Post by Graveyardbride on Oct 30, 2014 23:07:23 GMT -5
Colorful and cosmopolitan, sultry and sophisticated, garish and ghoulish, New Orleans is a veritable mélange, and its history contains more than a few skeletons in the attic. This was almost literally true of the house at 1140 Royal Street, notorious even by the bizarre traditions of the French Quarter. Built in 1831, the three-story edifice was the home of Dr. Louis LaLaurie and his fashionable wife Delphine (above), esteemed for her elegant balls and charitable works among the sick and poor. From time to time, it was true, guests of the LaLauries remarked among themselves that the house sometimes had an unpleasant smell and Madame LaLaurie was once fined by the authorities after a young slave girl she was whipping fell to her death, but for the most part, people tried to overlook such things, feeling it was none of their business. But attitudes changed one day in 1834 when a fire broke out in the LaLaurie residence. When firemen entered the edifice, they found the cook changed to the floor of the kitchen and in a locked room upstairs, there were several severely mistreated slaves, some already dead and others barely alive with limbs amputated or purposefully deformed. Preserved organs and other body parts completed the picture. When word spread that the elite LaLauries were monstrous ghouls, a mob of outraged citizens surrounded the house demanding they be brought out and made to pay for their crimes. Unfortunately, the pair escaped, some said to France, and were never seen again in New Orleans.
The abandoned LaLaurie home quickly became known, far and wide, as the “haunted house.” Neighbors were startled by shrieks of terror echoing in the night, and those passing the structure after dark reported seeing vaporous forms in the windows. A few even claimed to have seen Madame LaLaurie herself, whip in hand, chasing the phantom of a young girl to the edge of the roof.
But in time, the abandoned house was restored, first as a school for girls, then as a music conservatory, and following a few other incarnations, it was once again turned into a private residence. At one point, it was owned by actor Nicolas Cage and then by Michael Whalen, a Texas energy trader. Perhaps after so many years, the specters of the past have faded, but tour guides still point to the haunted house and tourists occasionally report seeing phantom human shapes staring down from the dark windows.
The Grieving General. A stone’s throw from the LaLaurie House, another Quarter abode, this one at 1113 Charles Street, came by its ghosts in a grim manner. Known as the Beauregard House (above), it was once the home of General Pierre Gustave Toutant “PGT” Beauregard, one of the South’s ablest generals in the War Between the States. Beauregard ordered the first shots fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor and played a major role in the Confederacy’s first great victory at Bull run. He fought with distinction in a dozen other battles including bloody Shiloh on the Tennessee River in April 1862. After two days of mutual slaughter, 23,000 men on both sides were lost – and it was believed some of the Confederate dead followed their distinguished leader home to New Orleans. The specters of Confederate soldiers have been seen on the grounds, and it is said that Beauregard himself appears occasionally, sorrowfully whispering, “Shiloh, Shiloh.”
Battling the Mafia. Now open to visitors, the Beauregard House is remembered for yet another haunting. In 1909, members of the rich Sicilian Giacona family found themselves under intense pressure from the local branch of the Mafia: Pay up or perish, they were instructed. But the Giaconas were made of stern stuff and when four Mafiosi came calling, family members shot three of them to death. This event predicated what witnesses have described as a recurring phantom tableau of courageous householders overwhelming their oppressors. Scary doings, but not scary enough to have deterred the distinguished lady novelist who owned Beauregard House for more than 20 years. Frances Parkinson Keyes bought the Giacona home in the 1940s and lived there contentedly until her death in 1970. She used the former slave quarters out back as a studio and wrote about New Orleans eccentricities in such bestsellers as Dinner at Antoine’s and Steamboat Gothic.
The Brave Priest. The wealth of anecdotes makes it seem as if scarcely a block of the mile-square Quarter lacks ghosts, or “haints,” as many locals call them. Visitors to the great, triple-spired St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square will learn it was on this sacred ground that the sainted Father Dagobert defied the Spaniards in 1769 to secure a Christian burial for six insurgent parishioners. A short-lived revolt by the French-speaking colonists had been quashed with particular vindictiveness, its leaders executed and left to rot under the guard of soldiers. But Pere Dagobert could not abide such sacrilege. Somehow, he retrieved the bodies and took them into the nearby cathedral; perhaps the soldiers turned a blind eye to the man of God, or perhaps they even helped him. Dagobert then gathered the families of the martyrs, performed a proper mass for the dead and led the cortege through drenching rain to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, not far from the Quarter, where the fallen were properly laid to rest. Even now, more than two hundred years later, on rainy nights, the disembodied voice of the beloved Capuchin priest is said to be heard singing hymns along the streets between the cathedral and cemetery, and there are those who say they have seen his spectral form floating along the aisles of St. Louis Cathedral itself.
