Pale and with blood shot eyes, a gaggle of mysterious girls set their foot on Louisiana floor for the primary time. Shipped from France, they had been the promised ladies for the colonial males to be their wives. Who had been the Casket Ladies? Simply harmless girls distant from residence, or blood thirsty vampires?
In a metropolis saturated with ghost tales, voodoo queens, and haunted mansions, few legends maintain as eerie a grip on New Orleans folklore as that of Les Filles à la Cassette — the Casket Ladies. Even at the moment, the colonial mail order brides of Louisiana endure from inaccurate recollections and darkish legends and it’s tough to separate reality from fiction..
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Their story, with its whiff of vampirism, colonial intrigue, and the stressed lifeless, is as a lot part of the French Quarter’s haunted previous because the foggy alleys and crumbling tombs of St. Louis Cemetery. And like all nice New Orleans ghost tales, it begins with a ship journey and ends with a coffin.
Daughters of the King or the Girls With no Future
The Casket Ladies had been a gaggle of mail order brides despatched from the previous nation to New France to populate the colonies, severely missing European females. It was not the primary time the nation had despatched a cargo of ladies for this goal. Within the early 18th century, when New Orleans was a younger, swampy French colony teeming with troopers, fortune-seekers, and rogues, girls had been briefly provide. In a transfer each sensible and ominous, the French authorities organized for younger, virtuous girls from convents and orphanages to be shipped to Louisiana to marry settlers and assist “civilize” the tough colony.
It was not solely to get the lads a spouse, however a white and European spouse, as a result of, as Commissary Jean-Baptiste Dubois Duclos mentioned: “[i]f no French girls come to Louisiana, the colony would turn into a colony of mulastres” (folks of combined race).
The Governor of Louisiana hoped for one thing just like the Filles du Roi of Quebec in New France and Jamestown, that had younger gentlewomen volunteering to go to colonies to marry the lads in trade for a dowry by the king. These had been seen as correct brides and a welcome addition to creating a brand new world within the colonies. At first a minimum of, they usually too would later be remembered as prostitutes by many. Though a lot wanted, the a lot wanted brides are remembered by a skinny veil of misogyny and sexism.
The Pelican Ladies Involves Louisiana
When the southern a part of North America began to kind as a colony, they wanted brides for the frontier males right here as effectively. The primary shipments to the French colony in Biloxi in Mississippi on the Pelican in 1704. This was the capital of the French owned North America known as La Louisiane. Approaching a ship generally known as Pelican, the girl was later generally known as: The Pelican Ladies. The ladies there had been chosen for his or her advantage and piety.
Their voyage over the Atlantic held them chained collectively within the ship’s maintain and a few by no means made it throughout and died of yellow fever. After six months at sea the place they stopped at Havana for provides, twenty three girls with their nun chaperones arrived. The ladies had been accompanied by three grey nuns known as soeurs grises from the charity hospital La Salpêtrière in Paris.
The ladies, seeing the tough situations and lack of consolation felt tricked and tried to go away. Soiled shacks as homes, deer pores and skin over the home windows as curtains and males that had been by no means residence. A lot of them returned to France, some had been denied and compelled to marry. Ultimately, nobody wished to return to Louisiana. They rebelled and refused to cooperate in what was generally known as the Petticoat Rebel.
After the ladies began to demand an honest dwelling, the French males modified their perspective on them, considering the ladies tough due to their calls for. They considered sending a unique set of ladies. For the following shipments to the colonies, the federal government went to darker locations to pick the brides.
A Unusual Cargo from France
Then there was the Casket Ladies, and there may be little documentation that they ever did exist, a minimum of as to how they’re remembered in legend.
258 girls had been shipped from France to Louisiana between 1719 to 1721. 80 of them came visiting on La Baleine in 1721 to Cellular bay in Alabama. 29 of them had been orphanages, 35 had been from poor homes and 194 had been convicted criminals from La Drive jail. French officers known as them “girls with out futures.” Among the womens households had even despatched them there themselves to be rid of them.
These younger girls, the youngest a 12 12 months previous former intercourse employee in Paris, arrived from France carrying small rectangles that had been relatively coffin-shaped baggage trunks known as cassettes, meant to carry their modest belongings — linens, and garments, caps, chemise, stockings. Over time, the phrase cassette grew to become casquette and was translated from French to casket.
To the lonely, determined colonists, these ladies appeared heaven-sent at first, however then, concern and suspicion crept up on them. Because the cargo began to provide them aside from the “virtuous” just like the Pelican Ladies, the therapy of them additionally worsened. To the officers in Louisiana, they had been appalled by the backstory of the ladies they’d been despatched.
Many complained about their habits and a few males even refused to marry them, though most of The Casket Ladies had been married inside six months of stepping off the ships. Among the girls had been additionally pressured to marry. To the extra superstitious locals, they appeared to convey with them one thing… unnatural.
