HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right, let me get in there. Oh spooky! Spooky lady. Spooky, spooky lady. You don't wanna...
MARCUS PARKS
Oh that's a spooky lady!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh spooky lady.
ED LARSON
Spooky!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Spooky!
ED LARSON
Spooky! Where that ghost at? Spooky!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You spooky! I've been thinking a lot about the girl bossing of Madame LaLaurie and I know it's gonna happen.
MARCUS PARKS
The girl boss version of Madame-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is going to happen.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean wasn't that Kathy Bates? I didn't watch the American Horror Story: Coven but wasn't she sort of girl boss Madame LaLaurie?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A little bit but they haven't gone full, like I was saying we get J Law, she's bringing new. Yeah, the name's Delphine if you're nasty. No, it's going to happen.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's gonna happen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's all gonna be Sia, it's all her music. They're gonna turn her into a hero. I don't know how, I think they're gonna say that I was hiding them from my horrible husband. Right?
ED LARSON
I mean if they turn her into a sandwich, I can't wait for that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa. The BK LaLaurie.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Marcus Parks with Henry Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yup.
MARCUS PARKS
And Ed Larson.
ED LARSON
Spooky!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a spooky lady!
ED LARSON
Hey, you over there, ghost? You spooky!
MARCUS PARKS
So when we last left Madame LaLaurie, she just moved into 1140 Royal Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans with her husband, Dr. Louis LaLaurie. And this is a little detail that we had neglected to mention, she had five children from her two previous marriages.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And they all lived in this house.
ED LARSON
Oh man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. I wanna say their kids in the end, like it ranged like 30 years between them by the end.
MARCUS PARKS
It was a lot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
She must have been hot. If you're gonna marry an older woman with five kids.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
No, I think she was rich.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She was hot too though. If you see pictures of Delphine LaLaurie she was stately, she was considered very beautiful, porcelain skin.
MARCUS PARKS
Those portraits however are not originals.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Doctored! Whoa, it's AI! It's Instagram! Spooky lady!
MARCUS PARKS
Those were done for the 1892 book many years after she died.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
So we don't actually know what Madame LaLaurie looked like.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I heard that that pussy be busting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we know it was busting. Yeah. We know that. But we don't know exactly what she looked like. I would imagine she would be one of those women you'd describe as severe looking.
ED LARSON
Ooh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's weird, I actually saw the opposite. It said that she was soft. That's why the true horrors when they were revealed were extra shocking because no pretty woman would ever do something bad. Jodi Arias, Casey Anthony. Sorry.
MARCUS PARKS
But as soon as Madame LaLaurie and the doctor moved into the city, that's where the legends truly begin. Now some of these legends are of course total horseshit but others may have a kernel of truth to them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what makes a good legend.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, the kernel of truth. You gotta have something that's half true. See according to Victoria Love, the author of the more sensationalist of the two books we used, it was believed that Dr. LaLaurie was testing Haitian-style zombie drugs to induce cooperation and docility and enslave people that were proving troublesome, sort of chemical lobotomy.
ED LARSON
Weekend at Bernie's 2 stuff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, sure, sure, sure, absolutely. Honestly more like Weekend at Bernie's 4 stuff. It's gonna be hard to go back to the 1880s until we have the time machine version which is Weekend at Bernie's 3.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
These experiments, if they did happen, were of course failures and the poor poisoned souls who didn't survive were of course thrown in the swamp. This one is unlikely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
If only because the cost of such experiments, $25,000 in modern currency per victim, was prohibitively high for even a person as wealthy as Madame LaLaurie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We also know that scopolamine is effective but it does have a range of effects.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it does not necessarily make you a living zombie. But it can I guess if you just are in the right mood or if you haven't eaten lunch. I don't know, I haven't used scopolamine anytime recently.
ED LARSON
Do you smoke it or do you just rub it in your eyes?
MARCUS PARKS
You blow it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You do, yeah. It's a powder that's supposed to activate a zombie-like condition.
ED LARSON
Wow, like The Iceman used to use.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You should watch The Serpent and the Rainbow.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's good.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh you'll love it. Yeah, you'll absolutely love it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You've never seen Serpent and the Rainbow?
ED LARSON
Never even heard of it.
MARCUS PARKS
Right up your alley. Yeah. The other legend that seems less likely but I think might partly be true is the story of the so-called devil baby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Give me them tits, mommy. Where's that book, mommy?
ED LARSON
I'm gonna figure you before I come out. The first thing the doctor saw was just a middle finger come out of her pussy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck you! Let me stay next to the clit.
ED LARSON
Do you need all these eggs?
MARCUS PARKS
But this one has an extra kick because it also involves another legendary New Orleans citizen, Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We need to do an episode on her someday.
MARCUS PARKS
We absolutely will. Now supposedly Marie Laveau came across an insane deformed child that was the spawn of a mortal woman and a demon. Laveau in turn sought out Madame LaLaurie and gave the grotesque demonic child to her for reasons that are unclear.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Let me see the dick too!
ED LARSON
Stretch it out!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Stretch it, make it a wristwatch. Incredible. Now make it a hammock! Oh my god, we'll take it on the road.
MARCUS PARKS
The child was then kept in darkness for five years, screaming and drooling, eating only raw meat until it finally died.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now you're saying that this was in New Orleans, Louisiana at this time period and not in Southern Florida, 1981.
ED LARSON
I hate cooked burgers.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The biggest baby ever born in Florida, yeah. This does sound like an origin story.
ED LARSON
There was a new baby born, people have been sending it to me. It was smaller.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
They keep writing it was 15, it was 14 lbs 8 oz. I was 14 lbs 13.5 oz. this baby ain't shit, stop sending it to me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they're putting sawdust in its diaper. Like it's cheating at bobsledding.
MARCUS PARKS
Now this devil baby story admittedly sounds insane from beginning to end.
ED LARSON
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
But remember Dr. LaLaurie was supposedly a student of medical abnormalities and the truth might be even more horrifying than the legend from descriptions of the devil baby. It could be that this child was suffering from the infamous harlequin syndrome. Now this birth defect creates huge diamond-shaped scales over every inch of the baby's body. And the spaces in between those scales are constant open wounds because the skin never stops splitting.
ED LARSON
Greyscale.
MARCUS PARKS
No, this is so much worse.
ED LARSON
Worse than greyscale?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you like are, how do you put it?
MARCUS PARKS
Pain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. You're a charcuterie plate.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
With the bread biscuits as the only thing you can kind of literally hang your hat on.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Additionally the heads, arms, and legs of the harlequin baby are severely malformed and the eyes are often blood red. And sometimes there's no eyelids, there's no eye holes, it's like two red dots kind of pasted on. The Eraserhead baby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Why didn't they kill it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well you know...
MARCUS PARKS
Well if say someone in 1830 in New Orleans was to give birth to a child with this defect and they truly believed it was a demonic being because harlequin babies at their worst-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
At their worst.
MARCUS PARKS
At their worst look truly inhuman. They might bring it to Marie Laveau.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man, it's definitely... You've never seen a picture of a harlequin baby?
ED LARSON
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Look it up, you'll love it. You'll love it. It's very much like if this was 2011 you'd see a picture of a harlequin baby and underneath it you'd see hashtag mood. You know what I mean? The struggle is real like when you see a harlequin baby.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Well it's New Orleans. If it was modern day New Orleans they'd probably just fry it up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Where are you going in New Orleans these days? You're going to different restaurants than I am.
