The Vampire Casket Girls of New Orleans

Our story of the vampire Casket Girls begins in the 18th century when New Orleans was a fledgling French colony. Imagine the air thick with the scent of magnolias, and though jazz as we know it didn't exist yet, let's set the tone with a hint of "When the Saints Go Marching In"—in spirit, if not in sound. Back then, America wasn't yet a thing; it was just a cluster of colonies, and New Orleans was a backwater fur trading outpost with a peculiar problem: a shortage of women.

Casket Girls vampires arrive in New Orleans

The History Blends Into Legend

The governor at the time, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, saw the dire need for marriageable women to help bolster the colony's population. He asked the French government to send women who could settle in New Orleans and marry the colony's many French men.

This wasn't an unheard-of request. In the late 17th century, King Louis XIV sponsored the "filles du roi" or "King's Daughters," a program that sent around 800 young women to French settlements in Canada. These women arrived with little more than a small wooden suitcase known as a "casquette" or "cassette," which contained all their belongings for a lifetime. These boxes were so small they'd fit as modern airline carry-ons!

By 1728, a group of women, began arriving in New Orleans. These women stepped off the ships onto the shores of New Orleans, so pale they seemed almost ghostly. Legend has it that their skin blistered and reddened under the intense subtropical sun. The nickname "filles à la cassette" eventually morphed into the eerie "Casket Girls."

The Casket Girls were taken under the care of the Ursuline nuns who ran a convent on Chartres Street. The nuns managed an orphanage, a hospital, and a school while living on the second floor. The third floor of the convent was reserved for the Casket Girls, their coffin-like wooden boxes containing their few possessions stashed at the foot of their beds.

The nuns eventually sealed off the third floor, shuttering the windows and ostensibly to protect the girls' virtue. However, strange things began to happen. Mirrors disappeared, illness spread, crops failed, and pets began behaving oddly. Rumors swirled that the Casket Girls had brought something sinister from the Old World. Soon the locals started believing that the Casket Girls were vampires, their vampiric nature explained by their ghostly pale appearance.

To combat this perceived threat, the nuns sealed the third-floor windows with 800 silver screws blessed by the Pope himself.

In the 1970s, ghost hunters intrigued by these tales tried to investigate by sneaking into the convent courtyard. Tragically, their bodies were discovered the following day, drained of blood. Why they trespassed when they could have observed from the public sidewalk remains a mystery...

Pope John Paul II re-blessed the anti-vampire screws during his visit in 1987. To this day, if you look up at the third floor of the convent, you'll see the windows remain firmly shut.

While it's unlikely that these pale women were actual vampires, the legends surrounding them have become a captivating part of New Orleans' legend.

Life for these early French colonists was hardly as romantic as they might have hoped. The long voyage across the Atlantic, the harsh conditions of the New World, and the high mortality rates from disease made their journey challenging. Some women eventually returned to France, but others did manage to find success and happiness in their new homes.

Interestingly, modern celebrities like Madonna and Angelina Jolie are said to be descendants of the Casket Girls, adding a touch of Hollywood glamour to this historical enigma.

Whether you believe in the supernatural or not, the story of the Casket Girls is a hauntingly beautiful chapter in the rich tapestry of New Orleans history.