts. And that means going back to the day of the fire, sorting through the accounts of those who were there, and deciding who was telling the truth. To start us off, the most reliable account we have is from Judge Kananja.
He witnessed all the events at the Lalaurie mansion first-hand, and immediately after the fire he gave his sworn statement to authorities, making it the first record of what happened.
The judge said that he and the volunteers broke into the attic and found two enslaved women wearing heavy chains. He saw another old woman chained to a bed with a deep wound on her head. When he confronted Dr. Lalaurie about the attic, the doctor replied scornfully that the judge should mind his own business. So what can we take away from this story?
It's clear that the victims were chained up, and that the Lalauris kept the room secret even as the fire spread. But that's basically it. We only see three of the seven victims, and Judge Kananje offers no theories as to what happened to them. It's likely he didn't want to add details he didn't witness first-hand.
However, the press picked up the story from where he left off. There were three newspapers who reported on the story: the Louisiana Courier, the New Orleans Bee, and the Louisiana Advertiser. Their reporting in the days after the fire helps give us an idea of the kinds of things people in the city were saying about the LaLaurie mansion.
Most of this reporting comes from eyewitness accounts of the fire, or from the editors themselves. By looking at places where these stories overlapped, we can make educated guesses about what was true and what was probably not. The Courier broke the story first. On the same day as the fire, their afternoon edition carried a description of the victims. Their bodies were covered with scars and loaded with chains.
The Bee described the attic, reporting that the seven prisoners were, quote, "suspended by the neck with their limbs stretched and torn from one extremity to the other."
The Bee went on to say the victims had been chained for several months with little food, and that an elderly enslaved woman set the fire in a suicidal attempt to end her torture. Other newspapers later claimed that the enslaved cook set the fire, but because none of the victims were named, it's difficult to say if the elderly woman and the cook are the same person.
The Courier described a man with a large cut in his head. They said his condition was "so horrible that we could scarce look upon him." He had a large hole in his head. His body from head to foot was covered with scars and filled with worms.
Other bystanders reported seeing worms and maggots on the victims, so it seems likely that this was an accurate description. Not only is this horrifying, but it shows where the idea of the ants eating people alive and sticks poked through holes in the skull might have started.
However, that wasn't the last horrific detail to emerge from the Lollaree fire. The day after the blaze, the Bee reported that "pincers were applied to the victims to make them suffer all manners of torture, iron collars with sharpened points, and a number of other instruments for punishment impossible to describe." This article was backed up by bystanders, who confirmed that they saw instruments of torture at the house.
This wasn't a scene from a typical plantation. It was something straight out of the Spanish Inquisition. But does sadism of this level fit someone like Delphine, who came from a more genteel background? It may not be as unlikely as you think. A 1999 study by social psychologists Roy Baumeister and William Keith Campbell found three reasons for sadists performing violent acts.
The first two, either pleasure from others' suffering or escape from boredom, don't seem to line up with Delphine's personality. But the third reason might explain her actions. Baumeister and Campbell point out that sadistic acts can be a response to a threatened ego. And this might explain Delphine's actions.
We know she was having fights with her husband, at least one of which turned violent and caused her to file for separation. Remember Delphine spent her life struggling for control in her marriages. Her independence was likely tied up in her ego. Perhaps her third husband stirred up feelings of insecurity, and she decided to take out her issues on her enslaved workers.
But even if we can pinpoint what caused Delphine's sadistic behavior, it's still difficult to work out where it begins and ends. Frustratingly, this is made more difficult by conflicting newspaper accounts from after the fire. On April 14th, the Louisiana Advertiser reported that one of the seven victims had died, and that a number of bodies had been discovered buried in a LaLaurie garden, including that of a young child.
But only a day later, the Bee called out the advertiser for publishing falsehoods. Editor JC de Saint-Rome insisted that none of the seven victims had died, nor had any bodies been found. The thing is, according to researcher Carolyn Morrow Long, the two editors personally disliked each other. So it's difficult to tell if this was a legitimate correction or petty squabbling.
