a paranormal investigation

By Paige Lawrence

Storyville Opera House at the corner of Bienville and N. Rampart St. (1904)

Hs. VAUDEVILLIAN CIRCUS

In a city too well acquainted with horror and the supernatural, one event stands out in New Orleans’ long litany of unexplained tragedies.  On April 8^th, 1904 at the Storyville Opera House on what is today North Rampart Street, just blocks from the famed French Quarter an evening’s performance ended in inexplicable tragedy.

On this site, Dean Parewig Lawrence (professionally known as “D.P. Lawrence”) a circus impresario and former stagehand held a Vaudevillian variety show.  Of the 134 people known to be in the building that evening, all but two were dead or permanently insane within weeks of the performance.  Interpretations and theories about what happened vary wildly but the common thread in every account is a supernatural act, conjuring or experiment gone horrifically wrong.

Lawrence rented the building in the fall of 1903 for a pittance on the promise of large revenues to come from the theater he intended to open there.  At that time, the building had been derelict for many years but it had originally been a hospital for yellow fever victims during the frequent outbreaks of the 1800s.  In the 1870s it is said that the so-called “Voodoo Queen” Marie Laveau was regularly seen at the hospital, tending to the sick...

For months after he acquired the building, Lawrence aggressively courted New Orleans theater society to generate interest and seek funds for the restoration of the building, promising a “world class house of drama, comedy and theater.”  During this time he also assembled his troupe of performers and began rehearsing them for the theater’s opening performance.  Lawrence refused to give the names of his players but claimed that they hailed from twelve different countries and that they were world-class performers.  Some speculated that the whole thing was a hoax and that Lawrence was actually using a troupe of unknown amateurs. Even this sparked public curiosity.

For the theater’s inaugural offering, Lawrence promised a Vaudevillian spectacular entitled “The Cirque Nuit,” or nighttime circus.  The show was to feature live music, fortune telling, juggling, trapeze artists, oriental (belly) dancers, fire performance, sideshow acts and a finale with a mystery performer who Lawrence evasively described as, “a dazzling incarnation, a pyramid of oriental dance,” saying poetically in the Times-Democrat theater column (“Vaudeville to open new Storyville Opera House”; Times-Democrat, Jan. 3, 1904), “all men will gaze in terrible wonder at her undulating scales.”

Enterprising as he was Lawrence used his connections with the stagehands in town to sneak in to New Orleans’ largest theaters on show nights during intermission.  On no less than 4 occasions, Lawrence simply waited until the house lights went up & strode onstage, first asking the audience a moment’s indulgence and then quickly and clearly making his pitch for both their patronage and their financial support.  Due to his poise and presence onstage people assumed Lawrence was supposed to be there.  It was only the day after in the papers that these publicity stunts were revealed.  New Orleanians howled with amusement and as a result of his impish earnestness Lawrence quickly became known for his dark wardrobe, his sharp looks and the passion with which he spoke about his theater and the Cirque Nuit.

Jean-Robert LaCourre, a funeral director on Magazine Street and a vocal supporter of the arts in New Orleans was so charmed by Lawrence’s bravado that he invited the troupe to perform at his home for his birthday party.  Lawrence eagerly obliged.  Mr. LaCourre said in the Picayune society column that the private performance Mr. Lawrence offered, “erased all doubt that the Cirque Nuit is the most impressively skilled troupe of performers I’ve yet seen in a lifetime of New Orleans theater.” (Picayunne; Societe’; Feb. 14, 1904)

By now the city was abuzz with anticipation and publicity was good.  Lawrence made sure to capitalize on it and by March of 1904 Cirque Nuit’s three performance opening engagement (Apr. 8-10^th, 1904) was completely sold out and the future of the theater looked bright.

The opening performance was scheduled to take place at an inexplicable 1:11am.  When pressed by a reporter as to why the show was going on so late a winking Lawrence said simply, “Late?  That idiot Houdini kept a house up all night last month in London and that was a one-trick show.  Never you fear we’ll give them a show to remember with a cup of chicory coffee on the side.” (Picayunne; playbill section; April , 1904)

When the night finally arrived, the theater opened at midnight and patrons were greeted inside by a Dixieland parlour quartet.  Coffee and beignets were served by clowns and stilt-walking harlequinne.  The performance started normally; there was a juggling act, a fire-eater, a belly dancer, a magician and so on.  It is around this point that stories begin to diverge.

