On April 10, 1834, a fire broke out at the mansion of Madame LaLaurie in New Orleans' French Quarter
On April 10, 1834, a fire broke out at the mansion of Madame LaLaurie in New Orleans' French Quarter . Volunteers rushed to the scene to save the house and get everyone out safely. But when they arrived, LaLaurie wouldn't give them the keys to the slave quarters and insisted that no one was inside. Then the firefighters broke through the door and made a horrifying discovery. Inside, they found LaLaurie's enslaved workers, some of them horribly mutilated yet still alive while others were dead and simply left to decompose. Witnesses said that some had their eyes gouged out, skin flayed off, or mouths filled with excrement and then sewn shut. One even reported seeing a woman whose bones had been broken and reset at odd angles so that she resembled a "human crab." Later, LaLaurie's enslaved cook was found shackled to the stove and claimed to have started the fire in an attempt to kill himself so that he could finally escape the constant torture at the hands of L...