So after all that, what are we left with? Here's what we know is true: Delphine's victims showed signs of starvation and beatings, which had likely lasted for months. Their wounds were allowed to fester and fill with maggots, and torture devices were used to prolong their pain.
On the other hand, we're not sure about whether any of the victims died after being rescued, whether or not the fire was set intentionally, and most importantly, whether or not there was a mass grave in the garden. This last one is crucial. If bodies were found in the garden, it confirms that the Lalauris weren't just mass torturers, they were serial killers.
It's very possible that Delphine tortured many of her enslaved workers to death. We know that 12 died between 1831 and 1833, but since only one newspaper reported on this huge discovery, we're going to label the mass grave as false. Still, there's plenty of corroborating evidence to establish that Delphine was a cruel slaveholder. But some historians aren't convinced that this is the whole story.
And if they're right, Delphine might not be the monster she's made out to be. In fact, some people would have us believe she's totally innocent. So is there any truth to that? Has history gotten Delphine Lalaurie wrong? Spoiler alert: No, not really.
In April of 1834, 47-year-old Delphine Lalaurie faced the wrath of an angry mob. A fire had revealed the hidden torture room she kept in her attic and the seven enslaved workers she'd been brutalizing inside.
Rumors of Delphine's cruelty ran rampant through the city, some true and some false. Everyone had ideas as to what Delphine had done to her victims. And the more horrible the stories got, the angrier the mob became.
But did they have all the information? Conflicting newspaper reports tell us that the breaking news of the time had a few glaring errors. And some scholars think the misinformation goes beyond that. They believe Madame Delphine was set up.
Before we continue, it's important to acknowledge that many revisionists, especially throughout the 20th century, have tried to wrongly downplay or question facts of racism and cruelty in America. Some of the conspiracies supporting Delphine might fall into this category. Still, it's useful to discuss and question them to understand why such theories caught on. The first theory we'll look at is one we'll call the "Secret Saboteur."
In 1934, journalist Meigs Frost suggested that one man engineered Delphine's downfall through a campaign of lies and defamation.
This man was a mysterious neighbor known only as Monsieur Montreuil. According to Frost, Monsieur Montreuil was part of the Montreuil family, another Creole dynasty that shared power with Delphine's ancestors, the McCarthy's. Apparently, Delphine had cheated him out of a property deal during her climb out of debt, and Montreuil wanted his revenge. So the story goes that he used his family's influence to spread lies about her.
That might have included the story of the child on the rooftop, where an anonymous neighbor said Delphine chased a young enslaved child off the roof to their death. Then came the day of the fire. Frost said that Montreuil was one of the only people to actually enter the attic. Then he came outside, eager to tell an exaggerated story about what he'd seen.
His was the account picked up by the local newspapers, the one that damned Delphine as a monster. So how much of Frost's story can we trust?
Looking at newspaper accounts, there was a Montreuil who went into the slaves' quarters the day of the fire. Most likely, Barthélemy Montreuil, the city tax collector, and the New Orleans Bee did quote an M. Montreuil that day, who told them that the LaLauries had been committing atrocities for years. This lends some credibility to this theory.
But was Barthélemy Montreuil the single force behind Delphine's downfall? Was he the neighbor who spread the rumor of the child on the rooftop? And did he make it up? And was all of the bees reporting based on his biased testimony? The short answer? No. To all of it.
Montreuil appears to have admitted that he spent years accusing Delphine of cruelty toward her enslaved workers. But there was no property deal that spurred Montreuil to seek revenge. He had no reason to accuse her, other than believing she was guilty. Also, Montreuil didn't live across from the LaLaurise, but rather down the lane. If someone had seen her chasing a child about the roof, it couldn't have been him.
That and the account of Judge Kanonja thoroughly debunk this theory, which falls apart even more when we dig into Frost's apparent sources for his story: Delphine's great-great-grandchildren. In the 1920s and '30s, Delphine's descendants convinced many New Orleans journalists to publish articles questioning her guilt. But how did this theory gain citywide press with so little evidence to back it up?
