The LaLaurie Mansion

The woman who was enslaved in this house set the fire herself, to escape.

On 10 April 1834 a fire broke out at the Royal Street mansion of Marie Delphine Macarty, known after her third marriage as Madame LaLaurie. Rescuers found a 70-year-old Black woman chained in the kitchen, trapped while LaLaurie busied herself saving furniture. She had started the fire deliberately to get out. She then led the authorities to the attic, where seven enslaved people were found bound, with evidence of prolonged and violent abuse.

LaLaurie was a New Orleans socialite and a serial killer who tortured and murdered enslaved people in her household. She was born in Spanish colonial New Orleans on 19 March 1787, into a prominent European Creole family: her uncle by marriage Esteban Rodríguez Miró governed Spanish Louisiana and Florida, and her cousin Augustin de Macarty was mayor of the city. She married three times in Louisiana and was twice widowed, and she held her social position right up until the fire.

A crowd sacked the house afterwards. She escaped to France with her family and was never brought to justice. She died in 1849.

One correction matters, because the building is the reason people come. The mob burned her house. The structure now called the LaLaurie Mansion, at 1140 Royal Street, was rebuilt after she left New Orleans. It is a genuine French Quarter landmark, significant architecturally as well as historically, but it is not the house those events happened inside.

What happened here is not a ghost story and should not be visited as one. The most important person in it is the woman who set the fire.