ED LARSON
Hustler Club. Horrible, horrible, horrible kitchen, great atmosphere.
MARCUS PARKS
You talking about that one that's off the highway out near the airport?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They have this great tank filled with abortions that you can just scoop out. You get to pick it like it's a lobster.
ED LARSON
Yeah. There is one lobster in there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh she must have visited Seaworld.
MARCUS PARKS
But if Dr. LaLaurie was well known as a doctor who studied medical abnormalities, Laveau might have brought the harlequin baby to him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure, just to be like you want to see something fucked up? Yeah. And he would have been like yeah. Oui.
MARCUS PARKS
Oui. However there is no way in hell that a harlequin baby would survive for five days in 1830, much less five years. But even so, this story might actually be half or at least a quarter true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well because we know that, you know, well we don't know but we think that we know that he worked on Delphine LaLaurie's daughter.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We know that he at the time showed up as this like hotshot new doctor. He had a Ghostbusters sign with a hunchback behind it because his whole model was no hunchbacks, no mo.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Hated it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hated them.
ED LARSON
I gotta sit up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, sit up.
ED LARSON
I forget.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Literally cobra your back. But people might have viewed him as just like okay, you like crooked bones.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll bring them all to you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Maybe. I mean harlequin syndrome does have like degrees. Like I know there's a Harlequin baby that's alive at like six or seven or something like that. But yeah, in the absolute worst cases, yeah, it is like the most horrifying thing you could possibly see.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like I'm a 32nd degree harlequin baby. All right? Because I made it to the top, I have the apron.
MARCUS PARKS
Your skin is quite red. That is true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's pink. All right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that is true.
ED LARSON
And they say I look like a pig.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you are. See, these are harlequin babies. They all look like this.
ED LARSON
Oh I've seen this before.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you see this?
ED LARSON
Amber always sends me these. I get so mad. Like it's fucking 8 AM.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now there are no records of excessive abuse towards enslaved people before Madame LaLaurie was married to Dr. LaLaurie. But perhaps it was their relocation to the French Quarter from an isolated plantation that brought more attention to her methods.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now this is actually under some debate. So certain books talk about how the family knew that Delphine was bad with the groups, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's what I mean. Like the family knew.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The family. And there was one promissory note that was discovered by the author of 'Madame LaLaurie: Mistress of the Haunted House'.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where it shows that she did pay a very prominent defense attorney a certain sum of money during this time period. So they do think that maybe she had charges brought up several times, that is kind of the... Which is rumor but it seemed to be kind of solid, what we know now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is that there were a lot of people saying like we think Delphine might be extra rough with some of her people.
MARCUS PARKS
Well soon enough the rumors of how she treated the people in her household were so numerous that the authorities entered the LaLaurie mansion to investigate. Once they entered, they found that some of the enslaved people therein had been recently bloodied from a fierce beating and all of them were almost starved to death. From accounts, Madame LaLaurie took perverse pleasure in watching them waste away before her very eyes and gave them only enough food to be able to work. But this was also a setup because if you're that malnourished, you're probably not gonna do your tasks with great competence. And if you're making mistakes, then that gives Madame LaLaurie another excuse to punish you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Never ending punishment wheel.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I mean this is something that we see, like you see this in sociopathic personalities all the time. They set other people up to fail so that gives them an excuse to commit the horrible atrocities that they commit.
ED LARSON
Sounds like a nun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Sounds like how on a vague level my mom used to feed us and feed us and feed us, right, and then when I'd have to go to the husky store to get my pants when I hit about a 44 inch waist, right, bordering on 46, she'd be like if only you could put down some of that food. You know what I mean? When you're then getting shamed.
MARCUS PARKS
But then the whole time she's been using food as the only means to communicate love to you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Well comfort and stability in its way.
ED LARSON
Yeah. My mom used to always tell me you gotta drink less, you gotta drink less. Then I'd come home and there'd be like a bottle of whiskey and a 30 pack. And you're just like it's just me!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. But sometimes it would also be like are you afraid of me?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean? Is this about keeping me satiated if I'm not hungry or if I'm not thirsty, if I am one of those I'm gonna fucking freak out?
MARCUS PARKS
No. The most intoxicated Christmas I ever spent was at your mother's house.
ED LARSON
Hell yeah. That was a good one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was.
MARCUS PARKS
That was great one.
ED LARSON
I got you a knife.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that was wonderful. It was one of my favorite Christmases ever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was from the kitchen.
MARCUS PARKS
But since no witnesses came forward to declare that the Madame was seen beating these people with her own hands, and as I said in the first episode, treatment of enslaved people was often a matter of taste, she was absolved of any wrongdoing by the courts. It is said however that the embarrassment of the court case only made Madame LaLaurie that much more cruel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They also believe she did one of those like (Louisiana accent) I'm innocent!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like she went in.
MARCUS PARKS
The oath.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, the oath where you could just say you're innocent and they're like you know what? Now that I heard you say it, you sound correct.
MARCUS PARKS
But even though no witness came forward in her court case, it was a story from a neighbor that created one of the LaLaurie mansion's most enduring ghost tales. One day that neighbor heard a piercing scream and looked from her adjacent townhouse to see Madame LaLaurie chasing a young enslaved girl, whip in hand. The chase then entered the house and eventually ended up on the roof. But while the neighbor did not see exactly what transpired, she heard the body of the young girl hit the ground in the courtyard below. She later saw the lifeless body being taken away and saw the shallow grave where the young girl was buried. Today this young girl is known as Leah and it's said that her spirit roams even as far away as the sidewalks outside the LaLaurie mansion where people have reported filling a tug at their clothes at the mention of her name.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This story is actually in all of the ghost tours.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right? And there's a lot of people to call doubt on it because that neighbor, it's the idea that the neighbor heard something, was physically unable to see it even if they wanted to.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What was going on. But what we know about Madame LaLaurie, we know that for a fact that she liked to hurt her enslaved people over the top. We know that she liked to do that. But also the main crux of this is that we know if you look at percentages of how many enslaved people died-
MARCUS PARKS
And we'll get more into that later.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, under her care, quote unquote "her care". You would see that it points to a lot of young girls died in that house.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That did not need to. And in pairs, quite often the mother and the daughter would die. And there was just a lot of them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And we got a listener email from someone who was actually able to go into the LaLaurie mansion.
ED LARSON
Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And at the party that they attended, they said that they were allowed to go up on the roof. It was like yeah okay, go up on there, you can see all of New Orleans, it's a beautiful view.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And everyone says the roof is where all of the bad juju is.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that's where the room where the enslaved people were found were on the nonexistent third floor.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But yeah, they said that up there they couldn't stand up, they started to feel sick, they started to feel dizzy. No issues with heights or anything like that and really no like health issues. But they said it was the worst feeling they've ever had in their life, without really knowing like the full story of what had happened up there or what had happened up there according to legend. Now no skeletons or bodies were found on the LaLaurie grounds over the years or at least there are no records of bodies being found. But according to funeral records at the St. Louis Cathedral, 20 people died while being enslaved to Madame LaLaurie over the decades. Now I know the mortality rate for enslaved people was high, especially those who worked in the sugar plantations of Louisiana. If a person was sent there, it was called being quote "sold down river" and it was all but a death sentence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because there's many ways to die. Heat exhaustion, dehydration-
MARCUS PARKS
Industrial accident.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Industrial accident, malaria, being bit by bugs.
