The Backstory: Nicholas Cage and New Orleans's Most Haunted Mansion

Haunted houses usually have a story that’s been embellished over the years or even just made up. But a mansion in New Orleans’ French Quarter, once owned by Nicholas Cage, has a documented history that’s absolutely horrifying. And even he was terrified of the place!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, do you love a good haunted house. We're
launching into October, the month of Halloween. You're not alone.
There's a mansion in New Orleans with a terrifying past,
as well as a connection to an eccentric movie star.
I'm Patty Steele. What happened at the Lelori House? That's
next on the backstory. We're back with the backstory. Well,

(00:25):
a lot of us are attracted to big and kind
of scary old houses, and if folks think they're haunted,
they tell us horror stories of what happened there. And
I guess while we're thrilled, we don't necessarily believe it all.
Actor Nicholas Cage is infamous for his love of haunted
mansions and castles and his ability to buy them. Then again,

(00:46):
he also has an inability to keep up with the
payments once he does buy them. But a house in
New Orleans that he bought and then lost to foreclosure
has a really terrifying backstory. This is the true story
of what's called the most haunted house in New Orleans.
It's the early eighteen hundreds. New Orleans socialite Delphine Lolori

(01:07):
has a magnificent house, right in the heart of the
French Quarter. She lives there on Royal Street with her
much younger third husband, doctor Lewis Lelori. By the way,
you might recognize Delphine's name as well as the mansion
from Coven That was the third season of American Horror Story.
Of course, the show borrowed the house in Delphine's name

(01:28):
for the focus of the season. Actress Kathy Bates when
an Emmy for playing Delphine, who in the show was
recast as a witch, and in some ways that kind
of makes sense once you hear her real story. The
Lolories have a troubled marriage, most likely due to Delphine's
ferocious temper, and they had a troubled household as well.

(01:50):
Neighbors said Delphine's slaves didn't look well treated, though she
always seemed to be kind to them at public. They
said they heard screams and strange noises coming from the
mansion at all hours of the day and night. There
was gossip that she was cruel to her slaves. Eventually,
the town caught wind of it and sent a local

(02:10):
lawyer to the house to remind her about the laws
for the proper care of slaves. Now, mind you, this
was New Orleans in the eighteen thirties, so how they
treated slaves was a little bit of an issue here.
But the lawyer said he didn't see anything alarming, so
that was that. For the next three years, beginning in
eighteen thirty one, records showed that there were twelve deaths

(02:33):
among Delphine's slaves, though they didn't report how those people died.
But one of those deaths was that of a child
named Leah. A neighbor says she saw the little girl
fall to her death from the roof of the mansion
while trying to run away from Delphine, who was chasing
her with a whip. Apparently, Leah had been brushing Delphine's

(02:55):
hair and hit a snag, pulling her hair. Delphine was
enraged she came after Leah with the whip. After the fall,
the Lalies buried the little girl's body in the garden,
but now because a neighbor had seen it, there was
an investigation. The Lalories were tried and found guilty of
illegal cruelty as opposed to legal cruelty. What's that about.

(03:19):
Well as punishment, they were find three hundred bucks and
nine of their slaves were taken from them, but once
again ha money to the rescue. Those nine slaves were
returned to the mansion after Delphine bought them back through
a relative. Can you imagine what it must have been
like to escape that horror only to be returned to

(03:40):
the same house and the same people who had tortured you,
And it kept going. Further stories said that Delphine kept
her cook chained to the kitchen stove and even beat
her own daughters when they tried to feed that cook
and the other slaves. Imagine she's doing cooking for the family,
but she's starving. Despite the rumors, though, nobody went after

(04:02):
Delphine and that was it. Although for a period of
time her husband left their home, by eighteen thirty four
he was back. Then, in April of that year, a
fire broke out in the mansion's kitchen. When the police
and firefighters got there, they found that seventy year old
cook chained to the stove, just like the gossip had said.

(04:24):
She told them she had set the fire as a
suicide attempt because she was afraid of being punished by Delphine.
She said that slaves that were taken to the attic
never came back. That's when firefighters found a locked door
in the attic. They tried to get in to make
sure everybody was evacuated. When the Lolories refused to hand
over the keys, they broke down the doors inside in chains.

(04:49):
They found seven slaves who had been horribly mutilated, chained
by the neck in heavy iron, spiked collars, emaciated, and
their skin literally torn to pieces with a whip. When
Delphine's husband was asked by a judge who came to
the scene what had been going on, Doctor Lelorie snapped,
some people better stay at home rather than come to

(05:11):
other people's homes to dictate laws and meddle with other
people's business. The slaves said Delphine had tortured them for months.
Two of them died within days of being sort of rescued.
And why do I say sort of rescued. Well, amazingly,
the powers that'd be put those rescued slaves on display

(05:32):
in a jail where they were available for public viewing.
Within two days, up to four thousand people had shown
up to gawk at them, many saying they needed to
see it for themselves because it was so hard to
believe anybody could be so cruel. Almost immediately, an angry
mob came after the Lolories, but they managed to escape.

(05:54):
No one knew where they'd gone and if they'd gotten
out of the country, but they were never seen in
New Orleans again, at least officially. It seems Delphine and
her husband had apparently fled to the waterfront as the
fire burned in their mansion. There, they jumped on a
schooner took it to Alabama, where they caught a ship
to France. Years later, Delphine's son said that she had

(06:18):
wanted to move back to New Orleans, but most of
her five children, some in the US, some in France,
thought that was a very bad idea due to her reputation. Now,
as far as anybody can tell, she never resurfaced in
New Orleans. Did she fake her death in France and
sneak back into the US seems a bit unlikely, because

(06:39):
a gravestone was discovered years later in France showing she
had died there in eighteen forty nine, when she was
sixty two years old. Hope you're enjoying the backstory with
Patty Steele. Please leave your review and follow or subscribe
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(07:00):
to dm me if you have a story you'd like
me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty Steele and on
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Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our writer

(07:22):
Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
Feel free to reach out to me with comments and
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Backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history you didn't
know you needed to know.