Date: Sun Dec 30 2001
Time: 20:44:14
Thoughts & Comments:
Hi Alyne! It's Beth, It's so nice to meet you! I had an odd question for you. Perhaps
I should read everything you have already written here first, but I tend to be very
impulsive when I am interested in something. I guess Jim and Sarah can verify that. LOL. Please, excuse me if you have already covered this and I just have not read about it yet. My ex and I visited New Orleans a few years ago. We had a strange experience at one of the houses in the French Quarter. Can you tell me anything about a house where several people were chained up and starved to death in it? Does that ring a bell? We didn't know it at the time we visited the house, but later saw what had happened in one of those "Historic haunted houses of New Orleans" tourist guides. We were so freaked out that I can't even remember the name of the street it was on. My ex is not usually extremely sensitive to paranormal experiences. However, he went absolutely nuts. He was trying to break into this house because he swore that he heard a woman screaming. My ears work better than his do and I couldn't hear a thing. He started to realize that it must be a ghost that he was hearing. I had to physically drag him away from the house. Before I drug him off the porch, he told her to come with us. I felt the "buzz" of energy that ghosts give off at the house. I knew there were spirits, but I didn't feel anyone in particular. We forgot about it after awhile. A few days after we returned home, I felt a presence. He did, too. It was she. Believe it or not we were visited many times after that by the lady ghost. (My ex actually saw her and I had several encounters with her.) She was pretty good at moving things and opening locked doors, she was hard to ignore. LOL. We named her "Clarice" although I don't know her real name. Do you have any information on the house or the people that were tortured there? Does that sound familiar? She didn't stay with us all the time. She would come and go. She became a member of the family to us. She and I were at odds for a little while. I got the impression she thought of my ex as her man. She would get mad at me if I got angry at him. Once, she threw bananas off the fridge right in between us while we were having a tiff. LOL. They were at the back of
the fridge and had been for some time. She pushed them from the back to the front and they landed right smack in the middle of where we were standing. I think she wanted us to shut up. LOL. After that...we did. LOL. She and I eventually reached an understanding and I grew quite fond of her. I no longer am with my husband or in that same house. I still think about her and I was wondering if you might be able to tell me anything about who she might have been. My ex came up with the name for her. I always felt a little bad calling her "Clarice" and not knowing her real name. Thanks, Alyne. I appreciate you reading all of this.
Beth
Answer:
Dear Beth:
The house you speak of is most probably the infamous LaLaurie House, located at 1140 Royal Street.There is, indeed, a long and grim history associated with the house, and it is all traced back to Madame Delphine LaLaurie.
Delphine LaLaurie and her third husband, Leonard LaLaurie, took up residence in the house at 1140 Royal Street sometime in the 1830's. The pair immediately became the darlings of the gay New Orleans social scene that at the time was experiencing the birth of ragtime, the slave dances and rituals of Congo Square, the reign of the Mighty Marie Laveau, and the advent of the bittersweet Creole Balls. Madame LaLaurie hosted fantastic events in her beautiful home that were talked about months afterward. She was described as sweet and endearing in her ways, and her husband was nothing if not highly respected within the community.
Like all well-established members of society, the LaLauries kept a brace of slaves to help run their Royal Street home. Early on, there was nothing unusual about Madame's relationship with her slaves, although they all seemed to hold her in nervous regard. But eventually, whispers began to spread through the lower Quarter of the Madame's abuse of those indentured to working under her roof. The whispers grew louder and louder, among the Negroes and the Free People of Color. But New Orleans socialites turned a deaf ear to what they considered "nonsense" -- until the day Madame LaLaurie was seen chasing a young slave girl through the house and toher ultimate death on the courtyard ground, three stories below.
The death, deemed an accident, and Madame deemed perfectly within her right to exact discipline on her property, nonetheless set off a chain of events that would assure Madame LaLaurie an eternal place in infamy.
It is said that, angered at the needless and awful death of the young slave girl, one of the older kitchen women deliberately set fire to the house.The flames had nearly engulfed most of the lower stories of the house by the time the fire brigade arrived on the scene. The kitchen woman, it is said, ran out to the fire brigade and, hollering something about the "poor souls" in the attic, led those who followed to the top of the burning house.
There are actual accounts, with notarized signatures of at least three witnesses of high standing (one of my own ancestors, as a matter of fact, was one who signed) of the gruesome and horrible sights found in the dark and smokey attic that day. Dead and half-dead slaves, men, women, and children, were found in various stages of torment and pain -- chained to the walls by shackles on their hands and feet, some lying prone, others forced to stand in crudely constructed wooden stocks, they had been subjected to unimaginable acts of morbid atrocity. Eyes gouged out; tongues hacked off and in some instances crudely re-attached; mouths and eyes sewn shut altogether; noses and ears sheared off; bones broken and reset in horrible, twisted manners; genitals mutilated -- these were just some of the horrible sights that met the eyes of the fire rescuers and witnessed by ordinary citizens. Most of the slaves thus confined were already dead from torment or smoke inhalation, the others would not last long beyond this day of liberation.
The City was in an uproar. There were cries of vengeance against LaLaurie; they wanted her blood; they wanted her skin. And Madame knew it.
So, with the mob forming hot upon her heels, she escaped Royal Street and the French Quarter in her carriage, the horses dragging it madly away toward the swamps and Bayous south and east of the Quarter itself.
It is said Madame LaLaurie stopped and took refuge at the Pitot House (still standing) upon Bayou St. John, where she boarded a merchant schooner and escaped. Where is still a matter of some debate. Though many hold that she escaped altogether to France (and there has been a grave plaque found only two years ago that seems to support this theory), others insist she escaped to the North Shore, across Lake Pontchartrain, and abided for a time at the Claiborne Cottage in what is now old Covington. Still others have her escaping to Lacombe, Louisiana, also on the North Shore, where she is said to have reclaimed some of her wealth and station -- and more than a little of her old habits.
As for the home on Royal Street, it was restored and renovated many times over the intervening years, passing through the hands of many a land-loaded New Orleanian. As I write this, a new wave of interior renovations is underway.
As for the tales of the home on Royal Street, they are many and varied.
There are documented incidents of people seeing, feeling and hearing the ghosts of tormented slaves in the LaLaurie home, and there are even reports of the Madame herself being seen there. Not all the spirits attached to the LaLaurie home have stayed stationary, however, so it is possible that an entity may have followed you and your ex home. It is interesting to me that your ex came up with the name "Clarice" which sounds so very much like "LaLaurie" -- though this is not to say that Madame herself went back with you, it is a confirmation of sorts that the LaLaurie name certainly has staying power, fear of it even transcending the grave.
New Orleans is one of the oldest and most multi-faceted cities in the United States, and there are other tales, similar to those of the LaLaurie home that, sadly, have made their way into our history. But the gruesome horror of this particular event was so purilent that it stains the city's memory even now.
I hope this has been of some help to you.
Best regards, Alyne