Well, we can't discount the possibility that racial prejudices were at play when Meigs Frost first published the story, but it might also have had something to do with the legacy of the New Orleans Creoles.
In his essay "Creoles and Americans," historian Joseph G. Tregell Jr. points out that by the 20th century, many had cast Creole history as all-white instead of mixed race. This, as you'll remember from last time, is not at all accurate. 20th century Creoles wanted to downplay the interracial parts of their history, but also appear less racist than other Americans. It was a tricky balancing act.
However, Delphine embodied the myth they were building for their heritage: a refined, sophisticated, and distinctly European aristocrat. It seems that her descendants believed Delphine was simply too dignified to be cruel. As illogical as that sounds, we can see why white Creoles embraced this idea, as well as the theory of the "secret saboteur"
European dignity was the new cornerstone of the Creole identity. But if the ultimate example of that, Delphine Lalaurie, were a monster, it taints the entire culture. So maybe that's why the theory gained popularity. But we're not buying it. There's too much evidence in the Lalaurie mansion for one person to fabricate.
That said, just because there was torture going on in the attic, that doesn't mean Delphine was the one behind it, right? We'll call this second theory: The husband did it. And well, as you might have guessed, it suggests that Delphine's young husband, Dr. Louis Lalaurie, was the real monster in the mansion.
The logic is this: any rumors of abuse in Delphine's house only started after Louis' arrival in 1828. He also had a documented history of violence against Delphine, who accused him of beating her in 1832. Additionally, he was the one who dismissed Kanonja when the judge asked about the attic.
Then there are the rumors of medical experiments. Even though many of these were exaggerations published in the 20th century, could they have come from a grain of truth? There's a long, painful history of medical experiments on enslaved peoples in the American South. And out of the two LaLauries, it seems the doctor would have far more motivation for such experiments than Delphine.
Writers like Victoria Costner Love and Lorelei Shannon in their book "Mad Madame LaLaurie" suggested that Louis may have been the sole perpetrator of the torture, and that Delphine was either ignorant or too frightened to oppose him. However, they acknowledge this seems unlikely. Delphine was also apparently trying to steer people away from the slave quarters the day of the fire, which strongly suggests she knew about the torture room.
Not only that, she would have let the prisoners burn alive before she revealed her family secret. It's also difficult to imagine Delphine as completely powerless in the relationship. She had all the wealth, all the status, and was more than a decade older than her husband. And when he got violent, she went right to the courts. Wouldn't that have been the time to mention that he was torturing people?
As for the medical experiments, no evidence was ever found to support those stories, and no one who was there mentioned anything like them. So, based on everything we know about Delphine, her marriage, and her crimes, we can't pin all the blame on her husband. Still, some people insist that Delphine was too small to possibly be responsible for torturing her enslaved workers. We'll call this the "she's just too dainty" theory.
This one points to Delphine's petite stature and asks whether she was physically capable of even wielding a whip, let alone chaining up enslaved workers by herself.
To answer that question, we're going to return one more time to the story of the child on the rooftop. Remember, this was the only eyewitness account of Delphine personally abusing her enslaved workers. According to the story, she had to sell off a portion of her enslaved workforce as punishment following the incident.
There aren't any court records to support this story, but we may find the evidence in other places. In 1828, Delphine sold six of her enslaved workers. This was the same month her neighbor, Jean Boz, wrote that authorities had cracked down on her for "barbarous treatment of her slaves." Records show that a short time after this, Delphine paid a famous lawyer, John Randolph Grimes, to defend her in court.
Grimes was a powerful ally to the LaLauries, known for his sway in the courts, and he wasn't cheap. His fee was the modern-day equivalent of $7,000. So if we take all these individual pieces into account, they seem to support the story of the child on the roof. She was caught abusing her enslaved workers, hired a lawyer to defend her, and was let off with a slap on the wrist.
If the rooftop story is true, it's possible that Delphine and Grimes used their wealth and power to keep the whole affair largely off the record. Given Louisiana's justice system at the time, that seems plausible. So with that in mind, it's hard to discount the eyewitness account of Delphine wielding a bullwhip. Even though she was considered petite, she had to be involved in the torture.
