#3 Go or No? Built in 1832, this New Orleans manor is reputed to be haunted by several mistreated slaves - a story stemming from a fire in the building in 1834, when neighbors helping to save furniture from the flames reputedly found tortured slaves chained up in the attic by owner Marie Delphine LaLaurie, better known as Madame LaLaurie, a prominent Louisianan socialite and, it would later be discovered, serial killer. The fire had started in the kitchen and upon entering the home, police found an elderly woman, the cook, chained to the stove from the ankle. According to the New Orleans Bee of April 11, 1834, bystanders found seven slaves, more or less horribly mutilated ... suspended by the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other, who claimed to have been imprisoned there for some months. Upon hearing this and once the fire was out, an angry mob descended upon the house and all-but completely destroyed it. Actress Kathy Bates plays a character based on LaLaurie in the current season of American Horror Story, Coven. The home, which was rebuilt to resemble the original, was owned by actor Nicholas Cage from 2007 until 2009. Not much is known of LaLauries life after the fire. However writer Harriet Martineau documented that LaLaurie fled New Orleans during the mob violence, taking a coach to the waterfront and traveling by schooner from there to Mobile, Alabama and then on to Paris. She is rumored to have died in Paris in a boar-hunting accident.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 15:58:10 +0000
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