The Casket Ladies have later in legends been described as wanting extra lifeless than alive once they stepped off the boat. Pale from the dearth of daylight and emancipated after the lengthy months at sea. Within the harsh solar, their pores and skin burned shortly and blistered.
The Vampire Rumors Take Root
Quickly after the arrival of the Casket Ladies, unusual happenings reportedly plagued the colony. Having been picked out from prisons, there was definitely an uptick in crime and prostitution from the little feminine inhabitants.
Sickness swept by the settlements, livestock died below mysterious circumstances, and tales of cold corpses started to make the rounds. Was it the humid and harsh atmosphere of Louisiana, or one thing darker? Legend spoke of our bodies discovered with their throat ripped open and drained of blood.
The Vampires on the Outdated Ursuline Convent
Essentially the most persistent model of the story of The Casket Ladies claims that the cassettes had been taken to the Ursuline Convent within the French Quarter of New Orleans, nonetheless an outpost of the colony. The constructing remains to be on Chartres Avenue and is the oldest within the Mississippi Valley. On the primary flooring, there was an orphanage with school rooms and an infirmary, and the nuns lived on the second flooring. On the third flooring there was an attic and a few dwelling quarters for these in want.
The Ursuline Order got here from Rouen in France, to the marshy frontier of New Orleans, or Nouvelle Orleans because it was then. They had been mentioned to chaperone a cargo of The Casket Ladies once they arrived, however the order has denied their involvement with the mail order brides.
In 1728, a gaggle of Casket Ladies arrived from France. They had been taken to the convent for safekeeping till they may discover appropriate husbands to them, however quickly, rumors began to kind. Unusual sounds had been heard at evening — rustlings, scratching, and sighs that no mortal throat may make.
The Sealed Attic Thriller
Maybe the creepiest component of the legend includes the convent’s attic The Casket Ladies had been mentioned to have been positioned in. Among the nuns had been suspicious of the casket-like trunks they traveled in (right here the lore has enlarged the trunks). Their suspicion grew when the unusual deaths saved occurring across the convent. When the nun checked them, the coffins had been empty. Some say that the Casket Ladies smuggled the vampires to the crescent metropolis of New Orleans within the trunks or that they themselves had been the vampires, sleeping of their coffins when the solar was out.
Native lore insists that after unnerving occurrences and when the nuns found that the brides had been truly vampires, the nuns moved the cassettes — and probably one thing else — to the third-floor attic and sealed the shutters tight with silver nails blessed by the Pope himself to maintain them trapped. 800 of those nails to be actual. How the Pope heard about this and despatched them from the Vatican isn’t talked about although.
To at the present time, it’s mentioned the shutters on the attic’s home windows stay closed and secured, even by the fiercest hurricanes. Some declare that makes an attempt to open them have been met with dangerous luck, loss of life, or worse. Sometimes declare to see pale faces or flickering figures on the darkened home windows, mentioned to be the spirit of The Casket Ladies or maybe the starved vampires they turned out to be.
And when vacationers move by the convent at evening, many report a lingering sense of being watched — or of catching fleeting motion from the sealed home windows above or listening to their footsteps from the third flooring, following them by the constructing.
The Undead Legacy of the Casket Ladies
Within the legends, the caskets are sometimes advised to suit the ladies themselves, being shipped in lockdown. In fact, these trunks they had been named after had been small in order that the ladies may carry them themselves. The legend of the Ursuline Convent principally talks about them arriving in 1728, nevertheless, historic information declare that solely Ursuline nuns came visiting to New Orleans that 12 months and that the Casket Ladies got here as talked about earlier. New Orleans wasn’t based as a metropolis till 1718-1721. Some even argue that there have been no Casket Ladies in New Orleans in any respect.
As well as, the convent constructing we see at the moment wasn’t even completed till 1752-1753. So the place did the legends come from? Is it merely one thing made up within the twentieth century after the which means of the phrases reworked over time? There are, in spite of everything, no sources discovered for the casket ladies being vampires till then.
Some speculate that them being vampires, had been one thing that got here from the Anne Rice novels about vampires in New Orleans.
However the legend is way from lifeless. There may be additionally a persistent rumor {that a} group of ghost hunters did some investigation to the legend within the 70s. They turned up lifeless the following morning, and all of the footage they bought from their investigation was destroyed and the proof for the lingering casket ladies having something to do with it, erased.
New Orleans, a metropolis endlessly teetering between life and loss of life, has a knack for respiration unholy life into its personal legends. Whether or not born from coincidence, homesick imaginations, or darker forces, the story of the Casket Ladies has by no means really been laid to relaxation.
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References:
The Casket Ladies – Girls & the American Story
Lonely Colonist Seeks Spouse: The Forgotten Historical past of America’s First Mail Order Brides
The Historical past of the Casket Ladies of New Orleans