MARCUS PARKS
Just straight being beaten to death.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Also was quite common.
ED LARSON
Also she's like three blocks from the river, from the Mississippi. You could have just been dumping the bodies in there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well there's a lot of witnesses. Even at the time period this is an extremely popular section of town.
ED LARSON
Yeah, it's right by the French Quarter, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And there's a lot of people coming and going. And it is still contested about whether or not she had some form of unofficial graveyard on her grounds.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that was one of those things that was supposedly... The biggest version of the legend, they found it. But there's some talk about these missing bodies. Like where the fuck did they go?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because one thing within the state of Louisiana is that they kept copious notes on the ledgers of people who are coming in and out of these places and especially death registries. They don't put how they died but they did put, like they would track everybody. And it went from the moneyed people to the enslaved people. And the fact that there was a huge... I mean of the amount of people that were at her place, a huge chunk of them just disappeared.
ED LARSON
Were they tracking the gators? Gators could have been eating these people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Louisiana accent) Now that's why you need me, Troy Landry. Cause you can get a gator with these two fingers. That's all you need. Get out there, down in the bayou now.
ED LARSON
Lick them real good, get in their ear.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Louisiana accent) Gator, it got 19 holes, right. It got a hose hole, mouth hole, they got a two eyeball, they got a pussy hole, they got a butthole, and I get them two in the pussy and the butthole and give them the double pink. Get up in that hole now.
MARCUS PARKS
But here's the incredible thing about the statistics when it comes to Madame LaLaurie is that we really don't know exactly how many people disappeared. Who knows? But because of the copious records, we know for a fact that in the two years that she was at 1140 Royal Street, just in those two years, 12 enslaved people died in that house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And this is just people who were doing household duties. These are people cooking, people cleaning, footmen, chauffeurs. Just people who are just doing regular stuff and they're dying at a rate that is as high as a sugar plantation. It's insane.
ED LARSON
Every other month.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Every other month. And there also are unregistered deaths, just straight up disappearances.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So there's just a bunch of them, about 20, that have no record of what happened to them.
ED LARSON
Can I ask an ignorant question?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Always.
ED LARSON
So do people come and like check up on you to make sure that you're not killing your slaves?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No. There wasn't like a regulatory industry or anything like that. No, there was nothing like that. It was just somebody could report you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God. The idea of a slave inspector is just not... I don't know if you want that guy around.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You don't invite him to dinner.
ED LARSON
No, no, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
ED LARSON
He works for Allstate, that's for sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Actually that's one of our sponsors.
ED LARSON
Well, you know. Prudential.
MARCUS PARKS
But considering the rate at which these people were dying in jobs that were not dangerous, it's likely that these deaths were caused by the cruel actions of Madame LaLaurie. And with that, let's get into what is most likely the true story of what was going on in the LaLaurie mansion and the story of how her chamber of horrors was discovered. It all started with a fire in the kitchen on a spring morning in 1834. According to witnesses at the scene, one of the elderly cooks admitted to starting the fire on purpose to either put an end to the suffering of the people trapped above or to finally expose the Madame once and for all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It sounds like something finally broke inside the house. Because the main crew that were not locked upstairs in the room obviously kind of figured out like oh we're gonna end up there anyway.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like us being quote unquote "good at our jobs" is probably not gonna save us from whatever the fuck is going on in that room.
MARCUS PARKS
No. This woman was also a chained to the floor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean it's like chains were an everyday part of everybody's existence in that house. Or at least if you were an enslaved person, then yeah, you were wearing chains constantly. Which in other households, that was kept as like a particularly bad punishment. Like shackles was considered a punishment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And in Madame LaLaurie's house it was an everyday thing, punishment and starvation, that's what all these people were going through 100%, all the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's why we compare it to the Nazis quite often. It's because when you have institutionalized violence, when it's allowed from up top, then it breeds little serial killers.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Also when the people working for you are so unhealthy, they're gonna fuck up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's part of it. A never ending cycle.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Always. No, this really is the sort of institution that, as you said, like it brings people to the forefront, the people who have these sadistic personalities-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tendencies. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
These sadistic tendencies. Like they come to the forefront and the most vulnerable people always suffer. It's like the Einsatzgruppen we talk about so much, just roving bands of serial killers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He never stops talking about it. He loves-
MARCUS PARKS
I find it one of the most fascinating chapters in history is the Einsatzgruppen. It really is just roving bands of serial killers in the tens of thousands that they sent out behind the SS during WWII, out into Eastern Europe. Now the fire soon got big enough where a crowd of New Orleans regulars gathered to watch the mansion burn down. But when they saw that nobody was coming out, a judge in the crowd gave an order to break down the locked door so they could save the enslaved people inside from a fiery death. Good samaritans rushed into the burning building and found that the enslaved people inside, those that weren't hidden away, were still as I said emaciated, covered in horrific scars, and loaded with chains that they presumably had to wear every day. But then the rescuers found Madame LaLaurie's torture chamber which had been built next to the servants quarters to add an extra layer of psychological torture to even those who weren't being actively tortured and killed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is truly a scene from a horror movie.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In this time period. Because they go in, it's this beautifully appointed home. You know what I mean? It really is. And Delphine LaLaurie is known as a socialite whose husband is not really a around a lot. They have undisclosed problems but they think it's just because... And many times they probably think oh, Dr. LaLaurie is probably out there sowing his wild oats. I actually wonder whether or not he was scared of his own wife and didn't want to have anything to do with the house anymore and that's why he left. But you go into this palatial mansion at the time, beautiful appointments, and then it's nothing but horror on the inside. You've never seen the inside of this house when it wasn't prepped to be seen.
MARCUS PARKS
Well not only that but this is the palatial side, like that's what everybody sees. Like the servants quarters, nobody's going in there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No one's going in there.
MARCUS PARKS
No one's going in there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you went over there for dinner, you wouldn't go over in that area. Right? You wouldn't do that.
MARCUS PARKS
No, of course not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Quote unquote, right?
MARCUS PARKS
No, you absolutely wouldn't go over there. In that society, those sorts of places are off limits or at least you just wouldn't have any interest in it. The rescuers opened the door and found seven people chained to the wall, four women, two men, and one whose gender was unrecorded. All however had been mutilated from head to toe. Some had been suspended by their limbs to such a degree that their extremities had been torn from their sockets, while others have been tied into contorted postures meant to maximize pain and discomfort. One victim was said to have had a large hole in his head and his wounds were filled with maggots. Many of them had infested wounds. Each was wearing an iron collar with spikes that kept their heads in one position, lest their necks be stabbed. A cowhide whip stiff with dried blood hung against the wall next to a step ladder that Madame LaLaurie stood upon for downward momentum to make the lashes deeper. Later it was said by surviving witnesses that every morning after breakfast, Madame LaLaurie would lock herself in with the captives and flog or otherwise torture them until she tired herself out. Then she would simply go about her day as a New Orleans socialite and businesswoman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now this account comes from... It is interesting because again-
MARCUS PARKS
This is the true stuff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is the real stuff.
ED LARSON
This is the true one.
MARCUS PARKS
This is the real shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
According to a judge. So this judge was the first guy on the scene. So when the fire broke out, they were like we need to go help all the people inside. And he was the guy that was in front prying open this door. Because Delphine LaLaurie had already fucking bugged out.
