Delphine LaLaurie
Episode 170: How New Orleans' Wickedest Woman Turned Trauma Into a Tourist Attraction
A portrait believed to depict Delphine LaLaurie
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Here’s the thing about New Orleans, it’s a grungy, dirty place. But, it’s weirdly beautiful at the same time, with old historic Spanish colonial style buildings, ferns hanging from lacy wrought iron balustrade adorning expansive covered porches. The history and surviving decorative architecture of New Orleans make it weirdly glamorous in some ways and then the crumbling infrastructure as the city literally sinks into the Mississippi River bank, the hoots and hollers of drunk tourists stumbling along uneven sidewalks, the stench of vomit and rotting trash infested with rats… you get the idea. It’s gross and beautiful all at the same time somehow. And so what that means is, New Orleans attracts people who love both gross and beautiful things. It attracts history lovers. But, more specifically, it attracts dark history lovers. Visitors to New Orleans want to hear tales of torture and murder. They want ghost stories. They want devil worshipping. They want all the gory details. And so, a whole industry has blossomed in New Orleans catering to these morbid desires of tourists - ghost tours, gory history tours, murder tours, whatever just walk me around the city and tell me about all the horrible things that happened here. That sort of thing is really big in New Orleans. Unfortunately, what that means is, actual true history in New Orleans has gotten very very twisted. Because no one wants to hear a story about an abusive female enslaver whose house burnt down almost 200 years ago. They want you to point to her house, still standing, with blood smears visible through an attic window and tell you that she savagely tortured and ripped apart 100 people there in that very room. They want her to be a monster, sick, sadistic, inhuman. And every time you tell her story, it has to get more and more extreme to outpace our growing desensitization toward horror and gore. I’m talking, of course, about infamous New Orleans enslaver Delphine LaLaurie, a favorite villain of gory history and ghost tours. But how much of Delphine’s story is actually true, and how much was embellished to sell tickets to tourists eager to be horrified. Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Last week, to kick off Spooktober, I talked about zombies and the origin of zombies coming out of 17th century enslaved populations in Haiti, or Saint Domingue as it was called then. Well, talk of enslaved people in Haiti naturally led me to New Orleans. I mentioned this in last week’s episode but the Haitian Revolution at the end of the 1700s led to a diaspora of people escaping the chaos going on in Haiti, and many people, including many enslaved people, flooded into New Orleans. Now the Haitian Revolution has come up in two different episodes so I really am going to have to do a mini fix about it. Look for that on the Patreon on Wednesday. If you haven’t joined us on Patreon yet, please consider it. It’s where true History Fix lovers gather and there’s so much exclusive content over there that you haven’t heard yet. You’re really missing out. That’s patreon.com/historyfixpodcast which is always linked in the description. Anyway, last week’s story naturally led me to this week’s story. I guess I sort of followed the diaspora out of Haiti and right into New Orleans.
So let’s go to New Orleans at that time, the turn of the 19th century. What is going on? A lot actually. New Orleans has changed hands several times since it was first founded by the French in 1718. Before that, of course, it was inhabited by Indigenous people, lest we forget. But in 1718 the French set up a colony and established the city of New Orleans. In 1763 it started to be controlled by Spain instead. This was part of the treaty signed after the French and Indian War AKA the Seven Years War. Spain got New Orleans. And this period is where most of the surviving historical buildings come from. The buildings in New Orleans are Spanish style, not French. I think people assume it has a very French vibe. It’s actually very Spanish in appearance, the city of New Orleans. It went back to France for like an actual minute in 1802-ish and then was ceded to the United States with the Louisiana purchase in 1803. So, a lot of different cultural influences going on in New Orleans, a serious melting pot. We have Indigenous cultures, French, Spanish, African because it was a major hub for the buying and selling and trading of enslaved people unfortunately, and then of course the United States gains control which is already a melting pot and so, yeah, it’s just a serious amalgamation of lots and lots of different cultures, languages, religions, ways of life which makes for a very unique place.
