Legends 19: The Casket Girls

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Welcome to Lore Legends, a subset of lore episodes that explore the strange tales we whisper in the dark, even if they can't always be proven by the history books.

So if you're ready, let's begin.

There are monsters everywhere.

From the big screen to our mobile devices, it seems we can't escape the subject of our fascination.

Stories about monsters and the people they frighten frighten are just as popular as ever.

And of course, pop culture is filled with all manner of examples.

From demonic spirits and friendly ghosts to wolfmen and zombies, literature and film have all the ammunition they need to show us the darker side of the world.

But of all the various characters filling the page and stage, no figure has captured the imagination of more generations than one.

The vampire.

They've been portrayed as debonair and sensual, and as terrifying and brutal.

Honestly, no matter how they're presented to us, we still gravitate toward their stories.

Perhaps it's the idea of immortality or the intimate way they kill their victims.

Whatever the draw, we can't seem to look away.

Hollywood has shown us that vampires can be a lot of things to a lot of people, and with each passing year, more and more branches are grafted onto that ancient tree.

a tree, as you know, with deep and twisted roots.

If we go back far enough, though, we can find all sorts of stories about evil people who thirsted for blood, causing their neighbors to question the inevitability of death.

And those legends never lose their bite, no matter how old they are.

But the stories from the past suggest that something darker is lurking in the shadows.

And if you're ready, I'd like to take you on a hunt.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore Legends.

For centuries in Europe, a town's infrastructure was tied to the local church and its burial ground.

Homes and businesses would be built around them, putting them at the center of the community.

But as urbanization took hold in the 11th century, those simple town graveyards quickly became too small.

More and more people were moving in and working close by and of course dying and the influx of new bodies eventually became a major public health concern, one that sadly went misunderstood for a very long time.

All it would take was a heavy rain to churn up freshly buried corpses or a wild dog might dig up someone's deceased mother.

Grave robbers with shovels and a bottle of liquid courage in hand were also a problem.

But not every body was a rotting mess inside a pine box.

Some looked surprisingly plump, plump, maybe even more lifelike than they were when they were still alive.

Back then, there was no medical or scientific explanation for these strange remains.

Locals believed that they looked like that because they had been buried improperly or died suspiciously.

These bodies were restless, they said, rising from the grave to stalk the living at night.

They were called revenant from the French revenir, meaning to come back.

In Slavic, they had two names.

One was upir, but the other became more familiar over time.

And it's how we today refer to creatures that don't quite know how to stay dead.

Vampire Some say that one of the oldest European stories related specifically to vampires is the legend of Count Astruk, whose origins can be found in Catalonian mythology.

According to a prominent version of the story, it all started in the 12th century as Muslim kingdoms had taken over southern Spain.

King Alfonso II worried that pagans in a particular region would side with the Muslims, who he had decided were his enemies.

So he had to bring Christianity to the area, and he sent in a war hero to handle things there, a guy named Count Astrouk.

But the Count didn't convince everyone to convert to his new religion through love.

After setting up shop in a castle in the town of Lares, he got to work convincing everyone by any means necessary.

Torture, brutality, and if necessary, murder.

For years, Astruk's tyranny reigned supreme until he finally was assassinated by his own soldiers in 1173.

It was rumored that one of his captains, a man named Benak, had poisoned both the Count and his daughter Nuria, all because she had denied Benak's romantic advances.

Other legends claim that he fought for the Spanish crown at the Battle of Las Nahua de Telosa, but one of the most prevailing stories is that Estrouk specifically targeted witches.

According to that legend, one of the victims he burned at the stake cursed him before she died.

He apparently got so sick the day after her execution that he was bedridden until he finally passed away a short time later.

And when it came time to collect his body for burial, it was missing.

Pretty soon after that, strange things started to happen around town.

Dead livestock began appearing around the castle where the count had lived, animals that had been butchered and drained of their blood.

It wasn't long before his servants caught sight of the culprit leaving those grotesque calling cards around the castle.

It was Estrouk himself.

He'd been spotted walking the halls of the fortress looking much younger than he had at the time of his death and it seemed that his diet wasn't limited to cow's blood either.

Stories began to spread among the locals as stories do.

They said that he would drink the blood of villagers and kidnap women before sending them back pregnant.

And when those women gave birth months later, the child would never be a bouncing baby boy or girl.

They were simply described as monsters, unnatural creatures that only lived for a short while.

Now, depending on the version of the story you read, Count Astruk's reign of terror eventually came to an end thanks to the works of either a Jewish hermit or an elderly nun.

In all of the versions, though, the hero tracks down the location of the vampire's coffin and drives a wooden stake through his heart.