MARCUS PARKS
Not quite. She hadn't quite bugged out just yet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But she didn't want people to go inside the house. And they were all like no, no. They bypassed her.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're like no, we're going in the house.
ED LARSON
Oh so was she like standing out front screaming?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, she's standing out front. And she's like no, don't go in my house. And they're like there's fucking people inside there, we have to go inside the house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We have to go in the house.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because again, very interesting, millions of dollars in today's money worth of goods and antiques, jewelries, all this kind of stuff that she was just gonna let go. Right? So he popped it open and when he saw that, he was the one who wrote the main account of what happened.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
What are the chances she started the fire?
MARCUS PARKS
Zero.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Zero.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, zero.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She didn't want anybody in there.
MARCUS PARKS
What most people think is that like they went inside and they found the cook. And the fire was put out very easily, the fire was put out pretty quickly. And they put out the fire in the kitchen and they found the cook who had started the fire. She was chained to the floor. And they asked why did you start this fire? And she said go look upstairs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Go open up the door upstairs and you'll see why I started this fire. None of us could handle this anymore.
ED LARSON
It's pretty badass.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, intense.
MARCUS PARKS
This woman was putting her life on the line for this, everyone was. Now the survivors were quickly removed and taken to the nearest place where they could receive medical care, which for some reason was the mayor's office.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think it was because of their state of being.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think they were brought to the mayor's office as literally a look at how they're mistreating this situation, they're mistreating their enslaved people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It immediately went into investigation.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But they also said in the books that's where they received medical care.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They tell you where to go. Can you imagine going to the mayor to have that? Like Gavin Newsom? Being like yeah, you got strep throat, that'll be $75,000.
ED LARSON
He's already telling me that. Are you in Covered California? It's a fucking disaster.
MARCUS PARKS
Well from my recollection, I think the old mayor's office was down the street from the LaLaurie mansion. And also there were vampires in the mayor's attic, if I'm remembering what our tour guide said correctly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes! Yes!
MARCUS PARKS
If that was the mayor's office. But there was at least a church/mayor's office down the street and there were vampires up in the attic and they said this where the Catholic Church put cursed objects for years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I remember that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah and they boarded up a room up there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's cool.
MARCUS PARKS
But once Madame LaLaurie's victims were safe, the editors of the two biggest newspapers in New Orleans got a good look at their condition and a further 2000 New Orleans residents visited to see what Madame LaLaurie had done for themselves. Like a big parade of people came by.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They're like you gotta see what this woman's been doing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was big news.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it was huge.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
People freaked out.
ED LARSON
2000 is a big crowd.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's huge, especially for 1830 or 1833. By estimates, all of the enslaved people rescued had been kept in that chamber for months and they were so starved that a couple of them died when some good intentioned people gave them too much food too quickly. Same thing that happened with the concentration camps. In the chamber, authorities also found torture implements like pinchers and the aforementioned iron collars with sharpened points, neither of which could be explained away as more of Dr. LaLaurie's orthopraxy equipment. Now the newspapers were outraged and the people on the street were so incensed upon seeing the bodies of Madame LaLaurie's victims living and dead, that they smashed every inch of the mansion to pieces, as if the house itself was the culprit of these horrific crimes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is to me that points towards that this really happened.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it's interesting. Over the years, how many different stories have we covered that you find out that shit is fucking exaggerated or like made up just for the story of it? This is one of those that feels like they had to minimize it to talk about it. Like everybody flipped the fuck out and just attacked the house.
MARCUS PARKS
For two days.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean they went to sleep and came back the next day to finish the job.
ED LARSON
It's like one of those things where like you hear about shit going down but then when you find out what really happened, you just go nuts.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But after the sheriff decided that enough was enough after letting the people lay waste to the mansion for the rest of that day and a little bit the day after, nothing in the house remained intact save for the walls themselves. People didn't even loot the expensive furniture.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And instead chose to smash all of Madame LaLaurie's possessions into pieces, which all that was then turned into a bonfire on Royal Street.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the shit because that's the stuff is that looting is one thing. Because you pop it open, I understand everybody going in there and grabbing cool stuff out of there because she had a bunch of cool stuff to grab. The idea that you're just gonna burn it?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You gotta be mad. That's one spooky lady!
ED LARSON
We used to do that in Tallahassee. My buddies, they were violent. This was before I knew you. My buddies were kind of violent and they'd always break my furniture when they got too drunk and shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
So one year on 4th of July, there was a thrift store across the street and I bought a bunch of shitty furniture and I put it in the back next to a sledgehammer and an ax. I was like have fun. And then they did and then we lit it all on fire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You actually just learned how to be a father to children. That's what you gotta do.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually in Lubbock, we had kind of a tradition. There was this yearly concert called Easter Bash. And what people would do is they would go to thrift stores and they would bring couches to Easter Bash. And then at the end of the concert, you set all the couches on fire.
ED LARSON
That's good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
This was back when Lubbock was like super fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, I think we could do it again. I just made a smash room for the stream.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that is true.
ED LARSON
We gotta do more smash rooms.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what I'm saying.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we're gonna get to it. But perhaps people took their anger out on the house because Madame LaLaurie herself was long gone. See once it became clear that her horrible secret was being uncovered and the mood was turning ugly, Madame LaLaurie and her family climbed into a carriage to escape.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they bugged the living fuck out.
MARCUS PARKS
It took a while though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it's because they were kind of feeling like maybe we can think about this and get past this juncture.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then it turns out like no, no, no, they're gonna kill us.
MARCUS PARKS
Well once they fled that was it, they're not coming back.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because the crowd noticed the Madame attempting to flee. They tried overturning the carriage. They tried grabbing her and pulling her out. I mean they could have ripped her limb from limb right then and there. I think that's what they had in mind.
ED LARSON
I mean how fast could this carriage possibly be going?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the horses. Horses kicking, the guys got Bastian, her man servant.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The guy that was like her number one guy. You are my number one guy! Like she did that to him. He was hitting guys with the whip.
ED LARSON
Were any of her kids with her?
MARCUS PARKS
I think so, yeah. I think the kids were loaded up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, they were traumatized.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well I don't know if they were.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh we'll find out later on that they both died. The kids that were closest to Delphine LaLaurie's lives were absolutely gutted. They never had a career, they never did anything.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just lived inside of her home. Her other children from the previous marriages, they went on and did stuff. Some of them actually had lives.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And got rid of the LaLaurie name and hid far away. But the ones that were directly connected to her, they didn't blossom.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the ones who actually had the last name LaLaurie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Because there were kids with the last name Blanque, the last name Lopez y Angulo, those are the ones from previous marriages. So yeah, they could move on.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But the kids that I guess came from Dr. LaLaurie-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. If there were any kids from Dr. LaLaurie, I'm not sure because she was 45.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She had two, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
She had two from him?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he pumped her full of cum.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow, okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he was French.
MARCUS PARKS
Good, good, good. So she had seven children overall. Yeah.
ED LARSON
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
But Madame LaLaurie was actually saved that day by one of the people she enslaved, her coachman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bastien.
MARCUS PARKS
Bastien. He was pretty much Samuel L. Jackson's character in Django Unchained. He was the guy who got preferential treatment by informing on everybody else in the house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was also probably tapping that pussy.
MARCUS PARKS
You think so?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. They were talking about how they were extremely familiar.