Our story starts in 1787 with the birth of Marie Delphine Macarty. 1787 so this was solidly Spanish New Orleans. The city was controlled by Spain at the time. Delphine was probably familiar with Spanish and I’m sure she could speak English too but French was her main language. She was born into New Orlean’s French-speaking Creole community and she was born into quite a prominent family. Her grandfather had moved the family to New Orleans from Ireland around 1730 when the city was still French and so her father had grown up speaking French and she had also grown up speaking French despite the city now being Spanish and them actually being Irish. Her parents were prominent members of New Orleans’ French Creole community. She also had several family members in positions of power including an uncle by marriage, Esteban Rodriguez Miro who was governor of the Spanish American provinces of Louisiana and Florida in the late 1700s and also a cousin, Augustin de Macarty who was mayor of New Orleans from 1815 to 1820. So Delphine is pretty set from the beginning. Her family is wealthy and well connected.
Delphine was only 4 years old when the Haitian Revolution erupted in 1791 and I think this had a really big impact on her. To recap, in case you missed last week’s episode, the Haitian Revolution happened when enslaved people in Haiti successfully revolted and overthrew their white oppressors. It was the largest and most successful slave rebellion in history and led to the world’s first independent Black-led republic, the Republic of Haiti. This is when Saint Domingue turned into Haiti, which comes from the Indigenous Taino name Ayiti. So, yay for a successful slave rebellion in retrospect, right? But at the time, this was terrifying. It was very very violent. And, you know, white enslavers everywhere shook in their boots knowing that something like this was possible. Delphine was 4 and I think this left an impression on her. I think this instilled fear in her that she struggled to cope with, maybe even subconsciously, throughout her life. Also, one of her uncles had been killed by the people he enslaved back in 1771 which was before she was born, but I’m sure she knew about this. I’m sure she heard tales of this. And, the Haitian Revolution sent shockwaves all the way to New Orleans, leading to several rebellion attempts there among the enslaved Black populations, the Mina Conspiracy in 1791, the Point Coupee Conspiracy in 1795, and the 1811 German Coast Uprising, all of these happening during Delphine’s life time, these attempted uprisings and slave rebellions. None of these were successful as the Haitian Revolution had been, but they definitely affected the treatment of enslaved people in New Orleans, leading enslavers to abuse the people they enslaved even more out of fear of insurrection. Which seems like the opposite of what you want to do? No? Wouldn’t you want to treat them better so that they don’t rise up and kill you? I feel like their logic was really flawed here in trying to use fear and intimidation to keep control of the people they enslaved. That certainly didn’t work in Haiti but whatever. All that to say, Delphine grew up at a time when there were very tumultuous relationships between enslavers and the enslaved and there was a lot of fear that all stemmed from the Haitian Revolution and also probably the murder of her uncle. Not trying to make an excuses for the way Delphine will behave later, just trying to better understand her psychology here.
When Delphine was 13 years old, yes, 13 years old, she got married to a high ranking Spanish officer named Don Ramon de Lopez y Angulo. Thirteen. This was in 1800, right before the US gained control of New Orleans through the Louisiana Purchase. When that happened, Don Ramon had to be sort of repurposed and he became consul general for Spain in the Territory of Orleans. In that new role, he was called to Madrid to appear at the royal court in 1804. So Don Ramon and Delphine, who is 17 and pregnant with their first child, they pack up and they hop on a ship to Madrid. But they don’t actually make it there. I can’t find the details, but I know that Don Ramon ends up dying in Havana, Cuba. They don’t actually make it very far at all. None of the records say how he died, just that he died suddenly and en route to Madrid. He dies, Delphine gives birth to their first child a few days after his death, now a widow in an unfamiliar place, in Havana, and then she takes the baby, a girl she names Maria Borja Delphine Lopez y Angulo de la Candelaria or Borquita for short cause that’s a really long name, and she goes back to New Orleans.