The Jilted Witch. Royal Street is said to be one of the haunts of a female phantom, who at times also frequents St Ann, Toulouse and Bourbon streets. She is called the Witch of the French Opera House, for it is from this building, since destroyed by fire, at the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse streets, that she first emerged. Anyone who encounters her will understand the appellation “witch.” Her hair and face are a chalky, deathly white, but her eyes are as red and burning as those of a goshawk, renowned among predatory birds for its implacable nature. The Witch of the French Opera House is avowed to be the spirit of a sensuous, but aging, woman, whose younger lover rejected her in favor of a new mistress, after which she committed suicide. But this wasn’t the end, for the distraught older woman returned from the dead and in a spectral fury, killed her faithless lover and his new girlfriend. But even murder could not slake her thirst for vengeance and to this day, she roams the Quarter, earthbound by hatred.
The Woman in White. Encounters with ghosts have occurred throughout the city. Around 1900, in a fine house at 2606 Royal Street in the Fauborg Marighny, just north of the French Quarter, Madame Mineurcanal, a grand Creole lady, unaccountably killed her little white dog and then hanged herself from a beam in the third-floor stairwell. Thereafter, the house remained unoccupied for many years, but following World war II, a family known only by the names of two grandchildren, Ramon and Theresa, moved in and immediately commenced seeing the misty figure of a woman in a white dress descending the stairs. For some reason, the children started calling the apparition “mini-canal,” a fair approximation of the name Mineurcanal. No harm came to them, but when a visiting cousin took up the chant, he was heard screaming in the night with a scarlet hand print on his check as if he had been slapped very hard. On another night, the father turned in bed to embrace his wife and embraced instead an incorporeal being. When the wife became pregnant, she had such a terrifying encounter with the lady in white that she almost lost her baby, and after the child was born, an apparition was seen bending over the crib. Moaning sounds and the barking of a dog could be heard at times, however, numerous investigations of the unexplained phenomena turned up nothing.
The Restless Dead of Destrehan. No excursion through the spirit world of New Orleans would be complete without a visit to Destrehan Plantation (above), widely reputed to be the most haunted house on the Mississippi, or, according to some, in the entire state of Louisiana. This magnificent mansion at 9999 River Road, only 30 minutes by car from the French Quarter, was built in the late 1780s in the two-story West Indies style with a dozen rooms facing out on wide, cool verandahs. About 1,000 of the plantation’s 6,000 acres were originally planted in indigo, then in sugar cane. It was a series of family tragedies that gave rise to the spirits that still seem to haunt the place. One early resident, Nicholas Noël Destrehan, suffered several losses. His 15-year-old bride died soon after their marriage and a second wife died young during a yellow fever epidemic. Then Noel lost his right arm when the cape he was wearing became entangled in some plantation machinery, and his sister Seliz died mysteriously at age 30 in New York City. A brother, René, died at 28, also in curious circumstances, and also in New York. Neither death certificate listed a definitive cause. Despite so much ill luck, the Destrehan family held on to the plantation until 1910, when it was sold to a sugar corporation. Later, it passed to an oil company, which eventually turned it over to the historic trust that manages Destrehan today.
Its many phantoms appear in various forms in every section of the house, but most often in the back hall. One employee told of a cold and formless miasma that dogged her footsteps as she checked the upstairs rooms just before closing. Tourists have exchanged greetings with a tall, courtly, French-accented gentleman, whom they later identified from pictures as the original owner, Jean Noël Destrehan. Others have encountered a strikingly handsome, but forbidding specter, who lacks a right hand, which is, without doubt, the apparition of the star-crossed Noël. Additionally, the wraiths of two little girls of unknown parentage have been observed playing on the staircase.
Queen of Voodoo. In Haiti, where voodoo was the ultimate religion and competition for followers fierce, Marie Laveau (above) might have been nothing more than a minor mambo, but in New Orleans during the mid-19th century, she reigned as undisputed queen of the cult. Much about Laveau is cloaked in mystery: She seems to have been a freeborn mulatto with possibly a drop or two of Indian blood – a tall, lithe, striking women with fine features and commanding black eyes. Her fame began in the 1830s as the all-wise, all-knowing hairdresser to the wives of the rich and powerful men of New Orleans. In short order, she became her clients’ well-paid employee, boudoir confessor and fortuneteller. Servants of white folks and the quadroon and octoroon mistresses kept by some Creole men were only too willing to spy for her and so adept was Laveau at manipulating the secrets she learned that some considered her a gifted psychic. As she willed, marriages and affairs were consummated or torn apart, good or evil luck summoned, concubines procured, crimes absolved. A person’s enemies, it was whispered, could even be made to die for the payment of $1,000.