ED LARSON
And the husband's gone by this point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, husband's gone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's barely there. They have like an 1830s version of divorce that they tried to do like twice that he didn't take.
MARCUS PARKS
So after whipping back the crowd, this coachman got Madame LaLaurie out of New Orleans and brought her to Lake Pontchartrain where she boarded a boat that took her across the water. Incredibly though, Madame LaLaurie presumably ordered the coachman back to the mansion. Because while we don't know what happened to him, the carriage returned to Royal Street and it was destroyed by the mob and then they stabbed the horses to death.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh.
ED LARSON
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, man. Don't be a horse.
MARCUS PARKS
That's how long the anger went on and that's how fucking angry the people were. It was like as soon as like that's her carriage, that's her fucking thing. So they stabbed the horses because they thought maybe she was still inside, stabbed the horses so they couldn't get away.
ED LARSON
Inside the horse?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like Ace Ventura. Poor horses just being like I'm just basically a car. I don't need all of this mess.
ED LARSON
God, just imagine being in a bar and someone's like LaLaurie's carriage is back, we're gonna go kill the horses!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's get that fucking spooky lady!
MARCUS PARKS
Well the legend is that Madame LaLaurie took a ship to New York and boarded a steamer for France. There she satisfied her bloodlust with hunting but was killed when a wild boar ripped her from stem to sternum. That however is wishful thinking, a hope that a violent person met a violent end. If she did go to France, she spent the rest of her days in Paris and died at the age of 62 after a long hopefully painful illness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. She lived in one address according to if believe that she made it, she lived out there with her two daughters, sitting in silence, just slowly rotting and suing anybody possible for any remaining inheritance money.
ED LARSON
Just going down to the fucking catacombs to beat one off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Being like yeah, slap that bean.
MARCUS PARKS
Reportedly when she did die, her body was returned to New Orleans where it was interred at St. Louis Cemetery. No record however exists of where the body is located, if it is there at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well they have I believe the tomb of the Blanques.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's where they believe she is, is that they popped the name off of the Blanque guy. The main dude was buried there with enough room for an entire family and then he was there and they said they believe that she was also popped in there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But there are no names on it anymore.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Other accounts however claim that Madame LaLaurie never even left Louisiana.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no.
MARCUS PARKS
They say that she returned to New Orleans eight years later after the heat died down and she died there in the late 1850s. This claim is supported by the recent discovery of legal paperwork that showed her handling her estate in New Orleans as late as 1850.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But there's some discrepancies because they thought it might have been her man.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because she had guys, it was like an investment firm that was running her bullshit over in New Orleans from one where she was in gay Paris. And there's also a word that one of her people wrote a letter saying, I forgot what the relation was, but like basically Madame LaLaurie has told us all about her staunch need to return to New Orleans soil and reclaim her name back in her homeland. And basically in this letter, it's very interesting, he's like I'm gonna have you money guys tell her how that's never gonna happen.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because if she goes back, they're gonna hang her essentially.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're gonna rip her to shreds.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But perhaps it's said that the Madame returned to New Orleans because many believe that her spirit still haunts her former mansion. See since the LaLaurie family sold the mansion in 1837, it's had countless tenants and has gone through multiple incarnations. After it was sold to a man named Charles Caffin, he renovated and expanded the mansion, giving it a third story and the severe fortress-like appearance it has today that honestly makes it look even scarier than it did when Madame LaLaurie owned it. It's almost as if the house itself grew into its reputation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I mean he did it right.
MARCUS PARKS
He really did. I mean it feels like he made it spooky on purpose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. I did look at a diagram on the inside. It's beautiful.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It would be so nice if it wasn't all full of all that rage and death. You go through, it's got the courtyard in the middle. It's nice. It's got a little fountain in there.
ED LARSON
I love when a house has a courtyard in the middle of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Me too.
ED LARSON
It's really pretty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah it is. It's very European. But it wasn't until 1889 that the publication of a book called 'The Haunted House in Royal Street' that the LaLaurie Mansion began to build its current reputation. That book included many of the stories we still hear today, like the ghost of the little girl named Leah who jumped off the roof to escape Madame LaLaurie, who can sometimes be seen teetering on the edge, deciding what to do next. There were also reports of knocks, whispers, groans, the clinking of chains, and the shuffling of feet. But perhaps hoping to trade on this notoriety, the LaLaurie mansion briefly became of all things a furniture store in 1892.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Went retail.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, people need their furniture. Now they would see the ghost of the little girl up top of the house?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And that is still seen to this day.
ED LARSON
So do you think that you could call that a girlgoyle?
MARCUS PARKS
Girlgoyle.
ED LARSON
Girlgoyle. A girlgoyle.
MARCUS PARKS
Quite possibly, yes.
ED LARSON
Thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Someone just made a new burlesque troupe.
ED LARSON
A roller derby team.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. Roller derby team.
ED LARSON
The Girlgoyles.
MARCUS PARKS
Now we don't know if this is true because it's in the more sensational LaLaurie book, but it was said that the chairs and sofas in this furniture store would regularly be found torn up and splattered with filth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've heard this a couple of times.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is in other books, they talk about this story.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is one of the big LaLaurie mansion hauntings.
MARCUS PARKS
Supposedly each time a new piece of inventory entered the house, it would be covered with urine, feces, and blood by the next morning. And this continued even after they posted a guard with a shotgun. Other sources however say that this splattering of human waste only happened a couple times and could very well have come from all too human sources.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do want to ask our listeners, sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com, that run retail on the first floor on Royal Street. They have great art galleries over there, there's really cool spots over there. How many times have you had to deal with rivers of shit slopping all over your stuff?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
It could just be people looking to get a deal. Like oh this couch is covered in shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's covered in shit and blood! His shirt's soaked with shit, his hands are covered in piss.
ED LARSON
I'm not paying full price for this!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You shouldn't let me sit down. That's on you!
MARCUS PARKS
Now over the years it's been said that whoever came into possession of the house was soon haunted not just by ghosts but personal misfortune.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
In 1893, the house was sold to an Italian immigrant named Fortunato Greco.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Shoulda named me Unfortunato!
ED LARSON
And this is my wife, Miss Fortune.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow, that's good.
MARCUS PARKS
Great, that's good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow, that's two of those. Word jokes.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
His nearby grocery store was never able to turn a profit. They said that's the curse of the LaLaurie mansion. But in a story that runs contrary to that curse, Greco flipped his luck when he noticed that the house was becoming a tourist attraction due to the popularity of the book about the LaLaurie mansion. So Greco started charging people a dime so they could take their own personal ghost hunts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. And then he just opened it up to everybody.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So it was like a boarding house and then it was like... That was what they say is that the true misfortune here was the fact that they just came in and a bunch of us shitheads, tourists arrived and destroyed the whole fucking house.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just ripped up the floors, just really destroyed it from the bottom up.
ED LARSON
And this is like, what, in the 1920s?
MARCUS PARKS
No, this is 1890s.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He set up concessions, he started selling merch. Because back interesting the day you could get really ghoulish souvenirs from places like this.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I remember when they dug up the Belle Gunness house, like you could go and I think you could buy like pieces of bone from her victims. Just weird shit. There was also pictures of bodies was very common, shit like this. Yeah, you would probably walk away with something really awful.
ED LARSON
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, stupid regulations.
ED LARSON
Sounds like this guy was successful.
