Local Historian Unveils Secrets of Mad Madame Lalaurie

Victoria Love wasn't planning on writing a book when she and her husband went to New Orleans for a vacation, but you never know what you'll find when you go on a ghost tour.

In 2008, the couple were taking one of the city's popular tours specializing in places believed to be haunted. Love, site administrator for the in St. Charles, was intrigued by the story surrounding the LaLaurie Mansion, and Delphine LaLaurie in particular.

"I'm one of those people who says 'I'd really like to know more about such-and-such' and when I went to the bookstores they said there's nothing written on her," Love said. "I'd asked the tour guide about how he knew all this stuff and all the original documents are intact. That makes a historian drool, you know."

For those unfamiliar with New Orleans history, Delphine Lalaurie and her husband, Dr. Louis Lalaurie, were a wealthy couple who lived in the city in the late 1820s-early 1830s. On April 10, 1834, their home on Royal Street caught fire.

When firefighters broke into the mansion's padlocked attic door, they discovered chained and mutilated slaves inside. From there grew the legend of "Mad Madame Lalaurie" -- a tale complete with angry ghosts, zombie drugs and even a "devil baby."

While the story has been told in various books about ghosts, no single book had been dedicated strictly to Lalaurie. Love began pouring through documents and archives until she felt there was enough material for a book. As luck would have it, a collection of the Lalauries' letters wound up at the archives of the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, making key amounts of research easy to get at for the Florissant resident.

Love didn't want to write a dry, historical tome so  she then enlisted the help of her friend Lorelei Shannon in Seattle, a successful writer of horror books.

"We've known each other since high school," Love said. "She wrote most of the psychobabble while I stuck to the facts. I'm not interested in why they did it, just if they did it. We made a good pair."

The book -- Mad Madame Lalaurie -- New Orleans' Most Famous Murderess Revealed -- was published Feb. 28 by The History Press. "We wrote it as a true crime story," Love said.

"For a woman to be accused of such substantial violence is really rare," Love said. "Was it yellow journalism or fact? The medical atrocities were pretty heinous -- like the woman that had all her bones broken and reset at odd angles so she scrambled like a crab -- you don't hear about women doing stuff like that.

"Whenever you see big pieces of anomalies in history it really gets me going," she said. "And that was an anomaly that a woman would do medical atrocities."

Her research revealed that this legend, at least, was untrue. "It turns out there were no medical atrocities. That's one of the book's spoilers. Everybody thinks that she was a serial killer, that she was torturing all these folks -- there were slaves that were tortured, there were people in really bad shape in her attic but there were seven and they were all alive. What she did prior to and post the fire we don't know."

"It's a rough history, obviously. There's so many big picture things -- white against black, creole against american, women versus men and all that. On top of that, her family is fabulous. In this book we have pirates, we have zombies, we have mummification drugs, there's a devil baby."

Mad Madame LaLaurie is available for purchase on www.amazon.com and through The History Press. For more information visit www.mad-madame-lalaurie.com.