Laura Wright 
New Orleans possesses an unusual talent for turning history into legend.
Sometimes the history is already strange enough. Sometimes generations of storytellers add a little blood, a mysterious stranger, a few ghosts and just enough uncertainty that separating one from the other becomes almost impossible.
The Gardette-LePretre House, at 716 Dauphine Street in the French Quarter, is a perfect example.
It is better known in New Orleans folklore as the Sultan’s Palace.
According to the legend, a mysterious Turkish nobleman once rented the mansion and filled it with beautiful women, servants, armed guards, incense and extravagant parties.
Then, one morning, the house fell strangely silent.
Blood was discovered beneath the front door.
Inside, nearly everyone had been slaughtered.
The mysterious Turk was found buried alive in the courtyard.
It is one of the most gruesome stories associated with the French Quarter.
It is also almost certainly not a historical murder case.
But unlike many modern New Orleans ghost stories, this one has surprisingly old roots.
The Gardette-LePretre House
The house itself is quite real.
The present structure was built in 1836 for Joseph Coulon Gardette, a dentist. Builder Frederick Roy constructed the unusual three-and-a-half-story Greek Revival residence at the corner of Dauphine and Orleans streets.
In 1839, the property was purchased by Jean Baptiste LePretre, a wealthy merchant and planter who retained ownership until 1878.
Around 1850, the house acquired the elaborate cast-iron galleries that now make it one of the most recognizable buildings in the French Quarter.
Those facts can be documented.
Then the Sultan arrives.
And history becomes considerably less cooperative.
The Mysterious Tenant
The traditional story says that LePretre did not always occupy the house himself.
At some point, he was supposedly approached about renting the property to a wealthy man from Turkey.
Depending upon the version, the prospective tenant was either a sultan, the brother of a sultan, or a man waiting for his royal brother to arrive.
LePretre agreed.
Soon an extraordinary household moved into the mansion.
Heavy curtains supposedly covered the windows.
Doors and gates remained locked.
Large guards armed with scimitars stood outside.
Servants came and went.
And numerous women lived inside.
The neighborhood began talking.
Of course it did.
The Harem
Soon everyone supposedly knew that the mysterious foreigner maintained a harem inside the house.
Passersby smelled incense.
They heard unfamiliar music.
There were rumors of lavish parties and sexual excess.
The inhabitants rarely mingled with their neighbors, making the household even more intriguing.
Much of this imagery should immediately make us suspicious.
The story is filled with nineteenth-century Western stereotypes about the Ottoman world: harems, scimitars, incense, fabulous wealth, sensual women and mysterious Eastern men.
The Sultan’s Palace legend may tell us considerably more about nineteenth-century American fascination with the supposedly exotic “Orient” than it does about anyone who actually lived at 716 Dauphine Street.
But then the story becomes much darker.
Blood Beneath the Door
One morning, the house was silent.
The guards had disappeared.
The gate was unlocked.
Someone approaching the mansion supposedly noticed something beneath the front door.
Blood.
Authorities were summoned.
Inside, according to the most lurid versions of the legend, they encountered an almost unimaginable scene.
The inhabitants had been slaughtered.
Bodies had been mutilated.
Blood covered the rooms.
Some versions claim the victims were so badly dismembered that identifying them individually was impossible.
The carnage supposedly extended throughout the house.
Then investigators searched the courtyard.
The Hand in the Earth
There they noticed a human hand protruding from the ground.
They dug.
Beneath the soil was the mysterious Turkish occupant of the house.
He had been buried alive.
Depending upon the telling, he had been wounded first and then placed in a shallow grave, where he suffocated beneath the notoriously heavy New Orleans soil.
Everyone else was dead.
The killers were gone.
And nobody ever discovered who committed the massacre.
It is an extraordinary crime story.
There is only one major problem.
There appears to be no evidence that the massacre happened.
Where Are the Murders?
A slaughter of an entire household inside one of the largest residences in nineteenth-century New Orleans should have generated documentation.
Newspapers loved sensational crimes.
Police and court records should have existed.
Victims would have had identities.
There should have been an investigation.
Yet researchers looking for contemporary documentation of the Sultan’s Palace massacre have been unable to find it. One investigation of the legend found no corresponding newspaper accounts, despite searching historical New Orleans papers for references to the supposed event.