By the late 1850s, Laveau had turned voodoo into a sort of happening with a particular New Orleans twist. The rituals beside Lake Pontchatrain included all the essentials including the giant snake (or Zombi) with which she danced, the boiling cauldron, the black cat and cock, the thudding drums and the blood-quaffing. There also were unsubstantiated tales of naked participants screaming wildly as they became increasingly intoxicated and ended their revels in frenzied fornication. To these devilish rites, Laveau solemnly added statues of Roman Catholic saints, prayers, incense and holy water, as if in resolutely Catholic New Orleans, noted one observer, she were “offering voodoo to God.” Nor was there any semblance of secrecy in her rites, for the press, politicians and police were cordially invited. It was rumored that on occasion, even white women would fling off their clothes and join in the orgies. Additionally, there were private gatherings in Laveau’s backyard on St. Ann Street at which, or so it was said, babies were offered to Zombi in sacrifice – or smoked like hams and mummified into rock-hard little gris-gris icons. But all this was whispered, for those regaling others with such tales had never seen these things firsthand, but insisted they had it on “good authority.” Whatever the truth, when Marie Laveau promenaded along the street, holding her head high as if she owned New Orleans, the fear and idolatry she inspired were palpable.
Tales abounded of hellish voices and rattling chains when the Voodoo Queen died in June 1881, at the age of around 85. Others said she passed away quietly in her sleep, having renounced Zombi and all his works. Yet, old beliefs die hard. What is thought to be Marie Laveau’s crypt in St. Louis Cemetery No 1 is covered with dozens of rust-colored X’s inscribed by supplicants seeking favors. Others take spoonsful of earth from her tomb as charms and often leave presents such as beans, Mardi Gras beads and candles. There also are tales of wraiths dancing nude among the tombs, led by a tall woman with a huge snake coiled around her body.
Succor from the Grave. Cities of the Dead figure in the rich, ghostly traditions of New Orleans as they do in most communities, but it seems the cemeteries are situated on terrain remarkably accommodating to spirits. On dredged swampland between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, the city is an average of six feet below sea level with a water table so high that early citizens despaired of burying their dead because the water sometimes pushed the coffins out of their graves. At first people filled the coffins of their friends and relatives with rocks or drilled holes in them, but this did not work and citizens began interring their dead in marble and concrete tombs or crypts set above the ground. It is in these Cities of the Dead where ghosts seem to come and go as they please.
Tales are legion of encounters in St. Louis No. 1 (above) and Lafayette No. 1, the city’s two oldest graveyards, as well as in the many other burial grounds throughout New Orleans. One story relates how a grieving widow fell asleep beside the tomb of her husband in St. Louis No. 1 late one afternoon. When she awoke in the night, her unbelieving eyes beheld a veritable convocation of ghosts: young, old, male, female, white, dark-skinned, rich, poor – hundreds upon hundreds of them. Every tomb seemed to release a spirit. They were smiling, she saw, relaxed and happy, quite different from dwellers in the angry, hurly-burly world of the living. Her husband came to her. He was at perfect peace and she sorrowed no longer, knowing that one day, she would be with him.
Most other accounts are of single encounters, sometimes terrifying, but often gentle, comforting, even illuminating. Shortly after World War I, a young woman whose fiancé had perished in battle was being hotly pursued by a suitor bent on marriage. Alone and confused, she went to the grave of her dead love and remained there throughout the night. As the hours passed, an owl materialized on silent wings and began dropping roses into her lap: a red rose, then a white rose, one after another until there were 14 red roses and 15 white ones. The lady was puzzled at first, then the significance of the roses dawned on her. Fourteen red roses stood for the 14th letter of the alphabet, 15 white roses meant the 15th letter. Together they spelled No. The wise old owl, or perhaps the spirit of her beloved, was urging her not to marry the new suitor. She took the advice and sometime later, learned the man was a scoundrel who made a practice of courting gullible young woman and abandoning them once he had his hands on their dowries.
Source: George G. Daniels, Discovery Travel.
