The Massacre That Never Happened on Dauphine Street

The tall house with wraparound iron galleries at the corner of Dauphine and Orleans Streets is known on ghost tours as the Sultan's Palace. The story goes that a Turkish sultan's brother rented it, filled it with a harem and guards, and was found one morning with his whole household slaughtered and buried in the courtyard. There is no record of any such crime, and no mention of it in the newspapers of the time. The house itself was built in 1836 for Joseph Coulon Gardette, a dentist from Philadelphia, and owned from 1839 to 1878 by the merchant Jean Baptiste Le Prete; the ornate galleries were added around 1850. The tale seems to trace to an 1866 history by Charles Gayarré about a mysterious foreigner near Dauphine and Orleans, which Helen Pitkin Schertz moved to this house and embellished in her 1922 Legends of Louisiana. It is a private residence.