Today, there's not a lot of physical evidence that the people and places in these stories ever existed.

It doesn't help that the castle in Lares was destroyed during the Spanish Civil War, making it impossible to know for sure if any of the legend is true.

But the impact of the story is undeniable.

Count Astrouk may have been one of the first European vampires, but he certainly wasn't the last.

And as that sort of folklore grew in popularity, it spread first throughout Europe with a focus on Romania, of course, but then outward, eventually traveling so far that it crossed the Atlantic, bringing a dangerous legend a little too close to home.

It takes one to make one.

That's one of the most common elements of vampire folklore, right?

That anytime they wish, they could create more of themselves just by swapping a bit of cursed blood.

One of the most popular examples of this aspect of vampire folklore is, of course, Interview with a Vampire, the 1976 novel by Anne Rice.

In it, we are told the story of a Louisiana plantation owner who is transformed by a vampire named Lestat.

And of course, it makes sense that Rice would begin her novel in Louisiana, given the region's treasure trove of darker lore, stories that seem to shun the light.

Now, the French first arrived in that area back in 1685 in a failed attempt to colonize it.

It would take years for their efforts to finally yield fruit, allowing France to establish three major settlements along the coast, Mobile, Biloxi, and finally, New Orleans.

Several years later, during the first quarter of the 18th century, France found itself in something of a crisis.

It had lost a huge amount of money fighting the War of Spanish Secession.

Soldiers and rural farmers were suddenly out of work, and they flooded the streets of Paris.

They were destitute, homeless, and considered by the monarchy to be a burden.

A lot of them were arrested for the sorts of crimes you might expect from desperate, hopeless people.

But no matter how those deeds were classified, at the end of the day, they were simply arrested for being poor.

Meanwhile, France's Louisiana territory was sparsely populated, populated and it hadn't produced much of anything.

The hope was that the region could someday become a lucrative source of tobacco, just like their English neighbors to the east.

But the war had used up almost all of France's resources.

What they needed there were bodies, literally people to go and do the hard work.

So France decided to solve two problems at once.

It could remove its undesirables from the streets of Paris while also growing the colony's population overseas, all in one fell swoop by shipping them from Europe to Louisiana.

Of course, at first, most of these people were just men, and they were either convicts, military deserters, or smugglers.

And that influx of men ended up creating another problem because men alone couldn't populate the area.

They needed, well, wives.

These women were later referred to as File a la Cassette or Casket Girls, an odd name that we'll explore a bit later.

Now, the first ship carrying casket girls arrived as a merchant vessel named the Pelican in 1704.

These women started in Mobile where they were known as Pelican girls, but they eventually migrated to New Orleans.

The next ship arrived 15 years later in Biloxi.

But France was running into a problem, namely having enough of what they called women of virtue to send over the Atlantic to their colonies.

So they repeated a formula that had worked the first time.

They started sending women of ill repute.

And folks, you are more than welcome to roll your eyes at all of these moral definitives.

I know I am.

Just be sure to consult your optometrist.

I wouldn't want any of you to injure yourselves, right?

Now, a large portion of the casket girls who were deported were convicts, many of whom had been arrested for sex work.

Although, in quite a few cases, the charges had been false.

Women were plucked from orphanages and poorhouses, too, all for the express purpose of becoming brides for the men already there.

From 1719 to 1721, five ships delivered a total of 258 women from France to Louisiana.

They had lived in squalor no matter where they were, be it prison, an orphanage, or a poorhouse, and were deemed by the government to be women without futures.

It was possible that some of these women may have gone to North America willingly, given their minimal chance at success in France.

At least in Louisiana, there was a possibility of marriage and children, but there are no records of such women.

What we do have proof of, though, is that a number of families in France downright ordered French officials to deport their own imprisoned daughters to Louisiana where their lives could be a little better.

Of course that is, if they survive the trip at all.

In many cases though, those lives did not improve.

The men waiting for them were violent and often abused these young women and girls.

And while most of those who were shipped to Louisiana did indeed end up getting married as intended, a number of them did not and simply returned to the same types of work that they had performed in France to make ends meet.

It's incredibly ironic, but many of the men of the colony were frustrated with and maybe even suspicious of the women that had been sent to them, at the very least because of their reputations.

Why were they sent there?

What was wrong with them in the first place?

And when questions like those go unanswered for too long, people start inventing ways to fill in the blanks.

And that is how legends are born.

The legends have been around for a very long time.

Since at least the 19th century, stories have circulated that some of these casket girls weren't just criminals and women of the night.

They were literal monsters, sinking their teeth into the men of the colony.

Some said the women arrived in North America malnourished, pale, and stricken with fever.

What should have been a three-month journey took closer to five months to complete.

