Who would have thought that 2026 would be the year I embraced nonfiction books? So far this year I have read Diary of Anne Frank and I Am Malala, both amazing and sad autobiographies of persecuted young women. Then I read Madame LaLaurie: Mistress of the Haunted House, a well researched biography of a New Orleans plantation mistress who is rumored to have tortured and murdered her slaves.

Marie Delphine Macarty LaLaurie was a Creole woman from New Orleans. She was married 3 times. When she was 14, she married Don Ramón de Lopez y Angulo who was a 35 year old widower. Their marriage only lasted 4 years before he died while traveling back to Louisiana from Spain. Her 2nd husband was Jean Blanque, who she married at the age of 22. They were married for 8 years, until his death in 1816. In 1825, at the age of 40, she married 25 year old Dr Leonard LaLaurie in order to legitimize their son who had been born the previous year, according to church records.

They had a tumultuous marriage and separated multiple times. It would seem that they were back together on the night of April 10th, 1834 when their mansion caught fire during a house party. Delphine made sure all of her expensive belongings were moved out to the street, but refused to allow anyone to look for her slaves. A judge who lived across the street decided to disregard the LaLauries’ wishes and entered the back building with a group from the community. It was in those quarters that they discovered a female slave trapped in the kitchen and 6 others chained in the room upstairs. They had been obviously abused. The community was rightfully horrified and would have enacted vigilante justice if the LaLaurie family hadn’t fled first to Mobile, Alabama, then to New York City and finally to Louis LaLaurie’s home town in France.

I really wanted to like this book more than I did. It was well researched but did not give me any new information about Madame LaLaurie or evidence of haunting. There was a lot of information about her relatives and children, but even they are not tracked all the way to modern times.

Rating: 3/5