What is known is that at the beginning of what was to be the finale of the show a woman covered in black robes and a hood was ushered onstage.  The musicians began and Lawrence acted as conductor.  The stage was lit with a large number of candles and Lawrence began reciting a strange litany of poetic verses in a foreign tongue.  Theatrical certainly but nothing seemed out of the ordinary.  The woman is said to have started moving very slowly like a rousing reptile when Lawrence intoned the verses and shortly he seemed to swoon before her.  Then suddenly, convulsing he screamed and dropped to his knees.  What is agreed upon is that the woman onstage began to howl and everyone in the building began to panic.

THE ONES WHO GOT OUT

Janos Pinski, the fortune teller and one of only a few eyewitnesses claimed that, “she had stepped forward and began to pull off her hood and robes, she was beautiful, but almost as soon as the light caught her face, it grew brighter and brighter until I couldn’t stand it and I had to look away.  The air turned cold, so cold I could see my breath.  Then she screamed and I was so frightened I ran out of the theater as fast as I could.  That scream, it wasn’t human, it made the whole building shake.  It was agony!” [Tulane Univ.; Dept. of Antiquities, “Cirque Nuit Incident;” NOPD, Sgt. M. Monaghan, Rpt. No 9864]

When interviewed by police inspectors, residents nearby reported hearing a horrible sound like a great, agonized scream, around 3 in the morning.

Mr. & Mrs. Arnaud Baudelaire left the theater hastily just before the finale and in their buggy made for their home near Metairie, LA.  On the drive the buggy snapped an axle and Mr. Baudelaire was thrown face-first into a turnbuckle and died.  His wife unable to remove the horse’s bridle & harness, started the walk home and was found the following morning on the roadside; dead of hypothermia.

Carol-Anne Rouchard a talented young actress and singer who had attended the performance had been by all accounts a vivacious, animated young woman.  She left the theater that night in mute shock and never spoke another word again.  A week later she experienced a sleepwalking incident and awoke at the Old Ursuline convent on Chartres St.  She lived the rest of her life at the convent and in her old age became a stigmatic.
Henri Roussard, a leather dealer and arts patron in New Orleans was seen leaving the theater that night bleeding from the ears.  He walked four blocks to nearby St. Louis Cathedral where he entered the church, walked up to the tabernacle, lay face down on the floor and simply expired.  A shocked priest who had been in prayer watched Roussard enter the cathedral, lie down and die.

Nadya Brynner was 63; she had been a fixture of New Orleans theater along with her husband Nikos who died in the building that night.  Panic-stricken, she could not recall how she got out of the building.  She died two weeks later of exhaustion after slipping into a violent fever.  The illness left her in a hallucinatory reverie, punctuated by visceral nightmares and screaming fits.  Mrs. Brynner claimed to be plagued by dreams of a spectral woman with black eyes and a terrible scream.

Rosalyn Dubois, daughter of the Louisiana seafood magnate Herbert Dubois, left the performance in hysterics.  The only thing that calmed her in the days that followed was sitting at her harpsichord and playing the melody of the Cirque Nuit overture.  Any attempt by doctors or nurses to remove Rosalyn from her harpsichord resulted in fits of screaming rage, crying and violence.  Seven days after the tragedy at the theater, Rosalyn Dubois jumped from the roof of her father’s garden district mansion and died on the flagstones below.

Janos Pinski the fortune-teller was interviewed by police and allowed to go home.  In the days that followed, Pinski attempted to read his Tarot cards for information about what had happened but to no avail.  With increasing frustration Pinski became convinced that whatever gift he had for divination had left him.  He drank heavily and was seen in the pharmacy on Royal St. purchasing a bevy of sedatives from camphor to laudanum to opium, presumably in an attempt to reach his oracle.  Eight days after the Cirque Nuit incident Pinski was found drowned in the tub of his apartment after slipping into an Absinthe-fueled stupor.