They stepped off the ships carrying small suitcases or cassettes in French, filled with clothing, headdresses, and other accoutrements in order to make themselves more attractive for their potential husbands.

But the stories continued to spread.

Visitors heard tales about the cassette girls in New Orleans, a word that eventually morphed into the similar sounding casket, which sounds a lot like the English word casket.

And so the cassette girls or women with suitcases quickly became casket girls.

And that new name only added to their lore because the stories about about them continued to change and evolve.

Those small suitcases in the story quickly became coffins, both in shape and size.

It was as though the women were being shipped across the ocean with their sleeping quarters in tow, much like a vampire.

One bit of context here for you is that New Orleans had been planned by the French as a virtuous city meant for trade and raising families, but it quickly devolved into a den of poverty and crime.

And much of its demise was actually due to the Scottish financier John Law, who had had built the city on a pyramid scheme that inevitably fell apart.

Supplies, food, and other necessities ran out before people had a chance to find their footing.

What took over was a web of corruption and depravity that had one visitor refer to it as the devil's empire.

This only added to its reputation as a dark place, built by convicts, orphans, sex workers, and other, using air quotes here, undesirables exiled from Europe.

There was also a series of disease outbreaks, such as cholera, malaria, and yellow fever caused by things like contaminated water and mosquitoes.

But the locals didn't understand how illnesses spread, so they found other ways of explaining these epidemics.

The stories vary, but many tellings suggest that the young women who came to be known as the Casket Girls arrived in New Orleans in 1721.

They had come aboard the ship La Baline and were somehow different from the other convicts of previous shipments.

According to some, these women had been orphans from a poorhouse in Paris known as La Salpêtrière.

The girls were kept under close supervision by a nun from that poorhouse named Sister Gertrude, along with two other sisters who watched over them throughout the journey in order to ensure their virginity.

They faced everything from dangerous weather and pirates to disease and malnourishment.

Honestly, survival wasn't guaranteed, and you have to admire their courage.

At some point, rumors about the women coming from France began to spread, that some of them were actually vampires.

And worse yet, it was believed that a number of other girls had been transformed on the trip during the journey.

Several years later, around 1727, a group of 12 nuns from France arrived for the purpose of opening a proper orphanage for the younger girls.

They were part of the Ursuline order, and they set up a temporary cloister while their convent was being built.

But something strange happened after the nuns arrived.

Over time, their story and that of the Bailine girls became linked, even though their timelines never actually crossed.

As the legend goes, the girls and their coffins were housed within that temporary convent.

Later, when it came time to move to the new building, the nuns paraded through town with baggage carts covered in a canopy.

Those who whispered the dark stories claimed that this would have provided the perfect distraction for moving several coffins across town without raising suspicion.

These vampires, according to legend, were then housed on the third floor of the new convent building, locked in the attic by the nuns to keep them from terrorizing the town.

The attic had originally been designed as a dormitory for orphans, built with six individual rooms, three of which were equipped with fireplaces.

There was also a room that was not included in the original plans.

It was allegedly meant to hold girls suffering from mental health issues.

Its walls were made of brick rather than wood, and it was sealed with a Dutch door that allowed meals to be passed through while keeping the nuns safe.

The stories claim that this particular level of the convent was completely sealed off.

The shutters on its windows were permanently closed, with, they say, nails that were allegedly blessed by the Pope.

But those stories left folks wondering, were they trying to keep people out or keep something else inside?

Even today, every once in a while, one of the shutters blows open during a bad storm.

And when it does, some people have reported seeing a face in the window peering out at them.

or the uneasy feeling of a pair of eyes watching them from afar.

Perhaps a casket girl still prowls the convent today, looking for a potential lover, or even her next meal.

It's ironic, really.

The legends about immortal creatures with a thirst for blood never seem to die.

In fact, vampires seem to be more alive than ever before.

And as a lover of dark tales whispered around the campfire, I'm alright with that.

So when we bump into examples of earlier stages of that lore, I find it exciting.

Yes, we know that the legends are old, but hearing those stories really helps it all come home.

But along the way, there have been some lulls in this obsession.

In the mid-18th century, for example, the vampire panic in Europe started to wind down.

This was mostly thanks to the publication of a book by a French scholar and theologian named Dom Augustine Calmet.

It was called Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampire.

It examined the accounts throughout folklore of various paranormal phenomena, including vampires in Eastern Europe.

Calmay concluded that such creatures were nothing more than products of the imagination.

But to the people who lived near the Ursuline convent, Calmé's beliefs couldn't have been further from the truth.

The convent still stands in New Orleans at 1100 Shart Street, and its third floor, complete with sealed shutters, still remains a point of interest.

