The LaLaurie Mansion: The Haunted House of New Orleans

Posted: 05.11.2018 | Updated: 01.15.2025

We would like to give our readers a fair warning. Stories about the LaLaurie Mansion are graphic in nature and are not for the faint of heart. Reader discretion is advised.

It’s unclear whether there was evil here before or after Delphine LaLaurie constructed her mansion, but frankly, it doesn’t matter. What’s here now is a terrifying, haunted, and sinister place known simply as the Haunted House of the French Quarter—the most haunted location in New Orleans.

What Makes The LaLaurie Mansion Haunted?

The murderous past of the LaLaurie Mansion has made it one of the most haunted places in the United States. Madame Delphine LaLaurie reportedly murdered 57 of her slaves inside the home in the early 19th century. Since then, it has become a place known for a cursed and terrifying history. Book a ghost tour with NOLA Ghosts to discover the truth behind the terrors of this haunted mansion!

The History of the LaLaurie Mansion

For nearly two centuries, this infamous grey mansion has fascinated and terrified residents and visitors in New Orleans. The 12,000-square-foot mansion was built in 1831 for Marie Delphine Macarty LaLaurie and her third husband, the French-native Dr. Louis LaLaurie. Together, Louis and Delphine were the toast of New Orleans society until a fire exposed their dark and disturbing reality.

The LaLauries were renowned for the extravagant parties and entertainment they hosted in their mansion. Many considered Madame Delphine LaLaurie and her younger husband, a well-known and respected doctor, gentle and sweet. Unbeknownst to the upper-class society of New Orleans, they were anything but gentle and kind.

The LaLaurie mansion’s long and horrific history first erupted into public view on the night of April 10, 1834. Delphine and Louis were hosting one of their renowned parties that night, and the house was filled to the brim with revelers. But, the grand, wonderful evening came crashing down when a fire broke out in the kitchen, quickly spreading to the slave quarters.

The LaLauries were completely unconcerned, assuring their guests that the building was empty. They directed their guests and slaves to bring all the home’s finery out into the streets to keep it from burning. The band set up in the street, and the drinks and party continued while the slave quarters burned.

Turmoil and Tragedy in the LaLaurie Mansion

Eventually, some of the guests grew concerned about the possibility that some slaves may have been trapped in the quarters. Brushing past the LaLauries and their crude objections, they burst into the slave quarters. Smoke billowed into the streets as, one by one, their slaves stumbled out of the building. This revealed the horrid conditions they were kept in.

Beaten and starved by Madame LaLaurie, a dozen or so mutilated slaves gathered on the sidewalk on Hospital Street to the horror of the guests still assembled outside. The slaves’ bodies were bruised and broken, bearing the marks of whips and other torture devices. One man even had a hole in his head; maggots crawled in and out of his brain through it.

While their guests were distracted by the hellish scene unfolding on the street, Madame Delphine and Louis LaLaurie slipped back into the home and locked themselves inside.

When the fire department arrived, they discovered an elderly slave woman bound in heavy chains to the hearth in the kitchen. She confessed to setting the fire as a suicide attempt to escape punishment from Mrs. LaLaurie in the upper room. She led the men to a heavy oak door with no handle at the top of a narrow staircase inside the mansion.

When they finally got past the resistant Madame LaLaurie, they forced the door open and proceeded to the attic to check for any new sources of fire or even embers that could still set the home ablaze. They were overcome by the stench of rot, decay, and death.

The Aftermath

According to an excerpt from the New Orleans newspaper The Bee, given the next day on April 11, 1834

“…the doors were pried open for the purpose of liberating them. Predisposed to taking this liberty, (If liberty it can be detailed) several gentlemen impelled by their feelings demanded the keys, which were refused them in a gross and insulting manner.

Upon entering one of the apartments the most appalling spectacle met their eyes.

Several slaves more or less horribly mutilated, were seen suspended from the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other. Language is powerless and inadequate to give a proper recollection of the horror, which a scene like this must have inspired. We shall not attempt it, but leave it rather to the reader’s imagination to picture what it was!

The slaves were the property of the demon in the shape of a woman whom we mentioned in the beginning of this article. They had been confined by her for several months in the situation from which they had thus been rescued and had merely been kept in existence to prolong their sufferings and to make them taste all that the most refined cruelty could inflict.

The Barbarism of the LaLaurie Mansion

Some believe that Dr. Louis LaLaurie and his wife were conducting horrific medical experiments on the slaves inside the LaLaurie Mansion. 

According to accounts, the victims were men, women, and children. They included a caged woman who had her limbs broken and set at unnatural angles to resemble a crab. Nearby was a person with a mutilated sex change operation. One woman had limbs removed and odd circular pieces of skin removed to resemble a human caterpillar. Some had pieces of their faces removed to resemble gargoyles.