Mr. William Henry Hyde, a retired British Army officer, gave his statement to the police, saying simply that he had no explanation but that he ran from the theater when he saw panic break out.  “I suppose I thought it was part of the show you know.  But when the other people reached the panicked state that they did…  Well, I served in India, I’ve seen riots break out and I saw that this was no different.  I figured best run with others, ahead of them if possible or be trapped there with…  Well, God knows.”

After giving his statement Mr. Hyde headed for his home at the far end of Esplanade Avenue near Bayou St. John.  Arriving there in the wee hours of the morning, Mr. Hyde exited the streetcar and waited for an inbound streetcar to pass.  In the dewy pre-dawn hours Mr. Hyde slipped on a damp section of track and fell forward landing in front of the oncoming streetcar with no time to recover and was decapitated.

Twenty-one days after the performance the last of the people known to have survived the event and escaped the building was found.  The bloated body of Howard O’Brien washed up on the banks of the Mississippi near the St. Joseph Plantation.

The night of the horror; NOPD had received a tip from a waiter at Café Du Monde saying that in the early hours of the morning, someone had come running into the Café claiming that a man in a grey suit had just walked into the river and started swimming off in the direction of Algiers.  By the time the waiter a few others had run back over the embankment to the river’s edge, nothing could be seen.  Howard O’Brien was listed as a suicide.

THE LIVING

One person in the building that night who seemed to suffer no immediate ill effects is the so-called Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, Mama K.  Mama K was arrested by police at the scene of the tragedy and charged by the New Orleans’ District Attorney as an accessory to murder for her participation in the show.  However, due to a complete lack of material evidence the charges were dropped after only a few days.

As a result of the incident and because she had associated with a white theater troupe, Mama K. lost her position of primacy within the Voodoo community of New Orleans and remained bitter about it until her death in 1918 of Spanish flu.

Samuel R.  Baylor, had been a reporter for the Times-Picayune at the time of the incident and approached Mama K. for an interview about the Cirque Nuit Horror in 1914.  Ten years after the incident Mama K. was still furious and at first refused to make comment.  What Baylor did get out of her he could not print in the paper but included in a magazine article for Horror Stories magazine entitled, “Circus of the Dead.” [Popular Publications, 1937]

When asked by Baylor what happened the night of the Cirque Nuit, Mama K. reacted angrily the moment Lawrence’s name was mentioned.  “That dumb [expletive deleted] done tried to cross the cross woman, that’s what happened.  Left hands always get crossed theyselves; you don’t know that?  That boy asked me to sing a hoodoo song, I sang a hoodoo song and that’s all I did!  What he did ain’t never right!  Lord! … Where you from!?!?”  She slammed the door in Baylor’s face and refused to say anymore.

The other person known to have survived and frankly, in better shape than anyone else present that night was the coat check boy, Peter Endersen Phillips.  Phillips was 20 years old and working nights to finance his education.  For no reason anyone can explain, Phillips, was unaffected by whatever happened inside the theater.  He was also the NOPD’s main source of information on what happened immediately following the show’s tragic climax.

[…“Phillips recalled sipping a cup of coffee and looking into his cup to see a large black beetle float to the surface of his drink.  Shocked he leapt backwards dropping his cup.  As it shattered on the floor, Phillips looked up to see a couple coming out of the theater the wife in hysterics.  The husband was pleading with his wife, saying, “you didn’t see anything, its just lights and nonsense,” just then the husband’s voice cracked, “lights and nonsense.”  The husband began to sob as he walked past Phillips.  Phillips also remembers seeing Mr. Henri Roussard walk down the stairs slowly, but with his eyes fixed dead ahead.  Phillips saw that blood was trickling from Roussard’s ears.  Phillips asked him if everything was all right in the theater and Roussard did not respond.”…] (Horror Stories, “Circus of the Dead”, by S.R. Baylor, Popular Publications, 1937)

Just as Phillips was about to ask Mr. Roussard if he could call a doctor, he heard a tremendous scream that shook the floorboards and ran for his life.  A group of frightened patrons fled the theater right behind him.  A woman identified as one of the waitresses tripped in her panic to escape and fell down the staircase, snapping her neck and killing her instantly.

