Doomed to Fail - Ep 183: Devil in The Big Easy - Delphine LaLaurie

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

In the heart of New Orleans' French Quarter, a mansion stood as a symbol of wealth and prestige—until its horrifying secrets were exposed. Madame Delphine LaLaurie was a socialite, a woman of influence, and a monster lurking behind the grandeur. What truly happened inside her infamous home? Was she a sadistic torturer, or has history twisted her tale into something even darker?Join us as we unravel the gruesome truth, the legends, and the unanswered questions surrounding one of America's most infamous women.🔪 History, horror, and hauntings collide in this chilling episode! 🔪 Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. And we are back live and recording. Welcome to Doom to Fail, the podcast that brings you two amazing stories, twice a week, every week, for the past two and a half years, and we will continue on for a long time to go.

I'm joined here by Taylor, and I'm Forrest. Hi, Taylor. Wow. That really works. Threw you for a loop, didn't I? You really woke yourself up. Yeah, we'll keep doing this until the world ends, which could be tomorrow. I don't fucking know.

We don't know. Why not keep doing it? Yeah, I saw an Instagram post where a guy was like, the day before the last day on Earth, and it was like, someone just like going to work. He's like, what are you going to do? You never know what's going to happen. Taylor, I have a lot of, like, fun commentary to tell you. that I can't be recorded talking about,

but I'll share with you later on. But yeah, we are here and the world has continued. So we're going to go ahead and go ahead and go. Did I leave anything off of my introduction that I should have said that now that, you know? No, that was great. Great. All right. So we'll go ahead and dive in.

I am going to be today's storyteller. And I know that's going to disappoint a lot of our listeners. No. But I've really fun one. So I kicked off March with Women's History Month covering women who've done horrible things throughout history. I did Elizabeth Bathory. I did Irma Gressa. And then I, well, before Magressa, I took a detour and forgot that I was doing this and did a story about Hachi, the beloved dog that was loyal to his master.

But now I'm back on women. And I'm going to go across the pond from Europe into the United States. Taylor, I learn Louisiana has like a lot of crazy history Like it is like this story A lot of it intersects with like the history of like Louisiana Because I'm going to cover a woman in Louisiana named Delphine Lurie Which I know you've heard of right

I was going to get to this at the very end But I'll tell you now Did you know that Nicholas Cage bought her house And then it went to foreclosure? Yes He did a lot of bad moves, huh? I feel like every other day he has a castle that goes into foreclosure or something. Or it's like return to dinosaur skull to a museum or something.

Wild. Wild. Um, okay. I, I'm going to start off by saying that, yes, this is a Louisiana story. It is very witchy. It's very true crime and macabreish, which I think goes hand in hand with New Orleans. I, when I learned that the, um, was in the,

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil When I learned that was a true story I was like I was like that's crazy I can't believe that's like a real It sounds so fake like somebody Somebody had to have made it up But no it's real so Yeah yeah very fun because it's a very Louisiana thing

It's very in this story too It's very combined with like voodoo occultism Witchiness corruption jazz The Nightlife It's like a fun all around true crime story And Madam LaLory Who we're gonna be referring to here She kind of combined them all

into this story. So I'm going to get into who she is, how she grew up, what was going on in the time that she grew up, what she did. And then what the outcome of that has been. So, Madam LaLory was born Marie Delphine McCarthy in 1787. Her family is, yet again, another validation of my theory that I keep telling you, which is like, if you were here in America early enough, you could become rich and successful. Like, there was nobody here. You just do what you wanted um her family i mean there were people here that we just killed them that's uh yeah okay fair fair but if you but if you don't care but if you don't care about that if you don't care about that then yes if you're like there are all this stuff i can steal it's all free stuff yep um yeah so her uh

grandfather is the one that came over from ireland uh and settled the family in um the spanish controlled region of Louisiana that is now known as New Orleans. So one generation after the grandfather migrates over here, Madame Lelori's uncle by marriage is a guy named Esteban Rodriguez Miro, who is the governor of this region, this territory. But again, actually, you know what, Taylor? I'm kind of going back now because if I tell you I'm the governor of like New Orleans in like the late 1700s, like who gives a shit?