MARCUS PARKS
He was!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well by leaning in.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he leaned in. He opened a saloon on the ground floor.
ED LARSON
Fuck yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He called it The Haunted Exchange. Stayed open for a good 15 years, which I think in New Orleans bar life-
ED LARSON
That's a good run.
MARCUS PARKS
15 years is a good run.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was a good run. But I think it's because you leaned into the thing and you let the ghosts be employed. You know what I mean? Give them an opportunity. Now they're a part of the industry. The buy-in employees things? What do you say with that idea? Where you have the employee-
ED LARSON
Shareholders?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they're shareholders.
MARCUS PARKS
But once the neighborhood became home to more Italian and Sicilian immigrants, many of the older buildings were turned into tenement housing and the LaLaurie mansion was no exception. It was during this period that a tenant in the LaLaurie mansion was reportedly murdered in his room in the most brutal fashion. It was suspected to be a robbery gone bad because his room had been ransacked but nothing of value was taken. Very much like poltergeist activity. Interestingly though, one of his friends claimed that the victim had complained of being bothered by quote unquote "sprites" before straight up saying that there was a demon in the house that would not rest until the victim met a bloody end. And soon after that's exactly what happened.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Apparently this is kind of where a lot of the ghost stories got legitimized was during the tenement house days of the LaLaurie mansion.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where a lot of people said they saw stuff that was just straight up constant ghost activity.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I imagine that's probably true but it's still New Orleans, people get murdered.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It is, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you don't need a ghost to kill people in New Orleans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And just being a tenement house in and of itself makes the house sort of kind of crazy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The atmosphere is kind of crazy. You never know who's going in and out. People bring chains from Italy.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the LaLaurie mansion remained an apartment building for most of the 20th century. But in 1969, a doctor named Harry Russell Albright bought the building outright and lived there for 30 years where he said he never saw or heard anything that could be considered paranormal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just feel like that's a guy in one of those like latex bubble suits. You know what I mean? Where it's just like (heavy breathing) Yeah, I didn't see anything crazy in this house at all. Meanwhile he's got like a dozen roses jammed up his ass and he's choking himself to sleep every night, being like nothing weird here. Yeah, yeah, I drink piss. Normal house.
ED LARSON
This buckle doesn't make me bleed as much as this buckle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Completely normal house.
MARCUS PARKS
But in 2006 the LaLaurie mansion was purchased by none other than one of our finest actors, sir Nicholas Cage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Please, Mr. Cage. Please, anybody out there in podcast land, we've been trying to reach you.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We know that you have a form that you have to fill out to reach you. What do we have to do to get that form on the top of the pile? I want to meet you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. So badly.
ED LARSON
I like that you called him sir Nicholas Cage because I feel like he's an American knight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS
I feel like he's American royalty.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh he is, very much so. He's very important to us.
MARCUS PARKS
I was hoping you'd pick up on that. Reportedly Cage wanted to use the LaLaurie mansion to write the next great American horror novel. Although he admits he never got that far with the book.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Actors can't read. But that's not their fault, their jobs are to emote.
ED LARSON
They can read, they just can't write.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They can't write.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They literally can't write.
MARCUS PARKS
They have to read the scripts, there's not like some sort of script man who just tells lines to actors-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, that's what Ken does. Yeah, ken calls me, he goes over the lines. I have an earpiece whenever I do it. Recently I put an index card for the people on the other side. It's great. That's how all acting is done.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you just put the blinders on them like a bunch of horses.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Someone bring him a salad. Is his Sweetgreens here? I can't go, I need 20 CCs of chia seeds.
MARCUS PARKS
Well according to Nicholas Cage, he didn't experience anything either but he also refused to sleep in the house. He did however make a fun joke when he bought it. He said other celebrities, they got beachfront property, I got ghost front property. That's me, I got ghost front property.
ED LARSON
Thank god this book was never written.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's not a writer. He's not a writer. Can you not do it like Nic Cage though? You know some people... You gotta do it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's ghost front property.
ED LARSON
Woo!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
But in the end, Cage admitted that he bought the mansion pretty much because he'd been obsessed with the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland since he was a kid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We know why he bought the mansion.
ED LARSON
Where did he sleep?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Anywhere else. He had many homes.
MARCUS PARKS
He had many homes, yeah.
ED LARSON
In New Orleans?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
No, he bought the LaLaurie mansion and a haunted church.
ED LARSON
Oh okay. So he slept in the haunted church.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was covering all his angles.
ED LARSON
I sleep next to the bells.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My problem is with this place is that it's too well insulated.
MARCUS PARKS
Now it's said that Nicholas Cage came to great misfortune during the three years he owned this house and that his career hit the skids for a bit. But after checking out his IMDB page, the years 2006-2009 were pretty standard fare for Nic Cage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it was the beginning of the dip of his box office numbers. That's the key here, man.
MARCUS PARKS
Not quite.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
Not quite. While 2006, admittedly that was Wickerman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not the bees!
MARCUS PARKS
Not the bees! The bees!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not the bees! He did get to punch several women. He did.
MARCUS PARKS
He punched, what, six or seven women?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All the cult members as he walked down the line.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he punched a lot of people. Yeah. And that was fun. And it could be argued that Wickerman over time is a net positive for Nicolas Cage because we all talk about it all the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not a great film.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a horrible film, it's not even that fun to watch for kitschy purposes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
ED LARSON
It's the worst thing to happen to wicker since fat grandpas.
MARCUS PARKS
But he also had a massively successful National Treasure sequel in 2007.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's fine for the numbers and Ghost Rider though which was a flop.
MARCUS PARKS
It was a flop.
ED LARSON
Yeah, it was.
MARCUS PARKS
Ghost Rider was a flop. But in 2009 he got to work with Werner Herzog on Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
ED LARSON
Fucking love this movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Top three Nic Cage movie, probably one of the lowest performing movies that he had ever done.
MARCUS PARKS
I read it did quite well. It did better than expected.
ED LARSON
Did you ever use my lucky crack pipe?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck yeah.
ED LARSON
My lucky crack pipe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Shoot him again. His soul is still dancing. That's one of my favorite lines in the movie, I love Bad Lieutenant.
MARCUS PARKS
What really wiped out Nicolas Cage during this time was that he had a crooked manager who stole all his money. Plus he got fucked pretty hard by the stock market crash in 2008.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, can't be leveraged like that.
MARCUS PARKS
Neither of those things can be blamed on Madame LaLaurie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, no.
ED LARSON
And he had to sell all those comic books.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was sad for him.
ED LARSON
Lisa Marie Presley.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he got that illegal dinosaur skull and he had to sell that back.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause it turned out it's illegal.
ED LARSON
Man, how is a dinosaur skull illegal?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's cause it belongs in a museum!
ED LARSON
Who gives a shit?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The museum.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, the museum cares. I think it was stolen from a museum.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh it was stolen. Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hobby Lobby goes through this. I wanted to do a whole episode about this, maybe we will. But it's a lot, talking about the illegal antiquities market is very interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause there's a whole world on selling shit that is not supposed to be sold to anybody because those are all supposed to go to scientific research for the most part because that's who's paying to go dig it up. So they're supposed to go in various places. But then these guys come in, they basically steal it or they do their won illegal archeological digs which is fucking a great concept, the idea of being in one of those is really fucking cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
How is it illegal? I guess if you're on a national park or something, it's not your land.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well you have to sneak into a place that's largely either government owned or it's some kind of a national park, some kind of endowed place, that you're not supposed to be there. I don't know all the rules. Sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com. Please, if you are a student of archeology, explain to me why it's bad to pirate bones. You can download a skeleton.
