Madame Lallaurie's House Of Horrors

Beauty and riches sure does cover the stench of evil deeds. The infamous socialite of New Orleans turned out to be a real horror. It’s not often you end up with a fancy neighbour who is in fact a serial killer. People are naïve when it comes to looking through a person and finding out their true intentions. If you are expecting a masked man who rampages the town with a chainsaw or a ragged man who hunts young blood partying in their summer cabin, congratulations! You are successfully fooled by the movie industry. Real serial killers appear to be extremely clean, neatly dressed and with very good manners. Just like the antagonist of this story, Madame LaLaurie!

New Orleans is infamous for its numerous haunted houses and deadly manslayers. The horror tour would certainly entertain you with its original stories and horror landmarks, especially the ill-famed House of Horrors. Back in the day, it was a very popular mansion where hundreds of parties were held. Madame Delphine LaLaurie was a respectable woman in the society and was well known for her lavish parties. She wore a mask of kindness in front of her guests and treated her slaves politely but little did they know she would feast upon the souls of innocent black slaves in the dark of the night.

Originally born as Madame Marie Delphine McCarty in 1780 in New Orleans, she was the only one from her family to have been born in America. She was married thrice and begat five children. After the demise of her previous two husbands, she tied the knots with a young doctor named Leonard Louie Nicolas LaLaurie who remained an absentee in their marriage life. After marrying an affluent man who barely shows any interest in her, she purchased a three-story mansion in the French Quarters in the wake of 1831 and started showing her true colours.

Though she had an artistic eye and her home decor was the crème de la crème of antiques, her attic remained locked away from her curious guests and reeked of blood and death. She chained her elderly cook to the kitchen stove and had stepped on her several times, leaving her to starve.Once a neighbour had claimed to have seen her chase a little slave girl all over the stairs until she jumped off the balcony in fear of what might happen to her in the attic. Suicide sounded like a better choice than to suffer as the subject of Madame LaLaurie’s tortures. And that’s where the rumour started. People began to whisper about her cruel intentions but that didn’t stop Madame LaLaurie. The attic was where she committed all her inhumane crimes. She hoarded the rotting corpses of her victims and added new ones to the bunch every day. Even a small mistake would earn one their free one way pass to the dungeon of death. Witnesses claimed to had seen victims with barely any life left in them, with their eyes gouged out and their mouth filled with animal feces and sewn shut. The horrendous sight of live people with their skin flayed made one’s stomach turn upside down.

Married to a doctor, Madame LaLaurie was curious about the human anatomy and conducted several experiments to pass her time. A woman was found whose bones were broken and reset to resemble the structure of a crab and another woman was wrapped in her own intestines. She broke holes in people’s skulls and used a wooden spoon to stir their brain. The disturbing fact is, all those poor, tortured victims remained alive even after her stomach-churning experiments.