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    New Orleans Vampires: History and Legend
    New Orleans Vampires: History and Legend
    New Orleans Vampires: History and Legend
    Ebook155 pages1 hour

    New Orleans Vampires: History and Legend

    By Marita Woywod Crandle

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    About this ebook

    New Orleans has a reputation as a home for creatures of the night. Popular books, movies and television shows have cemented the city's connection to vampires in public imagination.


    Rumors swirled about the fate of the Casket Girls, a group of mysterious maidens traveling to the New World from France with peculiar casket-shaped boxes. A charismatic man who moved to the French Quarter in the early 1900s eerily resembled a European aristocrat of one hundred years prior bearing the same name. A pair of brothers terrorized the town with their desire to feed on living human blood during the Great Depression. Marita Woywod Crandle investigates the origins of these legends so intricately woven through New Orleans's rich history.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateSep 25, 2017
    ISBN9781439662700
    New Orleans Vampires: History and Legend
    Author

    Marita Woywod Crandle

    Marita Woywod Crandle has been writing and storytelling since she was a little girl. She has always had a fancy for the magical side of life, making New Orleans, with its very creative atmosphere, a perfect match for this German transplant. Marita is currently working on a novel dedicated to one of the French Quarter legends, the Carter Brothers, and the book Drinking Mistakes, her memoirs as a Bourbon Street bartender. Marita has also written the holiday children's book Rufus, the Yuletide Bat, available at her gift store.

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    Reviews for New Orleans Vampires

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    • 2/5
      New Orleans Vampires
      Author: Marita Woywod Crandle
      Publisher: Haunted America - History Press
      Date: 2017
      Pgs: 241
      Disposition: Irving Public Library - Irving, TX - Hoopla e-book
      _________________________________________________

      REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

      Summary:
      Vampires, Dracula. Lestat. Bram Stoker. Anne Rice. New Orleans. A heady mix. From the earliest days, Louisiana colonial history and New Orleans entire civic life span has been colored by a dose of the occult. Things go bump in the night. Some of them are hungry. Some have fangs. Some walk the night. Some want your blood. Some your flesh. The Casket Girls. The Comte St. Germain. The Carter Brothers. The origins of these legends are explored here.
      _________________________________________________
      Genre:
      Nonfiction
      Politics
      Social Sciences
      Folklore
      Mythology
      History
      Americas
      United States
      Louisiana
      New Orleans
      South
      Religion
      Spirituality
      Occult
      Supernatural

      Why this book:
      Vampires. New Orleans. Thank Anne Rice for my being sucked into this. Helped that it took stylistic nods for the cover that echo back to Rice’s Vampire Chronicles.
      _________________________________________________

      Favorite Character:
      The sad thing here is that St. Germain’s story is treated even shorter than the Casket Girls. When the story is told, it flows full force, but the background and historical pieces, while not falling flat, do tend to not be as well done or as interesting.

      Favorite Scene / Quote:
      The personal vampire story about the strange customer with his cane is well told. And it reads like the kind of thing LeStat would do were he real. Not Dracula, but definitely LeStat.

      Hmm Moments:
      The chapters regarding St. Germain read totally different than the Casket Girls chapters. You can tell which are the author’s favorite stories and which are either included for completeness sake or for filler.

      When the Casket Girls story is finally put together, it is fascinating. This is why it has held a spot in the occult history of New Orleans. Was Sister Gertrude one of the Undead too when she returned from France with the Ursulines to do her penance for the horrible things she had done to her fellow travellers on the Casket Girls original trip?

      Alchemist, vampire, immortal, wealthy standoffish patron...surprised that Comte de St. Germain didn’t end up burned at the stake.

      WTF Moments:
      There were elitist prigs in France in charge of sending women to New Orleans to try and stabilize the community. On speaking of the forced deportation of women and bait and switch tactics used to lure some of them, “This clan of hoodlum women were anything but desirable…” is the kind of thing that an elitist prig would say. Hoodlum women help make the world go round. I’m equally certain that the founding mothers of most societies have a fairly large quotient of “hoodlum women” among them. Thank God.

      Meh / PFFT Moments:
      Instead of building on the previous legends, the early parts of the Casket Girls section spend their time tearing down some of the mystery, going more history than horror.

      The book blows holes in the Casket Girls legend before settle down to tell the story.