And its history of vampire activity is not, as it turns out, restricted to the 18th century.

In fact, a much more recent legend has cropped up in the last several decades, breathing new life into the old building.

Back in 1978, two paranormal researchers decided to see if the rumors about the casket girls actually being vampires were true.

So they set up camp and cameras in front of the convent and then waited.

They hoped to witness something strange along the building's perimeter.

Hours passed.

No ghostly presence made itself known, nor did an ashen, sharp-toothed vampire emerge from the third floor.

It seems that sitting outside the convent in the dark wasn't exactly a thrilling task.

All that watching and waiting with no payoff took its toll on their resolve.

Slowly, the researchers dozed off, and it was in that short span of time when something made itself known.

By opening and closing the shutters, the same shutters that had been sealed permanently with those blessed nails all those years before.

And the cameras they had propped up to record the event suddenly stopped.

It seems that there would be no proof of what happened at the convent on this night, which, to be honest, is a shame.

Because the following morning, the two lifeless corpses of the investigators were discovered.

Whatever had killed them must have had claws like a wild bear, because their bodies had been ripped open in a frenzy and drained of all their blood.

I hope you've enjoyed today's exploration of this particular corner of folklore.

It seems that the combination of vampires and New Orleans has always been attractive.

Even today, people are still thirsty for more.

And that's a good thing because we've tracked on one more vampiric legend from this beautiful city.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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New Orleans is a big city with a long history, and the Casket girls are only one part of that deeper lore.

It seems that there are other vampire legends associated with with the Big Easy, and one of them happens to be a more recent addition.

In 1932, a young girl was walking down Royal Street when she was stopped by a police officer.

He noticed that she was nervous and out of sorts and asked her what had happened.

The girl told him everything, but her story sounded strange, almost too dark to be true.

Still, she stood by every word.

She explained how two brothers had kidnapped her and tied her up alongside several others.

The only reason she was able to escape, she said, was because they hadn't tied her ropes tightly enough, making it possible to slip away and find help.

But according to her, the men had done something even worse.

She said they were draining their victims of their blood and drinking it.

Her tale sounded like something out of a horror story.

The officer wasn't totally convinced, but he decided to indulge her anyway, and together they walked back to the house she had come from.

It was a short distance away at the corner of Royal Street and St.

Anne, and it was owned by John and Wayne Carter.

Now from the outside it was an unassuming house on a pretty normal street, nothing out of the ordinary.

So it wasn't until the officer stepped inside that he realized the gravity of the situation.

That young girl had been right all along.

Inside, the officer found four other people all tied to chairs in various stages of consciousness.

Their bloody wrists had been bandaged, almost as if someone had been trying to keep them from bleeding to death.

Then in another room, the corpses of two other victims were discovered, both wrapped up in blankets like impromptu mummies left to rot.

The Carters, though, were nowhere to be found.

It seems that they were known to leave the house every morning before the sun came up and then return hours later after dark, all while the people inside suffered in agony.

Once back, they would remove the bandages from their victims' wrists and reopen the wounds, letting the blood drain into chalices.

And I'm sure you can guess what they did with those gruesome beverages.

It was as if these captives were no longer people.

They were cattle meant to provide food until their usefulness had run out.

Realizing that the Carters would return later that night, the police prepared and waited.

And sure enough, the pair came home, ready to drain their victims once again.

When they did, though, the police sprang into action and immediately arrested them.

The Carters, now in handcuffs, broke down before the police.

They confessed to everything they had done and begged to be put out of their misery.

They told the officers that they weren't human, they were in fact vampires, and if they weren't killed, they would continue to hunt the living of the city.

The police didn't buy the story though, and the two men were tried and convicted as serial killers before being hanged for their crimes.

According to author Marita Chandler of New Orleans Vampires History and Legend, it was a common burial practice in New Orleans to place freshly deceased bodies in above-ground vaults for a little over a year.

The swampy nature of the soil beneath the city often made below-ground burials impossible.

Then, once a corpse had decomposed, the remains would be placed in some kind of container and then pushed to the rear of the vault in order to make room for a new body.

Well, as the legend goes, when it came time for the Carter brothers to be packed away like that, the vault was found to be empty with no remains inside.

Which begs the question, had someone stolen them?

or had the pair truly been immortal, escaping into the night.

Ever since, witnesses have claimed to see two men with strong resemblances to the Carter brothers.

Two men dressed in nice old-fashioned clothing who are often spotted on the second-floor balcony of their old house at the corner of Royal and St.

Anne, looking down on the city, watching and waiting.

This episode of Lore Legends was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by Harry Marks and Aaron Manke and research by Sam Alberty.

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