But if both the Lalauris were torturers, was there one instigator? It's impossible to say for certain who was in charge up in the attic, Delphine or the doctor. The timing makes it seem that Louis started the torture, but Delphine's power in the relationship and her dominance as mistress of the house suggests she had control.
In either case, those looking to cast all the blame on Louie are out of luck. Delphine had to know about the torture, and if her husband was involved, it's likely that she oversaw the violence. But still, we have to come back to the why of it all. Sure, there's our theory about Delphine's ego playing a key role, but that's not the idea that some prefer.
This final theory doesn't necessarily vindicate Delphine, but it does bear mentioning for the role it played in shaping her modern legacy. Let's call it the "She's a Witch" idea. Some 20th century stories insist that Delphine had a close tutorship with the voodoo queen of New Orleans, Marie Laveau.
According to rumors, Delphine tortured her victims to summon dark spirits. Others say that Delphine raised a devil baby, the actual spawn of Satan, whom she tortured alongside her enslaved workers.
It probably goes without saying that these theories are unsubstantiated, and most came into being long after Delphine had died. For example, the TV show American Horror Story pulled heavily on these stories for their depiction of Delphine. Played by actress Kathy Bates, this is by far the most popular, well-known version of Madame LaLaurie in recent memory.
That said, they weren't the first to associate Delphine with dark magic. Long before American Horror Story, supernatural suspicions cloaked the LaLaurie mansion. These include the very first rumors started after the fire. Just days after the blaze, the New Orleans Bee called Delphine "a fury escaped from hell" and "a demon in the shape of a woman."
It's interesting that the Creole newspapers were the first to invoke demons and Satan to describe Delphine. They knew that her crimes would reflect on Creole culture. But instead of defending the LaLauries, they shaped them into monsters. And who could blame them? Despite the theories that would have us believe otherwise, Delphine committed atrocities inside her house. When hearing about her crimes, the word "evil" just rolls off the tongue.
However, she wasn't a total outlier. There are endless examples of sadism by white slaveholders in America. In 1855, a Louisiana overseer poured castor oil down a worker's throat, killing him. In 1856, a different overseer nailed an enslaved worker's genitalia to a post and beat him.
While the Lalauris were an extreme case of abuse, they were still part of a pattern. Since the beginning, Delphine's legacy has always been one of near supernatural evil. But does that somehow lessen the impact of her crimes? Shaping Madame into a devilish voodoo witch alleviates the more chilling truth.
Her cruelty wasn't the exception to a slave-holding, morally fractured culture. It was a symptom of it. Perhaps this, as much as the horror of her crimes, was what so enraged the crowd outside her house. They were horrified that someone so familiar to them was so deranged. That's why they wanted to punish her.
By the afternoon following the fire, they'd been waiting all day for authorities to arrest Madame Lalaurie. But none had come. They were ready to seek justice themselves. But Delphine wasn't the type to go down easily. She had a plan to make a desperate escape. And that plan would take her straight through the heart of the mob.
For years, Madame Delphine Lalaurie had been running a torture chamber in the attic of her slave quarters, where she sadistically abused her enslaved workers. But in April of 1834, her secret had been exposed, and justice was coming.
The afternoon of the fire, Delphine had her back against a wall. She barricaded herself inside her mansion, but the crowd outside was screaming for blood. It seemed only a matter of time before they stormed the house. It's unclear if Delphine's husband, Louis, stayed with his wife or fled the scene earlier, but we do know she had at least one ally in the house.
Bastien, her enslaved coachman, and he was the key to her escape plan. Of all Delphine's enslaved workers, Bastien is said to have seemed different. While neighbors described the others as haggard and starved, they reportedly remembered Bastien as sleek, well-fed, and fiercely loyal to his mistress.