      The Blood Brothers/Carter Brothers story is of recent enough vintage to be more true crime than vampire. Even with the admission of the brothers to the police that they were vampires. Would have been a better twist if the brothers had turned out to be familiars in the Igor vein.

      Wisdom:
      With the state of health of many of the forced deportees to begin with and shipboard hygiene being what it was in that era, of course, the Casket Girls ship had a high mortality rate, all ships would have. And if they survived the trip, they were delivered to the early 18th century miasma that was New Orleans; swamp, death, disease, before we even consider the predatory nature of their fellow travellers and the brigands, pirates, and monsters hiding in human flesh, they would encounter once they arrived. The death toll in New Orleans must have been horrendous.
      _________________________________________________

      Last Page Sound:
      Hit and miss.

      Editorial Assessment:
      Margarita’s chapter in the Casket Girls almost got me to give up on the book. Necessary info, maybe, but could have been shorter or glossed into another chapter.

      The story of The Comte de St. Germain is interesting. But as presented here comes across disjointed. The chronology being flipped, telling the story of the New World St. Germain and, then, the European. A chronological telling would have given the story more flavor. And would have ended with the disappearance of the New Orleans one, instead of the unattended funeral of the one in Germany, if the one who died in Germany even was The Comte St. Germain.

      The Carter Brothers story is weak sauce in context with the Casket Girls and The Comte St. Germain. They do not measure up to the other vampire legends of New Orleans.

      Would have been well served to have left the Carter Brothers out entirely or treated them with the same short shrift as Varney.

      Knee Jerk Reaction:
      it’s alright
      _________________________________________________

    Book preview

    New Orleans Vampires - Marita Woywod Crandle

    writing.

    INTRODUCTION

    Fog rolls over the slates on the square just in front of the St. Louis Cathedral. Spilling onto the wrought-iron benches, the mist thickens while the sound of hooves clip the pavement, the mule leading its buggy into the distance. There’s a reason Walt Disney fashioned his Magic Kingdom after the French Quarter in New Orleans. From the haunting buildings with Spanish lace balconies to the paddleboats floating down the Mississippi, from its bustling days with artists and musicians entertaining tourist on streets and in alleyways to its mystical nights with lovers dining in romantic restaurants and jazz from nightclubs flooding the streets, New Orleans has a magic you can find nowhere else. Perhaps that’s why the magical are so drawn to the city. In addition to the romantic balconies, the music, the art, the rich history of brothels and pirates and its flourishing ports, there is also a mystical draw to the city with a darker side.

    Witchcraft, voodoo and even vampirism have found their place in the French Quarter. There are several voodoo shops, some touristy, some authentic, offering guidance in the religion. There are witchcraft shops selling spells, potions and insight on the pagan religion and culture, and the only vampire shop in the country also found its home in the very heart of the French Quarter.

    While voodoo and paganism are true religions, vampires, on the other hand, are mythical creatures that somehow draw those with a taste for the unknown. Vampires have a remarkable history. Tracing back to Egyptian hieroglyphics, most cultures have their own version of a creature that sustains itself on human blood, a creature that draws one in, hypnotizing its victims and even promising eternal life to a select few. Super powers have been thought to give a vampire extraordinary speed and strength and possibly even the ability to fly and shift into bats, wolves and even fog, creating an allure around this creature that is enticing and even desirable.

    Boutique du Vampyre Street sign at 709½ St. Ann. Author’s collection.

    Eerie foggy morning in Jackson Square. Courtesy of Mark Barrett.

    When I first stepped foot in the French Quarter, I was not only mesmerized by the sensory overload the city offered, but I also knew I was home. The pull to the city was unexplainable to even myself. I was spellbound, and like so many others, once I left, my heart ached to return. Maybe the pull that was tearing at my heartstrings was in fact the curse of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, instilling her all-consuming spell. As I walked through the streets, falling deeper and deeper under the spell, I imagined myself living here. All that was left was to devise a plan for my life in this magical place.

    Author Anne Rice. Wikimedia.

    Anne Rice brought such wonderful attention to New Orleans with The Vampire Chronicles series. I could immediately imagine her characters roaming the streets. I became intrigued with the news of a vampire tour on a pamphlet I picked up on a counter somewhere. Engaged in the tour, I followed the guide and listened to the legends of the vampires of the French Quarter, and it was at that moment that I imagined the success of a vampire-themed shop tucked away on one of the streets. A place where tourists could indulge in the mystery of the species. This crazy little city, in my mind, was probably the only place a shop such as this could

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