So she’s a widow at 17 with a new baby girl. In 1808 when she’s around 21 years old, Delphine marries again. She marries Jean Blanque who was a prominent banker, merchant, lawyer, and legislator in New Orleans. One of those privileged white guys who is like “yeah I just do it all. I do all the things cause I can and why not?” Delphine had 4 more children with Jean Blanque. She had 3 girls who she named, get this, she named them Marie Louise, Louise Marie, and then Marie Louise… again? Not kidding, those are her daughter’s names. But I think they must have been called by their second middle names to be able to tell them apart. So they are Marie Louise Pauline, she was called Pauline, Louise Marie Laure, who was called Laure, and then Marie Louise Jeanne who was called Jeanne. They also had one son, Jean Pierre Paulin. But then this second husband, Jean Sr., also died in 1816 when all of his children were very young. Once again, I can find no record of how he died but he was a lot older than she was. He was 50 when he died and she was not quite 30.
Delphine is a widow once more, 5 children now, on to the next husband. I am curious how these men are dying. Like is this a black widow situation? Is Delphine killing these men? It doesn’t seem like it. She doesn’t gain anything from their deaths. The first one strands her in a foreign island country about to give birth any second. The second dies in debt so she doesn’t get any money from his death or anything like that. She marries for a third time in 1825 to a man who is 15 years younger than she is. She is now 40ish and her new husband, who is a doctor, a physician named Leonard Louis Nicholas LaLaurie, is only 25ish. So like cougar status.
These two seem pretty estranged from the start though. In 1831 Delphine bought property at 1140 Royal Street which she managed in her own name. Her husband wasn’t really involved in that property other than like sleeping there at least sometimes. And this might seem strange for a woman in the 1830s but New Orleans was different than the rest of the United States at the time. Women in New Orleans had quite a bit more freedom and independence. We saw this in episode 153 about the Baroness de Pontalba. It was just culturally different in New Orleans because of that extreme melting pot thing that happened there, I think, all these cultures coming together and so Delphine had a lot of independence. She purchased this property on the corner of Royal Street and Governor Nicholls Street and when she bought it it was unfinished. She had the house finished to her taste by 1832. It was a 2 story house originally, likely of exposed brick, in the Federal architectural style which is very like, Revolutionary War era, the White house is in the Federal style. So that vibe.
So she built a 2 story house, it had attached slave quarters and everything, and she lived there with her husband and 2 of her daughters who are adults themselves or at least older teens at this point. I mean Delphine got married at 13 so yeah they are grown at this point. The marriage was clearly not a good one though. In 1832, Delphine petitioned the court for a separation from her husband. In this petition she claimed that he had quote “treated her in such a manner as to render their living together unsupportable," end quote. But he definitely remains in the picture even after this because he’s at the house a few years later when… well, we’ll get to that part soon. He doesn’t go away they, he’s still hanging around unsupportable or not.
But this same time, when she buys and builds the house at Royal Street, petitions for a separation from her husband, involves herself in New Orleans high society, this is also when we start hearing tales of a much darker nature. This is when rumors about Delphine’s mistreatment of the people she enslaved start coming out. So, most of this is coming from the writings of Harriet Martineau. Harriet was actually a pretty fascinating person. She was an English social theorist. What the heck is that right? She was a writer who, and this is exceedingly rare, she earned enough from her writing to support herself financially. She was much loved by Queen Victoria who enjoyed her writing and actually invited her to her coronation in 1838. I’m getting Lady Whistledown vibes from this a bit. If you’ve seen Bridgerton maybe you are too. Harriet wrote about social issues. She wrote about political, religious, and social institutions. She was an abolitionist who believed that slavery should be done away with. I think I’m a Harriet Martineau fan, girl was ahead of her time. But she wrote about Delphine LaLaurie. Why? How? How do we get from the coronation of Queen Victoria to a mansion on the corner of Royal Street in New Orleans?