Like it's nothing. It's like it's your swamp land. you know so maybe like you're successful but like not in a way that you'd really care to be well i think the people i mean you could probably arrest people that's fun and like demand taxes that's true yeah it's not nothing i should have thought of that should call you can be governor of your house you know yeah that's why we're trying to come with names for my my retreat house um it can be the governor's mansion i love it but just far as lives in you're not you're not a governor It's not a mansion, but it's perfectly named.

So back at this time period, this area of the U.N., I don't know what you call it, whatever, this territory is controlled by the Spanish. And it's intermittently controlled by the French. And there's a huge war that breaks out. It's so weird because, again, this is like now obviously the United States, like the U.S. had nothing to do with this. Like it was literally just Napoleon and the Spanish kings fighting over. over the space right next to Texas. Right. And I'd also like never been there.

You know, remember Napoleon just like sells it. Yeah, yeah. He's like, get this out of my portfolio. I'm going to, exactly. I'm going to actually get into why that happened too. Yeah. Like I said, the history is really complex. It gets handed back and forth between Spain and France, Spain and France, yada, yada, yada.

And during Madame Lelori's, I'll just call it Delphine, Delphine's easier. During Delphine's childhood, slavery was rampant, obviously. So, Spain, France, and to whatever extent of the U.S. is relevant in the story at all, they all permitted slavery. And there was, like, different distinctions on how it was done. So in Spain, slavery was probably better practiced by Spanish people than the rest. Because at least with Spain, you could buy your way to freedom. Whereas with France and the U.S., like, they were trying to ramp up, like, like, like, practices. And, like, cruelty was kind of, like, more embedded within the slave trade.

and then also something unique that was going on in this part of the country was unlike the rest of the slave trade where it was usually like people coming over from Africa through the transatlantic slave trade these folks were coming over from the Caribbean that's where most of it was happening and so culturally there was like this complete separation between like U.S. slave trade versus like what was going on in Louisiana

several things were happening around this time when Delphine was like a child to kind of like help tell a story of how she could become the person she became essentially. So you have the Haitian revolution. So I did not know this, but apparently, which I should have known,

but like apparently France owned Haiti. They went over there, like they, this is crazy. They went over there and they took control of it and they enslaved the native people, which is like, is that insane? And like, that's a big reason why New Orleans developed the way that it did

because they were supplying slaves back and forth between New Orleans because New Orleans was like at certain points owned by France and so was Haiti. But anyways, they had a revolution and revolted against the French, kicked them out of their country and that was like a big to do about like, oh, wow, there can be successful slave revolts.

Like we didn't know that. Yeah, it was a slave revolt. That's the important part. Yeah. And then you have the media conspiracy, which was a planned revolt of slaves in Louisiana that was uncovered stopped a bunch of people got executed as a result of that you have the point coupé conspiracy um that was enslaved people in louisiana who plotted to kill our

masters and flee to then spanish controlled florida and um and they got figured out and executed as well at the same time around that you had the german coast uprising which was the largest slave revolt in u.s history about 500 um revolted and were burning and killing um plantation owners until the U.S. military was one that actually suppressed that and killed a ton of them as retribution. But I'm saying all this because it like planted the seeds within the minds of like rich white people that, oh, this can happen. Right. When it happens, it's like bad for us. Yeah.

Wait, but I wouldn't have any, you know, I wouldn't have any money, you see. If I paid, if I paid them, then I would have less money. So you see my problem. Yeah, exactly. that was so they had a really twisted logic as related to this obviously um because the the next piece of this is the reason why again i don't know how to say it's like sounding tone deaf but like there was incentive structures for slave owners to not be absolute shitheads to their slaves because of these things that were going on.

