Casa Rosa was a stately mansion once majestically standing along the streets in the lower part of New Orleans’ Third District. Don Juan Luis Angula of Spain painstakingly built the home with the old money he brought with him when he moved there. As years passed and after his death, although kept within the family, it started into ruin. Many began to call it haunted. Those walking the streets would stop to peer curiously through the bent and gnarled gates to see if they could find a ghostly face peering out windows with dusty and dreary torn velvet blinds or hap upon a being crouching on the worn roof cupola. Once in a while, an old mangy cat slinked from the bushes. A story would evolve around it, implicating some grisly creature living there with fangs covered in blood and drippy drool dribbling from its chin and snatching up little children as they passed with a paw and dining on their tender flesh.
On a slow week of news, reporter William Dawson seized on the story and went to Casa Rosa to interview the owner, Señorita Mercedes Antonia Angula. He was young and tall, pleasing to the eye, and smartly dressed in a suitcoat. William spoke eloquently to the somber servant woman who opened the door and grudgingly let him enter.
“I don’t know why you want to talk to her,” she muttered and shook her head. She took a large key from her pocket and bolted the door behind him—click-click. “I’ve known her all my life, and we both are about dead. Sooner or later, we’ll be buried out back by the old wall like all the rest.” She walked the reporter down a long, dark hall. It reeked of old things, dust, and mildew, and maybe a mouse or two that had died, but before they expired, slithered into a hole in the wall and laid there shriveled and unfound.
As William entered a great room, he felt a burst of cool air in the solemn darkness as the curtains sucked in with the opening of the door, not unlike the unsealing of a tomb long closed. The servant faded away, and he was left standing there alone, or at least, so he thought. His eyes took a moment to get used to the dimness, then worked around the room to the once spectacular, painted ceiling now leaving plaster flakes all over the ragged floor rugs. He could barely make out the velvet seating couches and old artwork of former family members on the walls, a cracked bust, and three statues—all grand at one time but now looking like a church graveyard long forgotten.
In the center of the room, on a faded, red velvet settee, was a woman. William squinted into the oozy shadows and saw a bit of pale face. Was she young or old? That is what William wondered as he gazed there, letting his eyes adjust as he took in the fringes of a beautiful satin dress. Then he blinked and saw her as she was, a woman who could have been a thousand years old. Her face was yellowish, dried, and crinkled. Her head had tufts of gray hair here and there with teeny lice wiggling along the strands. A boil bulged above the bridge of her nose, a brown lump looking like a rat had shat upon her forehead. The aged creature was wearing an ancient, red bell-shaped gown with puffy sleeves and festooned in pearls, some missing in great numbers.
A diamond necklace wrapped around her too-long, too-thin neck, and her skinny wrists and knobby-knuckled fingers were donning gold bands with rubies and diamonds. She had tied the ends of each with pieces of twine to keep them from falling off, and she kept bringing them to her lips to suck on noisily. Each dribbled with pus-green slobber. William tried not to cringe or gag or both. But he simply could not drag his eyes away from her.
“Have you come for the jewels?” a creaky voice squeaked from the settee. William jumped, startled. He had been so mesmerized by the repulsiveness he had not torn his eyes away. She twirled a finger at him, and for a moment, William decided she must be a witch and had tried to cast a charm spell upon him. Then he realized his folly and adjusted his stance, working up a fancy smile. “No, Señorita Angula,” he cleared his throat. “I have come to talk about this beautiful house, the flowers in your garden, your family, and especially—you.”
She smiled and seemed satisfied that he wanted to talk about her. She pointed to a dusty chair nearby, and William shook his head. “I have been sitting all day. I would rather stand.” He watched a cockroach slither across the armrest. Señorita Angula settled into the settee, and the two chatted of petty things like the weather and the old places of New Orleans. “And you have never married?” William asked as he had grown bored talking about matters he already knew—it was going to rain, and this mansion or that mansion was getting torn down. Everyone she knew was years into a tomb. He changed the subject, and although he understood his question was rude for a spinster, the Señorita giggled much like a schoolgirl.
“No, none of my suitors were good enough for my father. He is gone now. I mean, he is away in Barcelona at our estate there. He wrote to me the other day.”
William began to realize she was not in her right mind. Her father was long dead; his bones were dust. He shifted awkwardly. It did not appear there was much of a story in this rundown old house, just an old lady who had lost her wits. However, she was not going to let him leave so soon.