Well, as I mentioned, Harriet was an abolitionist and she took this very seriously. Starting in 1836, she toured around the American south and documented the harsh realities of slavery and other corruption that she encountered in the south. That work took her to New Orleans and she started gathering stories from local New Orleanians about the already somewhat infamous Delphine LaLaurie. So, a little bit of a grain of salt here. Harriet had motives. She was trying to prove that slavery was an evil institution. Do I think she blatantly lied and embellished what she wrote about Delphine? No, I don’t. But this is not a first hand account. This is an abolitionist, hoping to make slavery look bad, gathering stories from random people about someone who made slavery look bad. So, grain of salt.
In her writing which was a travel narrative called Retrospect of Western Travel written in 1838, Harriet relays what was told to her by residents of New Orleans who knew Delphine LaLaurie. They told her that the people she enslaved looked quote “singularly haggard and wretched,” end quote, as if they were being mistreated. But they also told her that Delphine appeared polite towards Black people when she saw them out in public. Harriet wrote that rumors about Delphine’s mistreatment of the people she enslaved got so bad that a lawyer was sent to her house to remind her about laws requiring her to care for them adequately. He did not report any signs of mistreatment or abuse when he visited her house.
There was another story that everyone kept telling her too. A story about one of Delphine’s neighbors, this was after the lawyer visit, one of Delphine’s neighbors witnessed an 8 year old enslaved girl fall to her death from the roof of the house. Apparently Delphine was chasing her with a whip, chased her up to and off of the roof and the girl fell and died and was buried on the property. That’s what was reported to Harriet. Much later, other writers add more details. I have no idea where they get these details from but in 1945 New Orleans journalist Jeanne DeLavigne wrote that the girl was actually 12 years old and her name was Lia. Still later writers without citing their sources say that Lia had been brushing Delphine’s hair when she hit a snag and like pulled her hair. This angered Delphine so much that she grabbed her whip and chased Lia who fled to the roof and fell to her death. Is that true? Probably not. Where would that detail have even come from? But it certainly makes for a more interesting story.
Back to what Harriet wrote in the 1830s. She said that this incident, the neighbor reporting seeing a little girl chased off the roof, led to an investigation at the LaLaurie house. They were found guilty of mistreating the people they enslaved and forced to sell them, nine people, they enslaved nine people at this time who they were forced to forfeit. But Delphine found a bit of a loophole in this situation. She sold them to family members and then later smuggled them back into the house and carried on as before.
Then there were the events of April 10, 1834. Harriet writes about this but it’s also backed up by newspapers and other records from the time so this, at the very least, this part seems to be true and not just hearsay. On April 10, 1834 a fire broke out at the LaLaurie mansion on the corner of Royal Street. Police and fire fighters show up to put out the fire and whatnot and they find a 70 year old enslaved Black woman chained to the stove in the kitchen by her ankle. Delphine is running around trying to save her furniture from the fire. Has not bothered to unchain this woman who is in the kitchen where the fire started. In fact she tells the police that she started the fire herself in an attempt to commit suicide. She told them she was regularly kept chained to the stove and mistreated and that she was afraid of being taken upstairs and tortured. She said that people who were taken upstairs never came back. And so she tried to take her own life and that’s why she set the fire. So now, you know, they’re obviously like “well what the heck is upstairs?” and they go to investigate.
The slave quarters up there are locked despite the house having been on fire. I’m assuming they have the fire under control now but they’re like, open this door, we need to make sure the people in here are okay. They ask the LaLaurie’s for the key to open the door and they refuse. So they break down the door and they found, according to a New Orleans Bee article published the next day, they found quote “seven people, more or less horribly mutilated ... suspended by the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other,” end quote. And these people claimed to have been imprisoned there for months. So, torture chamber? Yeah, kind of seems like it. Martineau wrote that they were emaciated like they were being starved, had clearly been whipped, were bound in restrictive poses so they couldn’t really move, and that they wore spiked collars and couldn’t move their heads. And I’m like where the heck is Delphine LaLaurie getting spiked collars? Is the local blacksmith making these for her? Was that a thing? Why was that not raising any questions? So confused.