Right, not because they didn't. Not because they thought they thought they thought that if they treated them bad enough, like long enough, they could revolt and this could potentially happen to them. So as a result of that, there was like a weird level of like in policing of the group of the rich white people of like, no, no, you can't do what you do. Because if your people revolt, then my people hear about it, they're going to revolt against me and then I'm going to get killed. And then we're not going to have any money. Then we're going to have any money. Do you understand? Yeah.

um so like i said like the reason napoleon sold louisiana to the united states was because of that haysian revolt it was literally like the entire impetus for it um so going back to delphine so she had she married three times so her first husband kind of irrelevant this guy he he was like some regent governor some shit back then um he was traveling from new orleans to madrid when uh delphine was pregnant with their child and he died en route it was like he was in havana he got sick he died nothing suspicious there this is just like how people died back then yeah about four years later she was also really young she was 13 when she first got married oh it's like crazy like it's like even i know it was a long time ago but it's like yeah crazy i know so four years later um after

the death of that husband she married a second time and this guy was named jean blank uh who would go on and have four more kids with him before he died eight years later in 1816 then she married a third husband which sounds like the one that was like the most toxic and the one that like it's something they hate each other almost instantly they got married at 1825 and she basically created like a whole separate universe for herself she went and bought this property at 1140 Royal Street which is for a brief period of time nicholas cage's property weird weird thing to say out loud um and she constructed her mansion there which is like a separate thing and then eventually like the the family would all move in but she had her own separate space as well god i just feel like it used to be so

easier to get construction done. Like, how do you do that? And I guess, I guess, yes, that makes sense. But I feel like there's always, like, stories of, like, even in, like, after slavery ended, things that are like, oh, we just added, added rooms to our farmhouse. I'm like, how about you had a room to your house? Dude, this is, like, again, anybody who cares about this stuff, listen to Ezra Klein, and he will articulate this down to the T.

It's like regulations are why we cannot build anything anymore. It's so hard. We was talking about how, like, Josh Shapiro suspended 8,000 different rules on how you should construct public works when the bridge collapsed in Pittsburgh. And it was like, yeah, they were up and running in like six weeks. Like it was like, there's not a problem of like engineering. It's a problem of regulation. Anyways, that's a side story. The mansion that she built here at 1140 Royal Street is called the Lory Mansion, which is still there to this day, although in a different form.

floor plans for the original mansion don't exist they were never established but we know roughly is that the mansion itself was about 10,000 square feet in size and it had slave quarters as well so it had a separate unit that was slave quarters the first floor was entertaining area so this was where you would typically receive guests you had a ballroom a formal parlor with dining area and that's kind of like what the first floor was that was like for guests only essentially The second floor was living quarters with a family, bedrooms, things like that. And the third floor was where slaves were being housed. Then you had a separate slaves quarter, which was behind the mansion.

And it was a two-story separate building. And that's where the nightmare stuff that we'll be discussing took place. So now if I Google it and look at it, it's like on the corner of a city block. Was it always like that? So Royal Lane was like one of the original main streets of New Orleans. but like obviously the texture of the city looked different right because like there was very very few people there but it was always in the center of the city yeah cool um so her public treatment of slaves was considered normal at the time she was referred to as being very polite with slaves and gave the appearance of at least caring about their health and well-being that was perceived as being over compensation because anyone who observed la lorries or delphine's slaves would comment that their condition was dramatically worse and more haggard than that other slaves in the area. And again, like I said,

like normally from like a moralistic perspective, nobody cared. Do whatever you want. The problem was don't be so bad that your people cause issues for us. Yeah. So people cared to that extent. And a neighbor did report at one point seeing

what they thought was somewhere around between 8 to 12 year old enslaved girl jumped from the roof of the mansion to her suicide. later on it was assumed that after everything was discovered it was assumed that that happened because of a whipping that she thought she was going to endure so she would rather just commit suicide at eight years old it's crazy um because of that situation that was reported by a neighbor investigators did start looking into what delphine was doing at the house they did find evidence