That is extremely difficult to reconcile with the scale of the alleged crime.
A massacre involving a wealthy foreign nobleman, numerous women, servants and guards would have been spectacular news.
Instead, the contemporary record is silent.
The Dates Don’t Behave Either
The chronology becomes even more troublesome because different versions place the massacre in completely different periods.
Some place it after the Civil War.
Others put it earlier in the nineteenth century.
Still others have pushed the story all the way back into the 1790s.
That cannot be correct.
The present Gardette-LePretre House wasn’t built until 1836.
Interestingly, however, there was an earlier house on the property.
Research cited by New Orleans writer Mike Scott indicates that a smaller brick-and-wood residence stood there before the current mansion was constructed.
And that leads us to something considerably more interesting.
The Legend Is Older Than the Sultan’s Palace
The massacre may not be historical.
But the story behind it is old.
One particularly important trail leads to nineteenth-century Louisiana historian Charles Gayarré.
In his History of Louisiana, Gayarré recorded a strange story associated with a house at the corner of Dauphine and Orleans streets.
The story involved the origin of a date tree remembered as the Tree of the Dead.
Significantly, Gayarré’s account was published in 1866.
That means some version of a mysterious foreigner and death associated with this particular corner was already circulating during the nineteenth century.
But Gayarré wasn’t describing the famous massacre exactly as we know it today.
And he wasn’t necessarily describing the present Gardette-LePretre mansion.
The story appears to have changed.
The Tree of the Dead
This may be where the legend becomes genuinely fascinating.
Gayarré’s older story was associated with an earlier house and garden at the same corner. Later generations apparently connected the tale with the much grander Gardette-LePretre mansion standing there.
Details accumulated.
A mysterious foreigner became connected with a sultan.
A household became a harem.
Mystery became murder.
Murder became massacre.
The victims multiplied.
The violence became increasingly grotesque.
Eventually the house itself became known as the Sultan’s Palace.
This is exactly how folklore often develops.
The story doesn’t necessarily appear fully formed.
It grows.
Was There Ever a Sultan?
There is no convincing evidence that an Ottoman sultan or his brother secretly occupied the Gardette-LePretre House.
That doesn’t mean no Turkish, Ottoman or Middle Eastern visitor ever stayed at the property.
New Orleans was an international port city. Foreign travelers, merchants and sailors were hardly unusual.
But identifying some vaguely plausible foreign visitor and declaring him the historical Sultan would be replacing one legend with another.
For now, the mysterious resident belongs to folklore.
And perhaps he always did.
Who Killed Everyone?
Once the massacre became established as part of the story, folklore naturally needed a murderer.
Several possibilities emerged.
Perhaps the mysterious resident had stolen treasure from his powerful brother.
Perhaps assassins had followed him across the Atlantic.
Perhaps pirates learned about the riches inside the house and attacked.
One particularly colorful version suggests religious authorities discovered the debauchery taking place inside and intervened.
None has meaningful historical evidence behind it.
They are solutions invented for a mystery that may itself have been invented.
But there is something revealing about them.
Nobody seems willing to let the massacre remain unexplained.
Every generation wants to finish the story.
The House Acquires Ghosts
The absence of a historical massacre hasn’t prevented the house from acquiring a substantial paranormal reputation.
People have reported seeing shadowy figures.
Others claim to hear screams or strange music.
The smell of incense is sometimes reported.
Some accounts describe the sounds of a party coming from inside when no celebration is taking place.
And figures have supposedly appeared behind the windows.
These reports inevitably became attached to the Sultan legend.
If people hear music, it must be the harem.
If they smell incense, it must come from the mysterious Turkish household.
If someone sees a figure, perhaps one of the massacre victims still wanders the mansion.
But there is an obvious difficulty.
If the massacre never occurred, who exactly is haunting the house?
A False History Doesn’t Necessarily Mean a False Haunting
This is where the Sultan’s Palace becomes more interesting rather than less.
Proving that a ghost story’s traditional explanation is wrong doesn’t necessarily explain every strange experience subsequently reported at the location.
People lived at 716 Dauphine for nearly two centuries.
The land was occupied even before the current mansion existed.