Judge Jean Francois Canonge was one of the guys who forced there way in that day and he reported seeing quote “a negress… wearing an iron collar,” and quote “an old negro woman who had received a very deep wound on her head [who was] too weak to be able to walk,” end quote. He also said that he questioned Leonard LaLaurie, Delphine’s husband about what they found and was told quote “some people had better stay at home rather than come to others' houses to dictate laws and meddle with other people's business,” end quote. So that guy sucked.
That’s pretty much the extent of what we have when it comes to Delphine’s mistreatment of the people she enslaved. We also have some death records that are pretty telling. Funeral records from between 1830 and 1834 document the deaths of 12 enslaved people at the LaLaurie mansion which seems like a whole lot for a 4 year period. These included a woman named Bonne who was 30 years old and worked as a cook and laundress. It also lists four of her children - Juliette, Florence, Jules, and Leontine - who were respectively 13, 10, 6, and 2 years old. They didn’t all die at the same time, that was my immediate question. Two of the children died in 1831, February and August of 1831. The rest of them died in the spring of 1833, three of them peppered throughout February including the mother Bonne and then the final child in May of 1833, that poor poor thing. So how did they die? We don’t know. Probably disease, probably exacerbated by mistreatment, poor health. Possibly murder. But, you know she had them buried properly so she probably wasn’t trying to hide anything. We don’t know how they died but it’s definitely not a good look for Delphine. We do know that Bonne was described as having come from Saint Domingue AKA Haiti and that she was recorded at one point as a chronic runaway. So Bonne was likely part of that diaspora out of Haiti during the Haitian Revolution which we know caused a lot of fear among white populations, like Delphine LaLaurie, in New Orleans. Just based on those details, chronic runaway, came from Haiti, I don’t think Delphine would have liked Bonne very much and I don’t think she would have treated her or her children very well at all. Then on the flip side of all that, we also have records that Delphine freed two men she enslaved in 1819 and 1832. Why? We don’t know that either.
So after the fire on April 10, 1834 and the discovery of this torture chamber in the LaLaurie mansion, the LaLaurie family was pretty much run out of town, and rightfully so. Literally an angry mob showed up at the LaLaurie mansion and torched the place. According to the New Orleans Bee article they quote “demolished and destroyed everything upon which they could lay their hands,” end quote, until there was quote “scarcely anything [remaining] but the walls,” end quote. And the house was left in ruins. When Harriet Martineau visited it 2 years later during her trip in 1836 she reported that it had quote “gaping windows and empty walls,” end quote.
The LaLaurie family took off, fleeing to Paris where Delphine presumably died years later in her 60s. Although, there are some rumors that she secretly returned to New Orleans, died and was buried there, but I’m pretty sure she died and was buried in France. But what about the people, the enslaved people that were chained up and all that? What happened to them? According to the Pittsfield Sun and New Orleans Advertiser newspapers, the victims had been evacuated from the house, you know, before the mobs descended. Two of them died following their rescue which isn’t surprising. The rest were, get this, the rest were taken to a local jail, not a hospital, a local jail where they were available for public viewing. What the actual heck is wrong with these people? According to the New Orleans Bee newspaper, by April 12th, two days after their rescue, as many as 4,000 people had shown up to view the victims in order to quote “convince themselves of their suffering,” end quote. Um, I’ll share some thoughts on all that in a bit.