of cruelty and as part of her punishment um eight of her slaves were forfeited back to the state eventually because she's connected to like the government she was able to buy back those slaves so they ended up going back to her anyways there were stories that she would chain the cooks enslaved cooks in the kitchen

and in fact one such cook would be the reason why investigators would ultimately discover what she was doing there because on April 10th 1834 the mansion went up in flames it started in the kitchen when an enslaved cook a 70-year-old woman who was chained to the stove by her ankle, she was like, I would rather die in a fire

and commit suicide here than endure what happens when you were taken to the uppermost rooms of the slave quarters. So she lit a fire. People saw it. Bystanders would show up. And they, again, this is so weird because it's like, it's like a kindness, but it's done for like selfish reasons. They were trying to get into those slave quarters to free any slaves that were in there

or shackles so that they wouldn't be harmed. um so they go to this other house that's like behind the main house and they asked delphine for access to it and she refuses to give them the key and so they're like whatever we're just going to break the door down so they break the door down and they go inside and they basically discover like the most creative haunted house decor like in history um there were seven people there in various stages of death or torture they found a woman who this is so gross they found a woman whose mouth had been

sewn shut, and once they cut the stitches open, they discovered that her mouth was filled with human waste. Oh, God. Yeah. There was a man who had his limbs broken and then reset to heal backwards. They call him the grab

man. Is that crazy? Awful. They found a woman who was strapped down and had strips of skin ripped off of her, suggesting that she'd been consistently flayed over time, like a long period of time.

one woman she was somehow alive her stomach was cut open and her intestines were wrapped around her waist was she alive yeah briefly she died very soon

after they found her yeah and then several others were found chained to the wall and they had iron collars with spikes aimed inwards on their neck oh my god

yeah so to the credit of the people of the time when the cruelty was discovered the citizenry basically just rioted and started destroying the mansion they destroyed all the furniture inside

set fire to it um people questioned her they didn't question delphine her presence during all this is kind of like in question like we don't know exactly what happened but her husband's perspective on this was like why are you inquire like how dare

you ask me how I treat my property like you don't really is my stuff basically is what you're saying um so they destroy the mansion they set fire to it destroy everything inside of it they um they take the slaves and they transfer them to the local jail and the reason that they wanted to do that was because they wanted people to see the cruelty but i was like that's kind of cruel too like don't you're not going to free them right no they're not going to do they have hospitals

i mean i don't i don't know maybe they just don't care they probably don't care did they have a doctor we met them at the prison i don't know yeah um But apparently 4,000 people went in and out of the jail just to see what was going on there. Of course they did. Yeah. That also, it's interesting because it kind of dovetails the Civil War where like the uprisings, the cruelty is just like it's all kind of ramping up. And what year? What year was it?

Are they like 1834? Okay. Yeah. I mean, we're still ways off. But it's like still like it's things are ramping up. Like I said, we don't know after this whole key situation happened with the slave quarters what Delphine was doing or wasn't doing, but we know that once she saw the mob kind of tearing apart her house, the two kids that were living with her and her mother who was also living with her, they fled from New Orleans to Millville, Alabama, and then went to Paris, France, from there. And that's where she lived. She kept wanting to come back to New Orleans, her home.

She wanted to come back to where it was. But her family was like, no, you definitely cannot go back there. They're going to rip you limb from limb. And so she ended up living in Paris until the age of 62. She died in 1849. And the record keeping around how she died is swarse. Some stories I read said that she died on a wild boar hunting accident. But we don't know exactly how she died.