MARCUS PARKS
Paleontology.
ED LARSON
Yeah, whatever the fuck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Please, any one of you nerds.
MARCUS PARKS
However it is rumored that during the years that Cage owned the home, he was suffering from terrible nightmares that he attributed to the curse of the LaLaurie mansion. He went to a medium who told him that the only way to break the curse and stop the nightmares was to buy a grave as close to Marie Laveau's as possible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. It's true.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And his grave is beautiful.
MARCUS PARKS
Now this is prime graveyard real estate in New Orleans, this is St. Louis Cemetery number one. This is arguably some of the most sought after graveyard real estate this side of Père Lachaise in Paris.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is nice, you go down there. That's how you know you are New Orleans celebrity status.
MARCUS PARKS
Or at least royalty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That's one of the places, if you get St. Louis cemetery number one, your place in New Orleans history is assured.
ED LARSON
Like Drew Brees is gonna be there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know if he will.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know if he wants to be there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know if he'll make it.
ED LARSON
He got a Superbowl back then.
MARCUS PARKS
No, yeah. If Drew Brees wanted to be buried in St. Louis cemetery number one, I think they'd let him.
ED LARSON
At least Kermit Ruffins.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can I get buried... I'm gonna look this up. Can I get buried in St. Louis cemetery number one. Oh book... No, no, that's for tours. Okay, no, you can't just book it.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't think there's gonna be protocol on the internet, there's not gonna be a form to fill out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How me buried... How me buried St. Louis Cemetery? Nothing.
ED LARSON
It'd be cool if there was like Trombone Shorty got one, it was just like half a trombone sticking out the top.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it'd be incredible. They're just not letting imagineers in.
MARCUS PARKS
But in the end, Cage was somehow able to convince the diocese in charge of St. Louis number one to make room for the 9 ft tall pyramid memorial that will one day be Nicolas Cage's final resting place.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS
They built it ahead of time. It's sitting there, like this big ass-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's huge.
MARCUS PARKS
I think the Latin saying is like out of everything one, or out of one everything, or something like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is absolutely gorgeous, it's a giant pyramid.
ED LARSON
Have you seen it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
It's cool. Eventually the bank foreclosed on Cage's house and the other haunted property owned in New Orleans, the Our Lady of Perpetual Help Chapel. But he still held onto the pyramid only because the IRS can't legally take cemetery plots.
ED LARSON
Fuck yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude, and this is why we discovered this right before the show. We're gonna do our 2006 style movie living in a cemetery where if we all open up a morgue, like the three of us, we open a morgue and stuff, we ain't never gotta fucking pay nobody ever again. We just live in a cemetery, dog!
ED LARSON
Just come over to your mausoleum drawer and knock on it, you roll out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's me, buddy! That's my house. I got a flat screen in there, we're running cable from across the street. You know what I mean, man? You got it made in the shade, brother.
ED LARSON
Hell yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We fucking put ice out. It's nice and cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Fucking pop a Sigur Rós song in the cemetery, on the soundtrack.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everyday, dude. Bauhaus.
MARCUS PARKS
No, if we're going straight 2006, we gotta pop like a Shins song in there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Sigur Rós song.
ED LARSON
Mr. Brightside.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Definitely. Put it back there. We have to invite Zach Braff.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He has to come once a year.
MARCUS PARKS
This is gonna be a vibe. Think like About Schmidt meets like Little Miss Sunshine. When you get the vibe, put it together.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sprinkle some Seth Rogen in there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, hell yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We got some inappropriate... We got a guy farting. It's gonna be big. Some weed comedy.
MARCUS PARKS
Some gay jokes that don't age very well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We get to live in the cemetery! You know what I mean? This is our lives, bro, this is past the pitch. This is what we're gonna do.
MARCUS PARKS
No property taxes, okay, fucker?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, what are you gonna do, government? I'm so sick. So sick.
MARCUS PARKS
Now after the bank foreclosed on the LaLaurie mansion, it was bought by a Texas businessman named Michael Whalen who still apparently owns the house to this day but has a very small footprint on the internet. Couldn't find out much about him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And this is also the story, I love it. We got one of the listener emails that was talking about a lady was on the French Quarter Phantoms tour and she was walking. You get to the end and all of a sudden you're hearing all the story about the LaLaurie mansion and this woman freaks the fuck out, she starts calling somebody-
MARCUS PARKS
Well she's like have you been paid to say this? Have you been paid to say this about this house? And then the ghost tour was like I don't know what you're talking about.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. Then they watched her walk away and make a call and basically you find out that she is personal friends with Michael Whalen and they and her family were told to stay at the LaLaurie mansion for the weekend and had never heard the story about what fucking happened in there. And so she's like we are getting a fucking hotel! We're getting a hotel! And they like freaked out.
ED LARSON
Ooh it's haunted, how risqué.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Cause that's the thing, haunting stories are haunting stories.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then this is the fucking worst level of a haunting story.
MARCUS PARKS
It's like you show up and I'm like oh yeah, you're staying at John Wayne Gacy's house tonight. Have fun, welcome to Des Plaines.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean at the same time, I'd do it.
MARCUS PARKS
I know you would do it. But if you're just a regular fucking person...
ED LARSON
Now would you stay in the floorboards?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Uh oh, too big.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. One listener who actually attended a party at the LaLaurie mansion, they said that the current décor was quote "sentient cocaine".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's awesome!
ED LARSON
Fuck yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, just very tacky. Extraordinarily tacky.
ED LARSON
On the same block, I was looking it up, there's a place called the Haunted Hotel where you can go and people say that they've been seeing ghosts there. I don't know if I believe them, those are Google reviews.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's probably just a guy in a sheet.
ED LARSON
Yeah, this one lady said that she went with her mom and she didn't tell her mom it was haunted and she was mad. And she said that they wouldn't call it haunted because the ghost was very nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Aw, that is very cute.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Aw, it's shared.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pre-lived.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's like when you do an AirBnB and there's like a guy living in the back house and you just gotta live with him for a while.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's just always out there hosing things down. Like why are you out there? We're trying to sleep.
ED LARSON
You come down here, I'll hose you down too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know you will! I know you will.
MARCUS PARKS
But as the years have gone by, so too have the stories of Madame LaLaurie's cruelty grown beyond the realm of the grotesque. And now they sometimes include her husband as a sort of Dr. Mengele type accomplice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I am innocent! I am innocent!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. What did you call him, Henry? Mississippi Mengele?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Mississippi Mengele.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And i mean the stories are outlandish. I mean they claim that Dr. LaLaurie broke a woman's bones and refashioned her into a crab woman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Another has a claim that turned a woman into an armless, legless worm.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Typical.
MARCUS PARKS
Have you ever seen Tod Browning's Freaks?
ED LARSON
No but I have seen Freaked and I really liked that movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Freaked is a great movie.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Freaked is awesome. In Tod Browning's Freaks there's a guy in the movie that's just a torso. And he can like roll his own cigarettes with his own lips.
