The 1834 Fire and the Discovery in the Attic
On the morning of April 10, 1834, a fire broke out at the LaLaurie mansion on Royal Street. When it was extinguished, authorities found seven enslaved people starved, chained, and confined in the upper part of the house. They were carried to the Cabildo for care, and the discovery drew thousands of townspeople; the events were reported in local and national newspapers, cementing Delphine LaLaurie's infamy.
Source: Contemporaneous 1834 New Orleans newspaper accounts (the documented seven victims); later analysis by Meigs Frost, New Orleans Times-Picayune, February 1934.
LaLaurie's Escape to Paris
After the fire and the mob that gutted her home, Delphine LaLaurie fled New Orleans; her ship docked at Mobile before continuing on. French records indicate she died in Paris on December 7, 1849. Letters exchanged with her children describe her wish to return to New Orleans, which they refused to allow.
Source: French civil records (death, December 7, 1849); family correspondence; Meigs Frost, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 1934.
A cracked copper plate later found in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 bears the date 1842; the better-sourced French record gives 1849.
The Tales of Experiments and Hidden Victims
The most lurid LaLaurie stories - enslaved people subjected to grotesque medical experiments, and skeletons later found buried beneath the house - trace largely to Jeanne Delavigne's 1946 book 'The Haunted House of the Rue Royal' and to embellished retellings. The documented record supports cruelty toward the seven enslaved people found in 1834, but these extreme mutilation tales are not supported by contemporaneous evidence and are best understood as legend.
These extreme accounts are widely repeated but historically unsupported; Ghost City Tours' own research treats them as 20th-century embellishment.