No. 4 – The LaLaurie House – New Orleans, Louisiana Folk histories of Madame Delphine Lalauries poor treatment of her slaves circulated in Louisiana during the nineteenth century. After 1945, stories of the Lalaurie slaves became considerably more explicit. Jeanne deLavigne, writing in Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans (1946), alleged that Lalaurie had a sadistic appetite [that] seemed never appeased until she had inflicted on one or more of her black servitors some hideous form of torture and claimed that those who responded to the 1834 fire had found male slaves, stark naked, chained to the wall, their eyes gouged out, their fingernails pulled off by the roots; others had their joints skinned and festering, great holes in their buttocks where the flesh had been sliced away, their ears hanging by shreds, their lips sewn together ... Intestines were pulled out and knotted around naked waists. There were holes in skulls, where a rough stick had been inserted to stir the brains. The story was further popularized and embellished in Journey Into Darkness: Ghosts and Vampires of New Orleans (1998) by Kalila Katherina Smith, the operator of a New Orleans ghost tour business. Smiths book added several more explicit details to the discoveries allegedly made by rescuers during the 1834 fire, including a victim [who] obviously had her arms amputated and her skin peeled off in a circular pattern, making her look like a human caterpillar, and another who had had her limbs broken and reset at odd angles so she resembled a human crab. Many of the new details in Smiths book were unsourced, while others were not supported by the sources given. Either way, the events that transpired during LaLaurie’s time were gruesome and horrific. Many believe those actions lead directly to the hauntings that those using the building now have reported. youtube/watch?v=noCXVeA1IZs
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 19:19:36 +0000