Marie Delphine LaLaurie’s Infamous New Orleans House Of Torture
Wayne Heish/Flickr1140 Royal Street in New Orleans where, in the 1830s, the Mad Madame Delphine LaLaurie tortured the people she enslaved.
In 1831, Dr. Leonard Louis Nicolas LaLaurie and his wife Delphine purchased a beautiful home at 1140 Royal Street in New Orleans, Louisiana. The LaLauries were well-off and seemed pleasant enough, but the inside of their home told a very different story.
Publicly, Delphine LaLaurie maintained a friendly face and even freed two of her enslaved workers. Privately, however, she turned her home into a house of horrors — and tortured and abused the people within.
Her violent abuse was apparently so bad that two of her enslaved workers felt that leaping from the roof of LaLaurie Mansion was a better fate than another day inside with the “Mad Madame.”
And it’s likely Delphine’s cruelty would have continued unchecked had it not been for a sudden house fire in 1834 that revealed the true nature of the lady of the house.
According to HISTORY, rescuers arrived at the scene to find a Black cook had been chained to the stove. She reported that she had started the fire hoping to escape from the torture LaLaurie put her through.
Public DomainA view of Royal Street and the LaLaurie Mansion.
As rescuers moved through the house, the horror only intensified. In the attic above the kitchen, they found seven enslaved workers in spiked collars, many of whom were in some way mutilated from torture, with their eyes gouged out or their bones broken.
They had been held prisoner for several months by that point, only kept alive to suffer longer and provide Delphine LaLaurie with an outlet for her sick desires.
Previous victims of Madame LaLaurie had reportedly become the subjects of macabre experiments. One woman allegedly had her bones broken and reset to appear crab-like; another woman was wrapped in human intestines.
Witnesses claimed that they saw many people with holes in their skulls — and wooden spoons nearby to stir their brains.
It’s difficult to know exactly how many people Delphine LaLaurie tortured, and to what extreme, but varying reports over the years also claim she kept some captives for her husband to practice voodoo medicine on and whipped her own daughters if they showed kindness towards any of the victims.
Public DomainPortraits of Delphine LaLaurie.
Delphine LaLaurie fled from New Orleans after the fire. She supposedly went to Paris, but that was never confirmed. To this day, no one has ever found her body.
Her mansion, however, still stands as a testament to the cruelty she inflicted.
