Haunted Slavery: The Lalaurie Mansion

Creepy, Occult, and Otherworldly Episode #3 of 4. Get a complete transcript of this episode at digpodcast.org. The Lalaurie Mansion in New Orleans, Louisiana, is said to be one of the most haunted houses in the French Quarter. The extreme and shocking stories that are told about the Lalaurie house are egregiously exaggerated and overwhelmingly gloss over the real issues of race, gender, and violence prevalent with the institution of slavery. Yet, we still voyeuristically consume these types of ghost stories. In this episode, part of our “Spooky” series, we’re exploring the story of 1140 Rue Royal - it’s haunted history so to say - and delving into the events, the media coverage, and the urban legend that grew from the events that took place in the early morning hours of April 10, 1834.

Sources:

Carolyn Morrow Long, Madame Lalaurie: Mistress of the Haunted House,  University Press of Florida, 2012.

Karen Halttunen, “‘Domestic Differences’: Competing Narratives of Womanhood in the Murder Trial of Lucretia Chapman,” in The Culture of Sentiment : Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels, Oxford University Press, 1992.

Kristin Nicole Huston, “‘Something at least human’: Transatlantic (re)presentations of Creole women in nineteenth-century literature and culture,” PhD dissertation, University of Missouri – Kansas City, 2015.

Sarah Handley-Cousins, “Ghosts are Scary, Disabled People are Not: The Troubling Rise of the Haunted Asylum,” Nursing Clio, 2015.

Thevolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Slaveholding Household, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Tiya Miles, Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era, The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “The Long Shadow of Torture in the American South,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South, eds. Fred Hobson and Barbara Ladd, 2016.

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