The year is 1834. A fire has broken out inside a New Orleans mansion. And rescuers who go in to put out this fire find something truly horrifying. What do they find?

The back building in particular is the slave quarters. This is 1834. And the rescuers find a number of

enslaved individuals in horrible conditions. Even though the building is on fire, they are chained

to the ground. Their bodies are

covered in scars. The New Orleans Bee describes them as, quote, more or less horribly

mutilated, suspended by the neck with their limbs stretched and torn from one extremity to the other.

These people have been confined in these kind of tortured situations, and for nobody's

exactly clear for how long it is the accident of this fire.

Well, if it was an accident, that is the thing that basically saves them.

And whose mansion was this?

So this is a woman named Delphine Lalori, who was a fairly wealthy New Orleans socialite.

And by all accounts a sort of normal member of the community, member of the white slave-owning gentry, but considered to be a outstanding member of society.

And then this horrifying truth comes out when her mansion catches on fire.

It seems that these people are being tortured just for the torture of it.

This is like just kind of pure sadism.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, like there's a kind of cruelty that's been an accident towards these people that,

that even for a place like New Orleans, even for 1830s, white southerners who believe that slavery is justified, they are horrified.

A kind of example of pure evil.

Yeah. A kind of example of pure evil. I'm Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas Supsera.

Today, friend of the show, Colin Dickie, is on.

Colin, of course, is an expert on all things.

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