Some believe that Delphine kept Bastien so well-groomed for the sake of appearances to dispel her reputation for cruelty. But more sinister rumors about the coachman swirled. Author Harriet Martineau said that Bastien was Delphine's spy, that he reported on other enslaved workers and possibly assisted in their torture. Another author, Herbert Asbury, suggested Bastien was Delphine's lover.
We can't say if these rumors are true, and Asbury definitely embellished facts in his book, but it's not impossible to believe that Delphine started an affair with her coachman.
Whatever the truth about their relationship, it's said that Bastien would do anything for Delphine. So as the mob outside reached a fever pitch, she sent him to bring her carriage around to the front of the house. Of course, there was no way for Delphine to get into the carriage except to walk straight through the mob. How did she do it?
In her book, Martineau describes the scene, saying when the carriage came around, Delphine, quote, was ready and stepped into it. Her assurance seems to have paralyzed the crowd. It might sound surprising, but it seems that Delphine still had the presence to captivate all of New Orleans.
As soon as the carriage doors closed, however, the mob set upon it. They pulled at the doors, hammered at the windows. Delphine sat inside, mere feet from their groping hands. Atop the carriage, Bastien whipped and bludgeoned the crowd. Slowly, the carriage crept forward. Before the crowd could muster around it, the horses broke free and Delphine was off down the road.
The carriage fled the city and took a canal route into the swamp, leading to Lake Pontchartrain. There, a schooner was waiting for Delphine. She boarded it quickly, aware of the mob gaining on her. Bastien watched his mistress sail away, never to see her again. She'd gotten away just in time. The mob soon arrived at the dock, only to find Delphine had escaped.
According to Martin O's account of that day, they exploded with rage, breaking the carriage to pieces and stabbing the horses to death.
Back at the LaLaurie mansion, the reaction was just as violent. People rushed into the manor house, smashing the furniture, crashing down chandeliers, tearing the panels from the walls. Delphine's neighbor, Jean Beaux, remembered the home's few protectors being thrown from the second story, only to land on the crowd below. By the time police got control, the mob had torn the mansion to pieces.
In the eerie quiet that fell over the city after that, people wondered where Delphine had gone. Some believed that she was still in New Orleans, that she was hiding on one of her properties tucked into the swamp. They were close. It appears that Delphine didn't immediately leave the South. She went to Alabama, allowing her to regroup with her children and husband.
But they couldn't stay long. And within the month, Delphine and her family fled north to New York City. Maybe Delphine hoped New York was far enough from New Orleans that she could leave the gossip and vitriol behind. But she was wrong. According to some reports, by the time she arrived, word of her crimes had already reached Manhattan.
In 1834, New York society still had many racist practices, but many residents considered themselves more benevolent toward Black Americans than Southerners. Naturally, they would have treated Delphine with disgust. It was soon clear as day. To escape her reputation, she would have to leave the country. By the summer of 1834, the LaLauries had boarded a ship to France.
Exiting the Hudson Bay, Delphine probably thought back to when she was 15, leaving New Orleans for Spain. Then she'd been forced to leave the city because of her husband's misdeeds. Now she was responsible for her exile. But it seems that Delphine didn't see it that way. According to her family members, Delphine didn't understand the anger directed at her. She still believed she hadn't done anything wrong.
At first, this seems disingenuous. After all, Delphine reportedly tried to keep firefighters away from the attic for a reason. But Delphine's upbringing may have caused this mental blip
Last week we discussed her compartmentalization. Her complex relationship with race likely caused her to build a twisted, often contradictory morality. And a 2013 study in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass shows how that thought process can cause mental gaps. People with compartmentalized personalities are likely to shape those compartments to avoid self-criticism.
Their sense of self is fragile, and they'll even defy logic to protect themselves. In this case, Delphine shielded herself with two contradictory truths. She knew her crimes were so bad that she had to keep them secret, but at the same time, she refused to think what she was doing was wrong.
Delphine's morality is a complicated, difficult matter. We'll never know if she felt shame, guilt, or a sense of wrongdoing. But history would remember that famous day in 1834 when the truth about her cruelty was exposed to the world.