and then four years after this mob had destroyed and burnt the mansion to the ground the property that it sat on was acquired by a private citizen and rebuilt um so like he rebuilt it so the one that but it's so the one that you can visit now isn't the one that she lived in no i mean i'm sure like the foundation is and like maybe some studs are but like they rebuilt area but like okay yeah yeah um and then nicholas in 2007 nicholas bought it and then later lost it to foreclosure. Oh, my God is so funny. But that's it. That's the Delphine LaLory

of New Orleans. One of the worst people to ever live and a cruel, mysterious piece of shit. Are they sure it was her? Like, just her? Or was it like other people helping her? It's all speculation. Like I said, I mean, we're talking about a part of the country

that wasn't a part of the country when this happened. And then the countries that it was a part of were fighting a war. Right. The record keeping isn't amazing on this. The assumptions are that yes, it was her that did it. One of the stories had to do with the girl that jumped from the rooftop. Again, it's all rumors. I happen to think that rumors have some grains of truth in them.

And so part of the rumor was that that girl, the servant girl, was combing her hair. And she caught her hair on a knot. And then she got pissed that she like caught it on the knot. and then turn around and started whipping her, and that's what caused her, like, run out of the room and jump out of the roof. Oh, my God. Yeah.

It's terrible. Yeah, there was some later records would show that in the four years before the fire, 12 people died at the mansion. Mm-hmm. Like a funeral home, they accepted 12 bodies that came from the mansion. And so if it wasn't her, I mean, who would it be? I don't know. That's what I'm asking.

Like, is it like, like, what was her husband doing? You know, no, the husband sounds, so she filed for separation almost immediately after they got married. Oh. The husband was like, so they had a home together. She built this separately. It was like an H.H. Home situation. She was like, she wanted, like, her hangout crib to be separate from where she, like, you know,

her husband was. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, she almost immediately filed for separation from third husband. Yeah, H.H. H.H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. seem to be able to find contractors really easily. No regulations. I'm telling you. Nobody cared. Chicago is just being built when H.H. H.H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. It's kind of creepy.

But it was, like, yeah. So it was, like, streets that, like, are ready for houses, but they weren't built yet. It's meant to be. It's meant. to be creepy Oh, that's scary And yeah I'm sorry that I Did you keep it in where I was like Oh, she sounds like Elizabeth Bathory? Did you keep that in that episode?

Did you remember? When I said, oh, Elizabeth Bathory sounds like Madame Laurie. You did? Yeah, I kept that on. Yeah, yeah. Because yeah, I think it's very, it's very similar to be like,

I'm like this mysterious woman in a mansion killing people. I know when Kathy Bates played her in American Horror Story, she definitely was like, you know, using baby's blood to stay young and stuff like that. Did you see that? The horse ray?

The Coven. You saw Coven, right? Yeah. Yeah, because that was referenced a lot with Delphine, was Kathy Bates. I can't remember why she like, oh, in it they had her, when she died, they had her dying in the, like, sack of her house when people were, like, burning it down. And then they buried her and then some, like, witches. in like voodoo witches

cursed her to stay alive and then when they found her in like the now time she was in her coffin still alive. Yeah. And then she became like like a servant at the witch's house. I should watch. I tried to I watched it and I couldn't get through like two or three episodes and then you told me that like I think you said

that was your favorite wasn't it? The favorite is Roanoke but you know what? It's Roanoke. That's why I couldn't get through. I never tried watching Coven. Right. It's good. It's good. Yeah, I was thinking today somewhere related to that that the next season of American Horror Story

should just be Lady Gaga doing music videos I would watch that's not that scary I think it'd be better it is scary have you seen the abracadabra one no

hotel was amazing hotel was one of the best that's my favorite I think yeah cool so I think I think I'm gonna pivot next week and actually I could probably do

you know what actually one of our list I'll call him out Daniel did send me a very impressive story of a young girl during Nazi occupation of some part of Europe

who did like a lot of amazing stuff and I might cover that next week. That sounds fun. Yeah. I like Nazi stuff. Well, you know, I don't know why I'd be thinking about it. Nobody knows.

It's a mystery. Cool. Thank you for sharing. Do you have any fun letters? I don't, but I do have some stuff that I looked up since we last talked. Because I was closing out Virginia Hall's Wikipedia page, and there is a movie about her. It's called A Call to Spy and was made in 2009. Oh, sorry, 2019.

