Delphine was a reputedly beautiful woman with long, black hair, and she and her husband were renowned for their extravagant parties.  They had many slaves and seemed a respectable pair, but little did townspeople know what Madame Lalaurie did to make her slaves submissive.  She had already been in court over charges of brutality, and on one occasion after complaints of abuse, several slaves had been removed from the home, but few people would speak out against this couple, so they were never arrested.  Not even after a young girl jumped to her death from the second floor to escape her harsh mistress. Then one night in 1834, a fire brought a volunteer fire brigade to the home and the Lalauries’ gruesome secrets were discovered.

As they put out the flames, they could smell the stench of death, so they broke into a locked attic room to find a truly disgusting scene.  According to several accounts, dead slaves were chained to the walls, but some were still alive and housed in cages, starved or maimed by medical experiments.  Some were even strapped to tables.  One man had been surgically transformed to look like a woman, and a woman who looked like a human crab.  Her arm and leg bones had been broken and reset into odd angles, and she was kept in a small cage.  Another woman’s arms had been amputated and her skin was peeled off in an odd sort of spiral pattern, while the lips of another were sewn shut. A few had been dissected, with their organs still exposed. Author Victor Klein, also a New Orleans native, indicates that scattered around the room were pails full of body parts, organs, and severed heads.  Among those who had died were males whose faces had been grotesquely disfigured.

A lynch mob was formed, but the Lalauries had escaped and were never heard from again.  Renovations years later uncovered the skeletons of slaves apparently buried alive, but no one knows how many unfortunate victims these two brutes actually had.