New Orleans itself has endured epidemics, hurricanes, fires, war and enormous social upheaval.
If someone genuinely experienced something unexplained inside the Gardette-LePretre House, there is no particular reason to assume the explanation must involve an imaginary Turkish massacre.
Perhaps the legend gave later witnesses a vocabulary for interpreting something they experienced.
A strange smell becomes incense.
Unexplained music becomes a nineteenth-century party.
A shadow becomes a murdered member of the harem.
Folklore can influence hauntings without necessarily creating the original experience.
The House Before the House
The earlier structure on the property is especially intriguing.
The current mansion dates from 1836, but the site had already been occupied for decades. Historical research places an earlier residence there by approximately 1780.
That complicates attempts to trace the legend.
When an old story says something happened “at the corner of Dauphine and Orleans,” later generations naturally associate it with the building standing there.
But buildings change.
Properties change.
Addresses remain.
A story can therefore become attached to a structure that didn’t even exist when the supposed event occurred.
That appears to have happened, at least in part, with the Sultan’s Palace.
The Perfect New Orleans Legend
The story survived because it fits New Orleans almost too perfectly.
A mysterious foreigner.
A magnificent French Quarter mansion.
Beautiful women hidden behind curtains.
Incense drifting through shuttered windows.
Secret parties.
Treasure.
Pirates.
Murder.
A body buried beneath the courtyard.
And ghosts.
It has everything.
Perhaps that should have made us suspicious from the beginning.
Real history is rarely so considerate of storytellers.
But Someone Was Telling the Story
Still, dismissing the Sultan’s Palace as a modern tourist invention would go too far.
That is the part I would preserve.
The specific massacre cannot presently be documented.
The house wasn’t standing when some versions claim the events occurred.
The familiar Sultan story appears to have accumulated substantial embellishment.
But an eerie story associated with this particular corner of New Orleans existed by the nineteenth century.
That makes it genuine folklore.
And genuine folklore has a history of its own.
The question changes from:
Who murdered the Sultan?
to:
What happened at this corner that caused people to keep telling stories about it?
That question is considerably harder to answer.
Legend Becomes History
There is another lesson hidden inside the Sultan’s Palace.
Once a story is repeated often enough, attribution disappears.
A ghost-tour guide tells it.
A travel writer repeats it.
A television program dramatizes it.
A website cites the television program.
Another book cites the website.
Eventually hundreds of sources appear to confirm the same event.
But all of them may descend from the same legend.
Repetition isn’t documentation.
New Orleans history is particularly vulnerable to this because its folklore is so good.
The temptation to believe is enormous.
Sometimes the most famous story about a building is the least historical thing about it.
What Really Happened at 716 Dauphine?
We know considerably more about the house than we do about its Sultan.
Joseph Coulon Gardette commissioned it in 1836.
Jean Baptiste LePretre purchased it in 1839.
The elaborate galleries appeared around the middle of the nineteenth century.
LePretre retained the property until 1878.
The house survived.
The Sultan cannot presently be documented.
Neither can the harem.
Neither can the massacre.
Neither can the buried man.
And yet the legend itself reaches surprisingly far back.
That is enough to make the place interesting without pretending folklore is a police report.
The Sultan’s Palace
Perhaps no blood ever flowed beneath the front door.
Perhaps nobody discovered mutilated bodies scattered throughout the rooms.
Perhaps no doomed Turkish nobleman awakened beneath the courtyard soil and realized he had been buried alive.
Those details belong to legend unless better evidence emerges.
But sometime during the nineteenth century, people began telling strange stories about this corner of Dauphine and Orleans.
They continued telling them.
The stories changed.
The old house disappeared.
A grander house replaced it.
The mysterious foreigner became royalty.
The deaths became a massacre.
And eventually the legend became so firmly attached to the Gardette-LePretre House that the building acquired another name entirely.
The Sultan’s Palace.
Perhaps visitors who report strange music and incense are experiencing nothing more than expectation inside one of New Orleans’ most storied houses.
Perhaps the old legend has become so powerful that people hear what they have been told to hear.
Or perhaps something really does linger at 716 Dauphine Street.
If so, there is a delicious possibility.
After all these years spent blaming a murdered Sultan and his unfortunate household, perhaps we have been haunting the wrong ghosts.
About the Author
