Those familiar with the legendary New Orleans vampire culture will surely have heard of the cult phenomenon better known as the Casket Girls of New Orleans. Sound a bit morbid?
It’s actually not.
Let me say this now: what we know that’s factual about the Casket Girls is iffy at best…
Let’s just say whoever was doing the historical scribbling or census recording in 18th century New Orleans… well… they did a bit of a shit job.
What we do know is that they were a real thing, but that’s about it. Everything else is basically leftover snippets of historical gossip; more or less merely the bi-product of Chinese Whispers and urban legends rolled into one that now largely exists for the benefit of the tourist trade.
But here’s what we do know… (generally)
It all stems back to those pesky Colonial settlers and their cute little habit of reclaiming land in America as their own.
Around about 1719 when New Orleans as a city was just a baby, it was being occupied by explorers, tradesmen, priests, you name it. Men who had come across the pond from France on their onesies (as in without wives or girlfriends) and soon realised that the place was a massive, MASSIVE sausage-fest, and that all their hard work in building a city and creating a life and legacy would largely be a waste of time if their bloodline ended with them and there would be no offspring to pick up where they left off.
So here’s their first attempt at conquering this problem: they appealed to fellow French-occupied areas of the South (such as Mobile, Biloxi, etc – areas older than New Orleans) and said they needed some womenfolk and could they do them a solid and send some over?
Well, the answer was yes, of sorts… What they did was empty the female jails and brothels and shipped them all over to New Orleans.
I think it’s important to say now that a LOT of the French settlers (if not all) were very, very Catholic men (see my Voodoo blog for more on the Catholicism element of New Orleans) and would have wanted a nice well-behaved French Catholic wifey.
It turns out, interestingly, that these ladies weren’t the domestic goddesses they’d been hoping for. Let’s just say it didn’t go well…
So here was their second plan: they decided to crank it up a notch and appeal to the French King, Louis VI, for help.
And this is what he ALLEGEDLY did – as in what he said he’d do: he would accost some bishop to go around to all of the convents and Catholic orphanages in France and send some good, proper, virgin girls and women over to be contracted wives. Lovely…
Here’s where it gets a bit foggy: rumour would have it that the King wasn’t actually that arsed about the types of ladies he sent over, and apparently followed a similar route to the folks in Biloxi and Mobile, and just tipped the female jails and brothels on their heads and sent their occupants packing for America, thus solving the nagging problem of the NOLA sausage-fest, and temporarily relieving France of its female rogues. Again – this is all we have to go on. There is no record that that’s actually what the King did, and the Casket Girls are something their New Orleans descendants are fiercely proud of.
That’s all well and good, but what actually is a Casket Girl?
So. Good question. It actually has nothing to do with caskets, or death, or anything remotely ghoulish. Again, it’s really the result of Chinese Whispers. ‘Casket Girl’ stems from the phrase ‘Filles à la Casquette’ which roughly translates to ‘woman with suitcase’. That’s literally what they were. Underprivileged women travelling across seas with their few belongings in a trunk. Bit of an anti-climax, no?
There’s some half-arsed rumour that some of these suitcases were so big that they looked like the could hold a corpse, but that’s twaddle. These were women who’d been living in convents, and/or abject poverty, and whose worldly possessions probably comprised solely of a crucifix and maybe a pair of knickers.
So where do the vampires come in?
Another good question. They don’t, really. The loose connection between the two (and I don’t use the term ‘loose’ loosely…) was that the women had spent weeks or months at sea in filthy conditions, hustled in together below deck with rats and all kinds of shit (including actual shit), and those who hadn’t kicked the bucket already were very, very exposed to Yellow Fever, Scurvy, Typhoid, Tuberculosis, severe malnourishment, and a whole bag of other delights that come with travelling at sea during those grotty times. It’s said that the ladies were somewhat worse for wear when they docked in New Orleans; some absolutely riddled with TB; vomiting blood, deathly pale, etc., and so became synonymous with the New Orleans vampire culture.
There’s no evidence whatsoever to suggest any blood-sucking shenanigans went down. They just looked the part, is all.
So that really concludes the mysteries behind the famous Casket Girls. Once they’d docked, those who managed to survive the grim trek over were then chaperoned to a convent on Ursulines Street in the up-and-coming French Quarter until they found themselves a hubby.
And they say romance is dead…
(All words and photos are my own and are subject to copyright. )
clarataylor 