And the woman from castles in it. But there's a couple other women. So even though I don't think this woman really met. real life in the movie there's three women and then so i wanted to name them as well there's a woman named um vera atkins who was also in the s oe who was a spy um who was cool and then another woman um an indian woman in um the uk named nur in yacht con and she was in the s oe as well and was a spy um kind of with virgin oh and they're all part of this movie yeah i think the movie kind of put them together in a way that maybe they're not supposed to be put together but

nor Inette Khan, the Indian woman, was, she was killed at DACO. This movie made $790,000 of the box office. It looks pretty terrible. I mean, like, I meant like a movie, like a Quinn Tarantino movie, not like a movie where like the budget is less than like the meals for that. I agree. This doesn't look very good. Like, even the poster doesn't, I'm not excited about it at all.

Yeah, it looks like, yeah, I created it. Everyone looks kind of terrible, and I don't know. But whatever. So there's one, but there should be a better one, even though I have not seen this one. All right. And then I also... Ask ChatGPT.

Okay, I went to ChatGPT the other day, and I was like, since I've been born, how many bad things have happened? And it was like, so many bad things. things. You're fine. And so it was just really nice. So since I've been born in 1982, these are the economic crises and recessions. In 1987, there was Black Monday stock market crash. The dot-com bubble burst in 2000. The Great Recession was in 2007, 2009. The COVID-19 recession was in 2020, and currently we're in an inflation crisis. So I just wanted to, I don't know,

that made me feel better. You know what I was talking about was living in times? And times you're always pretty terrible. I would say this. Have you ever seen the movie Margin Call? You've talked about it a lot. Guys, do I talk about it that much? Yeah, I feel like you're the only person that I've ever brought it up ever. So that might be just once, but it feels like a lot because zero people have talked about it in the other part of my life.

There's this scene with Jeremy Irons, and I'm not even a Jeremy Irons fan. I am the Jeremy Irons fan. He is awesome in that movie, but he's only in it for maybe like six minutes. And every six minutes of it is like worth. watching because there's one point when he starts like going off on like all the financial crises that he's experienced it was like yeah like every like four to eight years this happens this is that the way it is it's like burning down the shrubbery burning down the forest like rebuild the trees or something like it's it is kind of interesting

chairman irons is the bad guy in the third diehard which is die hard with a vengeance i can't see he was a bad guy he'll always be offered to me um really I feel like he's always a bad guy. He's freaking scar and the Lion King. Actually, you know what? Now that you said it, he was also kind of the bad guy in March and Call because he's one of the reasons why the financial prices happen. You know what? You're right.

I'll take it back. Yeah, he feels he feels like a... Also, he was Ben Afflix, Alfred, which is like the worst one. I know I've saw this before, but I should I tell you how I have a cop, a trivial pursuit game board? And one of the questions is which of these actors has not played Batman? and the answer was Ben Affleck because the person writing the card was like who was the most ridiculous person to ever play Batman

and they put Ben Affleck in there and then since that trivial pursuit was printed Ben Affleck played Batman. George Clooney and Val Kilmer were infinitely more ridiculous. But they were already in there it was like George Clooney, Val Kilmer

Michael Key in Ben Affleck so that was those were like the four you could guess from so the person was like I'm going to put a fourth person in here who will never be cast as Batman and they were. It's so ridiculous. Can you believe it? Fun times.

Cool. On that note, Taylor, anything else to sign off with? I don't think so. Thank you, everyone. Please send us an email, Doob tofellPod at gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you if you have any ideas

and find us on all social medias. And thank you for following us. Daniel, keep sending me DMs on Instagram. like your opinion your your topics are fun yeah same to people who i'm talking anybody else anybody else we actually do see them and read them yeah um cool thanks taylor we'll go ahead and cut off cool thank you let's go ahead and cut off cool thank you