|
|
|
LALAURIE
by KC Stapleton
Sunday August 14, 2005 10:15:28 PM CDT
 |
Lalaurie House
(1906)
1140 ROYAL STREET
New Orleans, LA
|
|
|
|
|
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana – Cities, like
people, have memories. Happy memories are commemorated with
pictures, statues, and awards, but there are also things that
cities would like to put behind them. Remembering causes the pain
to return like reopening an old wound. For New Orleans, the most
painful memory came at the hands of Madame LaLaurie.
She was beautiful, and her husband, a doctor, was handsome and
rich. They had purchased a Creole-style home in the French Quarter
and furnished the mansion lavishly. Invitations to their parties
became a social prize. Her looks were the fashion at the time:
long dark hair, blue eyes, and always beautifully and meticulously
dressed. Even if her blue eyes were a little cold and her husband
seemed to have a nervous nature, few mentioned having any qualms
when being entertained by them. Who would want to risk an argument
with a so popular a couple?
Only one woman at first dared to resist the social superiority of
Delphine LaLaurie. One day, as one of their neighbors was climbing
the steps up to her roof, she heard a scream. Across the street at
the LaLaurie mansion, a tiny figure was quickly running up to the
roof; the woman realized it was a slave, a young girl who was
Delphine's personal servant. The terrified child was running in
terror from an outraged Delphine, who was brandishing a whip. The
neighbor watched in horror as the little girl gave a last ghastly
scream and fell from the steps to her death on the stone pathway
below.
In anger, not only did the woman
speak out against her influential neighbors—she reported them. At
that time in New Orleans, there were laws against cruelty to
slaves. Delphine LaLaurie and her husband were fined, and their
slaves—over one hundred men, women, and children—were sold away
from them at auction.
|
|
However, Delphine would not be denied. She had her
family and friends turn the auction into a farce by buying back the
slaves and returning them to the LaLauries. There was little justice
for the slaves; they had no voice, no rights, and they were sold back
to a house that held no mercy and a woman who had no humanity.
Delphine's undoing would come from one of these individuals who could
no longer stand the horror of living under the LaLauries’ roof. The
cook, who was chained inside the kitchen, set a fire in a desperate
attempt to end her nightmare.
The LaLauries’ only interest was in preserving the lush interior of
their home, but neighbors and fire volunteers entered the mansion to
try to save those trapped inside. In a locked attic room, they found
victims who were long past rescue: not victims of the fire, but slaves
who had been brutalized by Madame Delphine and the Doctor. Inside that
room, they found servants who had been beaten, abused, and grotesquely
experimented on by the couple. Everywhere the volunteers looked, they
found men or women chained to walls or tied to tables, dead,
unconscious, or crying out in pain for someone to end their torment.
There were severed limbs on the floor and jars containing things the
witnesses didn't want to identify. The attic room was a torture
chamber.
The couple's social status meant nothing after that, nor did it matter
any longer who they had victimized. The news of the horrors the
LaLauries had committed swept through New Orleans, and a lynch mob was
quickly formed. But there would be no justice; the Doctor and his wife
escaped, probably with the help of relatives.
The LaLaurie mansion stood vacant for many years. Few people wanted to
remember that such cruelty had occurred within their own community,
aided and abetted by the laws and standards they still lived by. The
house was believed to be haunted; lights were seen moving past the
windows at night, screams and moans were heard coming from inside its
walls, and eventually passersby would cross the street to avoid
walking in front of the LaLaurie house.
The mansion has passed into different hands since then; it has been a
boarding school, a saloon, and an apartment building. During one of
its renovations, another secret from those times was unearthed. Under
the floorboards, makeshift graves were found holding dozens of bodies
that were believed to date back to the time of the LaLauries. We will
never know for sure how many people were tortured and killed by the
couple.
No one can say whether the restless souls of those who never found
justice still linger inside the mansion, but New Orleans will always
be haunted by what happened there.
|
|
|
The Comment Forum -
Post your comments here
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
©2005 WhatWasThen.com All Rights Reserved |
|