Once outside Phillips claims he looked up at the second story windows and saw a green-tinted fire burning inside the theater. After that he says he saw a bright green light emanate from the building in all directions and shoot outwards with a tremendous boom, like an explosion.  Then just as suddenly, it was quiet.  The electrical power in the building had blown and Phillips stood with the other survivors in stupefied silence hoping to see someone emerge.  No one did.

Within minutes of the disturbance New Orleans policemen began to arrive.  The first on the scene was a beat Sergeant Monaghan, who came upon the theater and said this in his report:

“Approximately 3:14am on April the 9^th, 1904 while on patrol in the neighborhood of Storyville on Bienville St., Sgt. heard tremendous sound in the direction of North Rampart St. & proceeded on foot to the Storyville Opera House.  Sgt. found there 9 souls standing adjacent to theater entrance in various states of hysteria & delusion.  Sgt. found & interviewed one P.E. Phillips a staff member & witness to the event.  His explanation was unclear & led Sgt. to enter the theater himself to ascertain the nature of the disruption there.  Upon reaching second floor level, Sgt. found theater doors open & saw clearly the faces of at least two-dozen men and women, still in their seats inside, all deceased.  Sgt. summoned additional officers immediately.” (Tulane Univ.; Dept. of Antiquities, “Cirque Nuit Incident;” NOPD, Sgt. M. Monaghan, Rpt. No 9862)

Police quickly swarmed the building and discovered the worst.  In all 121 bodies were found inside.  Performers, crew, kitchen staff and the entire audience save those who ran, lay inside the theater dead.

There were burn marks on stage; evidence of a minor fire but it did relatively little damage.  Beyond that none of the bodies found inside were killed by smoke inhalation or burns.  The Police department and the coroner’s office examined them one at a time and could find no medical explanation for the deaths.   It was as if they simply stopped living.

The Orleans parish coroner released a statement saying, “This is the most frustrating case I have been called to work on in my entire career.  Medically speaking these people should be alive right now.  Despite thorough analysis by our department in cooperation with faculty members from the Tulane University School of Medicine, multiple autopsies have failed to ascertain the cause of these deaths.  There are no wounds, no poisons, no evidence of heart attack; nothing, they’ve simply expired.  Upon inspection every patient was found to have an expression of abject terror on his face and I shudder to think what their dying eyes must have beheld.  May God have mercy on them all.”

The day after the incident police had sealed off the building and were in the process of recovering bodies and evidence.  Just at noon an elderly derelict woman approached the Police Inspector in charge, one Captain Morris from the street.  She walked right up to the inspector muttering in a strange tongue.  Just as Morris’ second, Lt. Thompson stood forward to warn the woman off, she said loudly, “Sekhmet Ha Ek!”  Thompson heard a strange hissing sound and turned to see a large snake emerge from under the banquette (wood plank sidewalk) and spring forth, striking the woman and biting her on the face and neck.  Lt. Thompson seized the animal by the tail and beat it dead on the banquette.  The woman who was never identified, died within minutes at the scene. (The snake was taken with the woman’s body to the city morgue and identified by a student intern from the Zoology department at Tulane Univ.  The snake was identified as N. haje or Naja haje, commonly known as the Egyptian cobra)

Dexter S. Gaster, the Superintendent of Police mounted a full-scale investigation and spent large sums of city money doing so.  After a few months with no leads, no Lawrence and no progress Gaster became the subject of public ridicule.  Due to the Cirque Nuit incident and its failed investigation the mayor of New Orleans, Paul Capdevielle took over the Police Dept. a few months later in July of 1904 and reorganized the department, selecting new leadership.

In a particularly strange twist, all official newspaper records of the incident disappeared.  The Times Democrat and the Picayune newspapers merged in 1904 and when the move was complete, a reporter went to view archives of the paper’s coverage.  Upon a thorough search the records and even the original photographs from the scene had vanished.  The new Times-Picayune editor said that they must have been lost accidentally.  Still, it is a frustrating loss and seems hardly coincidental.  Copies were saved but they have aged poorly in the humid southern atmosphere.  A few copies have been digitally reassembled.  Frustrating also is the fact that New Orleans coroners did not start keeping records of autopsy files until 1905.