Afterward, Delphine moved to Paris and lived a privileged, if quieter, life. Her marriage to Louis wasn't to last. By 1842, he'd left the family for Cuba. In a letter to a friend, he referred to himself as, quote, "a very sad individual." He died in 1863, and unlike his wife, didn't leave behind much of a legacy.
The facts around Delphine's death are harder to pin down. Many historians disagree on when or where she passed. Authors Victoria Costner Love and Lorelei Shannon say that Delphine secretly returned to New Orleans in 1842. Letters from her children show that she made plans to return around this time, and lived there until her death in the mid-1850s.
However, famed novelist George Washington Cable said that she remained in France but died after being mauled by a wild boar during a hunt. This is a satisfying ending for those wishing to see Delphine get her just desserts.
But the most likely answer seems to be the least fantastic, and it comes from author Carolyn Morrow Long, who said that Delphine passed away in Paris from an unspecified sickness on December 7th, 1849. Long cites a French death record and a funeral record from a nearby cemetery, making her account the most reliable of the three.
If she's right, Delphine died at the age of 62, having never been punished for her crimes.
But after she left the city, and even after her death, Delphine's presence lingered in the LaLaurie mansion. In the days following the riot, neighbors are rumored to have heard groans and scratching coming from the foundation of the house. Police supposedly searched the premises over and over, never finding anyone there. But for weeks, the groans continued.
The house remained ruined and vacant for several years. Then, in 1837, a landlord named Charles Caffin purchased and refurbished the property, intending to lease out the rooms. According to legend, the strange sounds persisted. Caffin reported hearing awful noises like cries and groans throughout the night. Unsurprisingly, he attracted few tenants.
Over the next few decades, the building passed from one business to the next, allegedly with each owner reporting horrible, mysterious sounds. These included groans, screams, and occasionally the clanking of chains. Throughout the city, the LaLaurie mansion was known exclusively as "The Haunted House."
But landlords soon learned to cash in on the house's reputation. By 1893, Fortunato Greco was selling 10-cent tickets to ghost seekers who wanted to tour the manor. Other owners did the same, with some hiring workers to moan and drag chains to scare visitors. Even today, rumors of Delphine's ghost draw visitors from all over the world.
In 2007, actor Nicolas Cage purchased the building for nearly $3.5 million. Like any haunted house, it's impossible to prove the presence of spirits in the LaLaurie mansion. Visitors have reported visions of Delphine still walking the halls, sometimes preparing for parties, sometimes chasing her victims with a bullwhip. Who knows if these are true?
But it seems that Delphine may have returned to New Orleans in a different way. The funeral records of Cimetière de Montmartre, Delphine's official burial place, show that in 1851, her body was exhumed and secretly transported back to New Orleans. Delphine always considered the city her home, and even after her exile, hoped to return.
Was this her family's covert attempt to honor her last wish? The absolute location of her final resting place is still a mystery. A 1941 newspaper article pointed to an unmarked crypt Delphine's son purchased in a New Orleans cemetery. But the cemetery records don't list any LaLauries as inhabitants, and the crypt has never been searched.
Still, for many historians, it's impossible to think of the French Quarter without at least a passing thought of Madame Delphine Lalaurie. She's a monster, a spectre, and a representation of New Orleans' complicated, painful past. She and the city are forever linked by her crimes. And whether it's her bones, her ghost, or her legacy, she will remain there forever.
Thanks for listening to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Monday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast. And we'd love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. For more information on Madame LaLaurie, amongst the many sources we used, we found the book Madame LaLaurie, Mistress of the Haunted House by Carolyn Morrow Long, extremely helpful to our research.
Stay safe out there. Serial Killers is a Spotify podcast. This episode was written by Connor Fitzgerald, edited by Joel Callen, fact-checked by Anya Baerle, researched by Miki Taylor and Chelsea Wood, and sound designed by Michael Motion, with production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Trent Williamson, Carly Madden, and Joshua Kern.
Our head of programming is Julian Boirot. Our head of production is Nick Johnson. And Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Vanessa Richardson.