“Did you know Señor Blenco?” Señorita asked, not waiting for him to answer. “No, you are too young to be acquainted with him.” The old woman wagged a pale, veined hand lazily, and her rings clanged and clattered before she began to prattle on about her many old loves that he wondered existed at all. She spoke of her beauty and desirability, of at least twenty young men from Spain who had competed for her hand in marriage. After each one, she would drag her toothless gums together, making a gruesome squeaking sound, not unlike a finger rubbed up and down on the wet glass of a window.
William began to realize that not only had Señorita Angula lost her senses, but she was also concocting stories. “Señor Blenco found me quite to his taste,” she rambled on while William tried not to cup a palm to his lips and stifle a yawn. “He poisoned his mother to give me her rubies, then died not long after being poisoned himself. And then there was Señor Villesca, a pretty man, indeed. He doted on me, gave me everything he had—until he broke his back.” She cackled. “They came, all of them, bringing me gold and jewels to tempt me to wed. My father was clever. He invited many men from across the ocean to court his daughter here. He arranged their leaving from our house at daylight, so everyone saw them leave. Then later, they returned for a liaison with me. And not one of them ever wanted to leave my house because I was so pleasing.” she chuckled. “And they never left once they called—” She paused and coughed a spittle-filled, throaty hack. “What was I talking about? Oh, yes, you must dine with us tonight—”
“Never left?” William had interrupted, perked up. “What do you mean by that?” But she had fallen asleep in the middle of the sentence, mumbling indecipherable words before grumbling snores filled the air.
William had nearly cheered in relief, but his mind was whirling. What did she mean that all those suitors never left? Certainly, he would stay for dinner. He had to find out. And what about the gold and rubies they gave her? Were her ramblings of a murderer or just an old woman who had lost her senses? He tipped his head and decided to sneak off and take a peek around the musty, dusty old mansion. He crept down one hallway, then another. The interior of the estate seemed just as odd as the woman who lived in it. He heard a scuffle near a stairwell and paused his steps. Was it the servant noting he had slipped away and was nosing around the place? Or was the skitter the fleeting passing of a rat?
William shivered, but nothing could have stunned him more than seeing what suddenly appeared before him—a young man. He certainly was not of this earth as he wore old-fashioned clothing. His face was deathly pale, and his legs wobbled when the man walked like his back was not attached to his waist. He extended his hand to William, who took it more out of shock than wanting to clasp the ice-cold fingers. The ghostly man led him up a flight of steps, and they came upon another spirit that appeared as if someone had smashed his head to a bloody pulp, one side flat from a horrible beating. And on they went up the stairway, each step seeming to have another dead man—one holding rubies in his bloodied hands while his mouth frothed as if someone had poisoned him, and others who were bludgeoned or had their faces smashed. William wavered, then looked to the man with the strange unattached spine. “You are Señor Villesca,” he gasped aloud, realizing the truth. “The man whose back was broken.”
Suddenly, there was an appalling stench. He released Señor Villesca’s hand, and around him, all the men began to melt in puddles of green snot-like slime, deep red blood, brittle bones, and yellowed teeth. Like a flood, this gooey sludge ran down the stairway as William slipped and slid, trying to escape. He ran straight to the door. As he got there, he stopped in terror. The servant had bolted the latch! William pounded desperately on the door for help, then heard the cluck-cluck of a tongue and saw the old servant coming up behind him, wiggling her clanking keys in the air. “Ah, you’ve done it! You’ve set them free!” she screamed at him while she came up beside William and wrestled with the key to lock. “Now, they’re going to kill her and get their revenge.” William did not answer. Instead, he slid through the gap as quickly as he could when she opened the door.
Just as he got to the front gate, he saw that someone had bolted it shut, too. Would he ever escape this place? The moment the thought crossed his mind, William saw the same man with the wobbly back appear before him. He took one hand and pushed the gate, and it opened wide. William burst through and stopped in the street to catch his breath, sweat rolling down his temple as he turned to look back. To his surprise, the gate was closed and locked. The man who had helped him flee had fallen to the ground in two parts, the top rolling one way and the bottom rolling another. Then he vanished.
Señorita Angula died. The family sold the home, and new owners decided to move a wall by a very old rose garden. As workers knocked the barrier down, the bottom exposed a three-foot deep hole that went all the way across the courtyard—beneath, they found fifty skeletons of men, poor love-sick wretches who had fallen prey to the charms of a woman and a murderous scam. Among them, one skeletal hand was still clinging to a ruby necklace.
You can find this story and others in: Ghost Stories and Folk Tales of New Orleans – by Jannette Quackenbush https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Stories-Folk…/dp/1940087465
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