Adding to the unpredictability of these mysterious events P.E. Phillips lived out the remainder of his life in relative peace and obscurity.    In 1928 he granted one interview, also to Samuel R. Baylor.  After that, he never spoke about the incident publicly again and he died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 89 in 1973.

The greatest unanswered question about that night is what happened to D.P. Lawrence?  His body was neither among those lost inside nor did he turn up again in town, at his apartment, anywhere.  Did he make it out with the first few?  Rosalyn Dubois thought she saw a man in a black suit similar to Lawrence’s run from the building as soon as they were outside.  Her subsequent fatal mental illness of course brings this, like so much else in this story into question.

Was Lawrence as some say consumed by whatever was unleashed that night?  New Orleans police scoured the city, Lawrence’s apartments and an area of swamp on the north end of the city known as Bayou St. Jean.  Not only had Mr. Hyde died there, not only was this an area Lawrence was known to visit.  But this was also an area known by locals to be a prime location for voodoo ceremonies dating back to the early 1800s.  After the Cirque Nuit horror there had been reports of a pack of dogs at the Bayou’s edge for some several weeks.  Local residents were unusually alarmed at the presence of these dogs and some swore that among these dogs they had seen one particularly overlarge mongrel animal that bore a striking resemblance to a Jackal.

In New Orleans these stories are by necessity, taken with a grain of salt.  Still the confluence of strange events and frustratingly little evidence is compelling even here. Ultimately, the building was demolished in the 1940s and today the site where the Opera House stood is nothing more than a parking lot.

Storyville Opera House  site today (2009)

In a city rife with stories of wild personalities, abandon, voodoo, murder and greed the story of the Cirque Nuit has faded from popular memory and taken its place among the oddities of New Orleans history.  It has in turn been replaced by new and more pressing horrors like economic stagnation, Hurricane Katrina and the first 27 years of the Saints football team. (Go Saints!)

AFTERWORD

This last section was transcribed from a recorded interview that my editor and boss Robert Hanson did after I finished researching the Cirque Nuit Horror.  I was basically freaked out and needed to vent so he took me to Decatur St.; got me fed, got me drinking and pressed record.  Here’s what I said once I stopped yelling at him and got some rum in me:

“When I got hired to look into the Cirque Nuit story I really didn’t know what I was getting into.  I’m the voodoo writer; I get that stuff, that’s what I know…why wouldn’t I go?  I figured if this is a really dark voodoo thing I’ll be able to understand it, even if it’s really gruesome and we can all “ooh” and “ahh” and the freakiness of it.  When I got to New Orleans this time, almost from the second I hit the ground and started talking to people, I felt this just really wrong, fucked-up, eerie feeling like I really wasn’t dealing with anything familiar.  Even the weather while we’ve been here, I mean… dude, its August!  Why have I been cold and clammy feeling in August?  Why has it been overcast? [Sips drink]

Researching this story left me with some serious goose bumps honestly.  I mean… We do these stories on purpose I know and its like, we WANT to find something, or we think we do when we get started, but then this…[pause] this got freaky man, fast.

Now, being here today, I only get an echo of whatever really happened that night.  All I can be sure of is that it was something… other than nothing.  No one has explained it adequately to me, but whatever was opened or invoked or broke through that night (right?) … killed almost everyone who saw it, and no one ever saw the man responsible again, not a body, not a set of clothes, not even a fingernail.  OK?  And they were REALLY looking!  And its basically been forgotten, I mean [sips drink] are they high?

[long pause]

What’s really shocking honestly, is this city’s ability to accept these events and move on… as though this was… ordinary business.  That chick at the voodoo shop last week was like, “well, that’s New Orleans.”  Are you fuckin’ kidding me?!?

[long pause, Rob says something inaudible to the waitress]

This was a truly eerie piece to work on and I am looking forward to my nice, quiet apartment in Oakland and some normal weather and no voodoo and my cat!  Cheers to that!”

I really couldn’t write a better epilogue, thanks Rob.

Paige Lawrence

February 2010

Paige Lawrence was hired as ethno botany and voodoo editor by Dark American in 2006.  This was his third investigation for the guide.  He is not related to D.P. Lawrence.