The Pittsfield Sun article also reported quote “we understand… that in digging in the yard, bodies have been disinterred, and the condemned well [in the grounds of the mansion] having been uncovered, others, particularly that of a child, were found,” end quote. So they’ve dug up bodies on the property and they found the body of a child in an old well that had been sealed up. This was believed to be the body of that little girl, Lia, who fell off the roof when Delphine was chasing her with a whip. But, of course, in the 1830s, there’s no way to definitely prove that it’s her. There’s no DNA or anything like that. It’s just circumstantial. It might be her.
Okay so, horrible. Delphine LaLaurie and Leonard, he’s not getting spared, they were obviously horrible abusers of the people they enslaved. That is confirmed. They were terrible, sick, sadistic enslavers. I don’t want to downplay that. But, I do want to take you through now how twisted and blown out of proportion this story has become really for entertainment purposes and that’s a recurring theme here. Heads up, some of what I’m about to tell you is super graphic and not appropriate for younger listeners. So if you want to skip forward about 2 minutes. Go ahead and do that now.
These embellishments to the story really take off in the 1940s with that journalist writer lady I told you about Jeanne DeLavigne. She wrote in a 1946 book called Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans, which like already how credible could this book be? She wrote that Delphine had a quote “sadistic appetite [that] seemed never appeased until she had inflicted on one or more of her black servitors some hideous form of torture,” end quote. She also claimed that the people who responded to the 1834 fire at the LaLaurie mansion found quote "male slaves, stark naked, chained to the wall, their eyes gouged out, their fingernails pulled off by the roots; others had their joints skinned and festering, great holes in their buttocks where the flesh had been sliced away, their ears hanging by shreds, their lips sewn together ... Intestines were pulled out and knotted around naked waists. There were holes in skulls, where a rough stick had been inserted to stir the brains,” end quote. However, Jeanne did not cite any sources, none whatsoever, for these claims. So is Jeanne reporting accurate details of a horribly sad story from history? Or is she trying to sell ghost story books to tourists?
Then we have Kalila Katherina Smith, who ran a New Orleans ghost tours business. In 1998 she wrote the book Journey Into Darkness: Ghosts and Vampires of New Orleans. Once again, how credible could this account actually be? Kalila added some more details that she said were discovered by those who responded to the fire in 1834. She wrote that they found a quote “victim [who] obviously had her arms amputated and her skin peeled off in a circular pattern, making her look like a human caterpillar,” end quote. And another woman who had had her limbs broken and reset quote "at odd angles so she resembled a human crab,” end quote. Once again, Kalila did not cite sources for this information and the sources that she did cite in her book did not mention anything about caterpillars or crabs. So strange to take it there just like in your own head and pretend that it’s real. Once again though, was Kalila relaying accurate historical facts or did she own a ghost tour business that depended on tour guides being able to tell absolutely insane stories to tourists? Now, do I know for sure that these later accounts are false? No I don’t. But I definitely can’t prove that they’re true either.
We also see details about the house itself blown out of proportion. Because when you’re on a walking tour through New Orleans you want to see stuff. You want to go to the sites where this stuff happened. That’s the whole point of walking around the city, right. It’s a tour after all. If you go on one of these tours, they will take you to the house at 1140 Royal Street which, yes, is the location of the LaLaurie mansion. And they will tell you that the house sitting there now is the LaLaurie mansion, the very same house in which this horrifying story took place. It isn’t. We know the house was destroyed and was left in ruins by 1836. The house that sits there now is a completely different house. We know the LaLaurie mansion was a two story brick Federal style house. The house there now is three stories and it’s stucco and in the Empire style. It’s a totally different house. It was built in 1838 for Charles Caffin. We know this because at some point there was a lawsuit in which those details were mentioned. According to Wikipedia, in the decades since, the house has been used as a public high school, a conservatory of music, an apartment building, a refuge for young delinquents, a bar, and a furniture store. In April of 2007 it was bought by actor Nicholas Cage for 3.4 million dollars. But two years later he lost it to foreclosure and it was auctioned off to an energy trader from Houston named Michael Whalen. But then, get this, Whalen sold it in 2024 to Lance Zaal who… drum roll please… is the founder and CEO of US Ghost Adventures.
