The Sultan’s Palace, 716 Dauphine Street (c. 1860s)
When Jean Baptiste LePrete leased his mansion at 716 Dauphine Street to a Middle Eastern man, no less than brother to a Sultan, he couldn’t anticipate the troubles to come. The tenants were exotic and interesting, and brought a load of expensive furnishings and well-dressed people to live in the mansion. Despite the odors of opium and sounds of music and laughter from inside, nobody was invited for a visit. One morning, a passer-by spotted blood dripping down the mansion steps, dubbed “The Sultan’s Palace” by locals. Police entering the house discovered flayed bodies, other bodies with limbs missing, and in the back yard, a single hand bursting up from the ground (some versions have the Sultan dismembered on a couch), buried alive. No records exist that can prove the massacre actually happened, but it has become one of the French Quarter’s most blood-soaked, gory tales.