Seven were suspended from their necks and were badly mutilated. Two of these survivors died shortly after their rescue.

The End of the Madame LaLaurie

Four thousand angry residents quickly gathered into a lynch mob, demanding the blood of the LaLauries for their heinous acts. They grew more agitated as they searched for the LaLauries, unable to find them.

As it turned out, the couple escaped to the docks and boarded a waiting vessel before the mob could find them and left their servant, who had participated in the tortures, to face the fury of the mob. The LaLauries escaped to France, where Delphine lived the rest of her days in a luxurious apartment in the heart of Paris.

She died nearly two decades later in 1853, interred, at least temporarily, in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris. Delphine’s spirit, though, did not rest peacefully for long.

The Hauntings

After the mob realized the LaLauries had fled, they tore apart the mansion, leaving it in total disrepair.

There it sat, a hulking ruin for decades. Almost immediately, the mansion became the scene of ghostly tales, as people reported hearing the tortured shrieks of the LaLauries’ mistreated slaves echoing through the streets surrounding the home. In the 1850s, the mansion was refurbished, but it would never shake the curse of the events that had transfixed the city of New Orleans.

Owner after owner would come to ruin, with none seeming to last more than a few years at most. Soon, no one wanted to reside in this once grand and glorious mansion. By the 1870s, the mansion was cut up into dozens of tenement apartments, mostly occupied by immigrant dock workers and their families.

Their children immediately began to hear unexplained moans and groans. Disembodied screams, burning human flesh, chain dragging, and scratching noises under the floorboards would bedevil the children’s sleep.

Their parents experienced none of these mysterious phenomena and wrote them off as simply their children’s overactive imaginations. It is fairly common knowledge that children are much more attuned to the spirit world, perhaps because their minds are more open.

However, this all changed when an immigrant dock worker came home late one evening and found his way up the stairs blocked by a large black man bound in chains.

He screamed at the man in his native tongue to move, and when the apparition did not budge, he used his hands to push the figure out of his way. His hands passed right through; the spirit dissolved into a cold mist. By sunrise, the mansion was empty once more, as all its residents fled in the night.

The Haunted House at 1140 Royal Street

It appears on postcards of the city as early as the 1880s, labeled as “The Haunted House of New Orleans.” People spending the night in the home report waking to find a woman with long, red hair glaring down at them. Passersby reports this same figure from the street. She seems to stare right through them as they walk by. Many believe this is the spirit of Delphine LaLaurie.  

The turn of the last century saw dozens of horrific tales become associated with the mansion. One such story states that, in the moments before the LaLauries fled the city, they pulled up the floorboards in one of the upstairs bedrooms. There, they shackled a dozen or more of their servants, still alive, with their mouths sewn shut.

When their muffled moans and the clanking of their chains were heard, the noise was assumed to be ghosts. Their remains were discovered decades later during a renovation of the home. It would become the repository of all the worst that humans could imagine other humans capable of.

The Modern LaLaurie Mansion

This notoriety makes the building something of a prized possession, but, like the Hope Diamond, its beauty and majesty seem to exact a painful price. One owner after another comes to a bad end. One opened a “haunted pub,” which he was forced to close a few short years later.

Shortly before this, he bequeathed the house to its last documented spirit. A suite upstairs was rented to a curious old man who died just days after moving in. Among his belongings was $10,000 in gold. His spirit still haunts the mansion’s hallways, seeking his misplaced fortune.

Over the decades, owners have found their health, sanity, and wealth ruined by the touch of this accursed building. One owner ends his days in an asylum; another slips into a coma after a bar fight. The most famous owner, Nicholas Cage, purchased the home in New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina. A few years later, he lost the house to bankruptcy, which stripped him of all his possessions in New Orleans.

Its current owner, a Texas energy trader, is using the mansion as a weekend home to entertain clients and friends. Here’s wishing him the best of luck!

Haunted New Orleans

Interested in seeing the infamous haunted house of New Orleans and learning about Delphine LaLaurie’s history in person? Book a New Orleans ghost tour with NOLA Ghosts and visit 1140 Royal Street for yourself! 

In the meantime, keep reading our blog and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for more spooky content! 

Sources:

• www.history.com/this-day-in-history/a-torture-chamber-is-uncovered-by-arson
• https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/new-orleans-haunted-lalaurie-mansion-dark-history/article_78aac250-3dff-11ef-ab08-134719c26ab8.html
• https://www.academia.edu/35351957/THE_MACARTY_PLANTATION_IN_NEW_ORLEANS_BYWATER_NEIGHBORHOOD
• https://www.legendsofamerica.com/lalaurie-mansion/
• https://64parishes.org/mistress-haunted-house
• https://www.thoughtco.com/delphine-lalaurie-4684656