So, that brings me to the real meat of this episode. This house at 1140 Royal Street in New Orleans is a major tourist attraction. It’s said to be haunted, of course, and it’s a stop on many many walking tours of the city. It is owned by the CEO of a ghost adventures company. This house, which is a completely different house than the one that stood there in 1834 when the crimes of the LaLaurie’s were discovered, but this house is a place of entertainment. People go there to be shocked and horrified and ultimately entertained, and to be lied to, let’s be real. I have issues with that and I’m not the only one. In her book Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era, historian Tiya Miles argues that these southern ghost tours exploit, sensationalize, and commodify the actual historical trauma suffered by enslaved people for commercial gain. And, I mean, is she wrong? She’s really not.
So there’s a major ethical question that arises here. Is it okay for a place where such extreme suffering occurred to be a tourist attraction where people pay money to be entertained? And where do we draw the line? We have many old pre-Civil War, slavery era plantations across the south that are tourist attractions. I’m taking my son to one on Wednesday for a school field trip. Is that okay? I think it depends on how it’s done and Tiya agrees. There’s a way to have a historical tourist attraction respectfully with a focus on education and truth and honoring the memories of those who suffered and learning from the mistakes of the past. That’s all very important. That should be the goal of attractions like plantations, and concentration camps, those sorts of places. That is not the goal of stops on a New Orleans ghost tour like the LaLaurie Mansion, or rather the house that stands where it once was. Tiya argues that this type of attraction focuses heavily on the macabre, the mutilation of Black bodies in order to shock and entertain visitors, not to illustrate the historical horrors of slavery. She also argues that this sort of thing twists reality in really damaging ways. These stories get sensationalized and blown out of proportion, twisted in order to meet the desires of an ever more desensitized audience. She argues that incorporating myth and even supernatural elements into the stories, ghosts and whatnot, it creates a quote “safe distance” between the audience and the uncomfortable truths of slavery. It allows us to sort of write off and disconnect from the trauma suffered by real actual people.
I agree with a lot of what Tiya argues in her book and I think we have to be really careful with this sort of thing. I also think it’s really interesting that we saw this happen immediately. Not a hundred or more years later with New Orleans ghost tours. We saw this happen right away, the mutilation of Black bodies as entertainment. The victims of Delphine LaLaurie were put on display immediately after they were rescued, at a jail no less. They were put on public display and 4,000 onlookers came to gawk at them in just two days. That’s insane, in hindsight especially, that’s so insane. These people were actively dying of their injuries, they had been through horrific trauma, literally tortured, imprisoned for months and the best we can do is throw them in jail and let people come stare at them. Was it for education or was it for entertainment? I think that’s where the real question lies. When you consider a historical site today, a tourist attraction, especially one where traumatic things happened, where people suffered, I think that’s what it comes down to. Is it for education or is it for entertainment? Because if it’s for entertainment then how is it any different than what they did to Delphine LaLaurie’s victims back in 1834, putting them on display? If it’s for entertainment, then we are continuing to gawk at people who suffered very real trauma, unimaginable horrors, for money no less. We’re doing it for profit. At least they didn’t charge admission to the jail where these victims were kept in 1834, that I know of. We’re almost doing something worse. We are putting them on display 200 years later, sprinkling in a few good old fashioned lies, and then we are charging people money to come and gawk at them to quote “convince themselves of their suffering,” as if the convincing of the privileged masses is what really matters here. Wow Spooktober is really turning into Black History Month on me. I was not expecting that. But I am really interested in the ethics of history. So much of ethics is such a fine line. But I think it really just comes down to, you know, be respectful. Are you being respectful of the dead, of someone else’s suffering? Are you respecting their memory? Or are you exploiting their trauma to pad your own pockets? That’s a yes or no question.
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