ED LARSON
That's pretty cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I mean it's upsetting for him but it's very cool that he can do it.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean he flipped it and reversed it. He was living a pretty good life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he figured it out for himself. That's what you gotta do, that's what you gotta do.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he's in that fucking final awesome scene where they're all about to fucking take down the acrobat and they're all like crawling through the mud and the rain and he's got a fucking dagger in his teeth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's cool.
MARCUS PARKS
That's a great fucking movie.
ED LARSON
Fuck yeah, I'll watch that shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Such a good movie.
ED LARSON
Remember the worm guy from Freaked?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
He's like would you wipe my ass for me?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Would you wipe my ass for me? My other favorite line is from Randy Quaid. Fiddle faddle. Love that fucking movie.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the floor of the chamber in this story was permanently slick from puddles of fresh gore, buckets of body parts were strewn about the room helter skelter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. That's the worst part. It's not organized. You get him a container store employee.
ED LARSON
Is that what helter skelter means?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
All over the place, yeah.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Willy nilly. It's a scarier version of willy nilly.
ED LARSON
Oh my god. Imagine if they wrote 'willy nilly' all over the walls in blood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It would have taken the temperature down. Like actually maybe the hippie movement is still alive.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh man, it would have taken them so long to figure out, like I want to see like the detective that's like willy nilly, what's another name for this?
ED LARSON
Did Caesar do this? Sorry to cut you off.
MARCUS PARKS
I'll always concede the floor to a Sid Caesar joke.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The willy nilly goo goo gaga baby pants murders. I don't know if that works,
MARCUS PARKS
But really there's no need to make Madame LaLaurie worse than she already was. Even without the more extreme claims, Madame LaLaurie is still one of the great villains of American history, the star of a particularly evil chapter in a book that is itself already evil enough.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Louisiana accent) Well thank you for that!
ED LARSON
Spooky! Spooky!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Louisiana accent) I will take a bow! She was very bad, man. She was bad.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, she's awful. Yeah, she was awful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bad bitch. I'm glad she's fucking dead.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. We're all happy she's dead and not an immortal being.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I mean god knows. She could still be there.
MARCUS PARKS
You think so?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, maybe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Weirder things have happened.
ED LARSON
It is good that she's a ghost if she is a ghost. You know, tortured.
MARCUS PARKS
Trapped.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, she'd be stuck there, yeah. It'd be good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a beautiful piece of property though.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a shame.
MARCUS PARKS
I think Nicolas Cage bought it for $3.7 million.
ED LARSON
Damn.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's hard. Royal Street is rpob one of my favorite streets.
ED LARSON
Yeah?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In that area.
ED LARSON
There's a good African restaurant next door, I was looking for food. Cause i gotta go now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We are.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're gonna go. We can't wait, we're doing it up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I'm very excited about our return to New Orleans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
New Orleans. Now guys, first of all I just want to say next week's episode is going to be absolutely disgusting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I'm really excited for it because it's been a second before we've gone... How do we say it? We're getting sludgy.
MARCUS PARKS
Sludgy I think is a real good word for it. There's gonna be a lot of goop.
ED LARSON
Nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A lot of goop.
MARCUS PARKS
A lot of goop. I think we might return to some sloughing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no, there's sloughing in there.
MARCUS PARKS
There's definitely some sloughing. There's gonna be some hydraulic pumps involved.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're gonna like it. You're gonna like the way you throw up.
ED LARSON
Mung?
MARCUS PARKS
Mung.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll see about that. And then we got a little Thanksgiving stuff, we got a special things coming up. And then we're gonna get into hopefully a super sad story for Christmas, right Marcus?
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah. It's gonna be Christmastime and everyone's gonna be real sad about what we're gonna be talking about.
ED LARSON
I love sad stories during Christmastime.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You see my thing is that we get into arguments, me and Marcus will get into arguments because I take it out on the audience, my feelings about Christmas.
MARCUS PARKS
And I think that it's a bad idea to take anything out on the audience.
ED LARSON
I couldn't agree more.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just gotta get in there. I feel sad, you're feeling fucking sad too! We're gonna do, we might do some dark history.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I think we will. I think for Christmas we're gonna be doing some real dark history, some cool shit.
ED LARSON
Just talk about all the families that burn down their Christmas trees and kill everyone. Every Christmas a family dies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's my favorite.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, last year we did talk about a killer Santa that brought a flamethrower to a family Christmas party and killed I think, how many, four or five?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was intense, man. He was not ready for the holidays.
MARCUS PARKS
But he bought all his guns down at Gun World on Burbank, on Magnolia.
ED LARSON
They sell a lot of... It's in Burbank, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
They sell a lot of guns there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
Did you know Burbank, they sell some of the most guns in the nation in Burbank.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, dude. How do you think... I mean Alan Thicke has so defend himself. All right? The very backbone of Hollywood.
ED LARSON
Man, during the pandemic there were lines around the block at Gun World.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I remember.
ED LARSON
Yeah, it was fucking crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It added to the vibe.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But thank you guys so much. Go get Operation Sunshine at your local comic book store. It is coming out, the next one will probably be November 15th, that is Issue #2 of our first four that will then lead to a second four. But right now, you're gonna get into that story. I'm very excited for you to see where it goes. We also have The Last Comic Book on the Left #4 I believe is also cooking.
MARCUS PARKS
It's cooking.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
And yeah, I can announce now that yeah, for Issue #4 or Volume #4, I'm gonna be doing a story, I wrote a story that fucking comics legend Matt Wagner drew. And his son Brennan Wagner did the coloring for it and it looks absolutely fucking incredible. Thank you very much to both of you.
ED LARSON
Very cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Both of you fellas for working with me on that one. It's incredible. I can't wait for you guys to see it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So cool. And then you got dates, right?
ED LARSON
Oh yeah. You can catch me down in Florida December 8th and 9th, I'm gonna be opening for Jeff Ross in West Palm Beach at the Kravis Center. I can't wait. And I'm trying to find a show on the 10th as well and then I'm going to the Dolphins game on the 11th.
MARCUS PARKS
Hell yeah.
ED LARSON
Hell yeah. Oh I also wanted to say I've been loving the videos of this, of our show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
It's been great. It's on YouTube, you got clips on YouTube. So follow the YouTube page.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good fucking plug!
ED LARSON
And then got to the Patreon and watch the fucking full thing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what I'm fucking talking about. We got the Twitch streams, we're doing that. We're working a lot.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we're working a lot. We got No Dogs In Space does a livestream every other Monday.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
On twitch.tv/lastpodcastnetwork.
ED LARSON
Yeah and I got my first mandate coming up for the stream, I'm very excited.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
It's gonna be amazing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes! Very, very excited. Guys, hail sweet Satan.
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein.
ED LARSON
Hail Satan again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I like it, double up.
MARCUS PARKS
Do it twice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know why? Because this is coming out the day after Halloween, so you've already expressed yourselves.
ED LARSON
Well it's coming out on the 3rd. Three days after Halloween.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What day is today? The 1st.
ED LARSON
It's the day after All Souls Day which is very appropriate.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, our show hasn't come out on a Wednesday in like 9 years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh man. Oh god.
ED LARSON
Well yesterday was All Souls Day and this is a ghost story so it works out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Enjoy yourself with it! Go on fucking Halloween shit!
ED LARSON
Be good to yourselves, everybody.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Goodbye.
MARCUS PARKS
Bye.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm fine.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you're okay. You didn't just fucking fall into a 9 year old hole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Help me.