 The Deep South is a cultural area in the southeastern part of the United States. Atlanta, Georgia is part of the Deep South. According to culture and folklore, there are three sisters of the Deep South. They are Charleston, South Carolina, Savannah, Georgia, and New Orleans, Louisiana. We have covered both Charleston and Savannah on this channel. I have a lot of heritage in Charleston. Charleston and Savannah were both mostly settled by English settlers, although Charleston did take in a few French Huguenots who were trying to escape the brutality of Catholicism during the Protestant Reformation. New Orleans, however, was a French outpost. These three sisters of the South are described as followed. Charleston, South Carolina is described as the beautiful sister of the South. Savannah, Georgia is described as the dirty sister of the South, and New Orleans, Louisiana is described as the wicked sister of the South. But how did this tiny little French outpost in the Bayou end up becoming one of the most notoriously evil and wicked cities in our nation? But before we go any further, you know what to do. Please hit that subscribe button and give us a like. As always, a very, very, very special thank you to all of our producers and our Patreons here at Esoteric Atlanta. Without you guys, we could not do what we do. If you would like to join our Patreon community, there is a link down in the description box below. Welcome to Esoteric Atlanta. My name is Bryce, and today on our first episode in our new series on New Orleans, we are going to be talking about the Casket Girls. As I said in the opening, most of my personal heritage comes from Charleston, South Carolina. I myself was born in South Carolina, and that's where my mother's family lived for many, many generations. My mother's mother, my maternal grandmother, the Stroms, immigrated into what was then Charleston from Germany in the 1600s. Our low country lineage runs deep. Well, according to my father's mother, my paternal grandmother, I also have heritage in New Orleans. You see, the state of Georgia that I live in today was at one point a penal colony. Before the United States won its independence from Great Britain, Georgia was a land mass that England was sending its prisoners to. Once America won its independence, we started to see the colonization of Australia under the same purpose. Well, the only grandparent that I have that is actually from Georgia is my dad's mother. She grew up in South Georgia, closer to the Florida, Alabama state line. And again, according to her, her ancestors came up through New Orleans. They themselves were not prisoners, but rather were French and decided to take their chances on the New World. In fact, that whole area from Mobile, Alabama to Biloxi, Mississippi to, yes, New Orleans was all French territory. So that makes sense to me that her line, her family, would have come up through this port eventually landing in South Georgia, where my great grandfather ran a dairy farm. You can even see the validity to her claims by the way her maiden name was spelled. Now I'm not going to say her maiden name just because she's my only grandparent still alive and I don't really want to dox her, but her maiden name was said in a very English way, but its spelling was incredibly French. The folklore around New Orleans is so legendary that most people all over the globe know about it. Vampires, ghosts, voodoo, and a very, very high case of men and missing people. But where did this all begin? Well, for starters, like everywhere in the deep south, the terrain here is really, really harsh. I've spoken about the weather a lot. It is so freaking hot down here in the south here in the summertime that honestly I have no idea how the settlers survived in their long dresses and petticoats. We also have a lot of Swampland. Swampland does exist along the coast of Georgia. We have the Okevenoke swamp here in South Georgia as well as in Louisiana where it's called a Bayou. There's a famous quote, man versus nature, nature will always win. And the Bayou is a force to be reckoned with. It's the home of alligators, of poisonous snakes, dangerous spiders, and the ability for someone to go missing whether they want to or not. This harsh terrain of the Bayou was one of the reasons why our story exists today on the Casket Girls. Now, if you've been on this channel for a very long time, you know that a few months back we took a look into the French court and the French aristocracy. I have linked those videos down in the description box below. Now we know that all the royal bloodlines allegedly dabble in Luciferianism and Satanism. However, it seems that the French royal bloodline and the French aristocrats, the elite, if you will, were a little bit more open about their practices. And it seems from my research that they brought these practices into the new world with them. Now, of course, the French aren't solely responsible for this. We have a fair amount of voodoo and hoodoo also in Charleston, but it seems that they were the ones who opened up this portal. Now before we go into these stories, as I say a lot when we cover different states, different countries, and different cities, I'm not talking about the average person. New Orleans, I believe, is one of the funnest and most fantastic cities that we have in this nation. I have nothing but love for the city of New Orleans. I have a lot of friends that are from New Orleans. And they are wonderful, wonderful people and come from wonderful, wonderful families. Once again, I'm speaking about a very specific elite group of people. And these heavy players in this elite group of people and the stories we covered over the French aristocracy also, also come up in the history of New Orleans. Now there's a lot about our history that we're a little bit unsure of. Before this great awakening, we pretty much believed the history books. Now I'm not saying the history of America is completely wrong. Yes, as people of European descent, we do pretty much know when our relatives came over because our relatives kept notes and told the generations and the stories were passed on, as such. However, the whole story of the white man not coming to America, to this continent, until Christopher Columbus is completely bunk. Yes, again, we acknowledge that the Vikings were here first. But there's also some interesting claims about there being Roman architect found here, as well as a lot of artifacts from Egypt, including the possibility of allegedly there being mummies, Egyptian mummies in the Grand Canyon. So a lot of the beginnings of this country I now take with a grain of salt, we don't really know what happened specifically. Remember, the powers that be are the ones that write our history books, and they only tell us what they want us to know, regardless of whether it's true or not. But according to the history books, of course, this land was Native American land for about 1300 years before the white man stepped foot into the bayou of Louisiana. At this point, once again, the French government had three outposts in the new American world. You see the French government all the way over in France was really more concerned with what was happening over in Canada. We know a huge part of Canada still is French speaking. But their interest in coming down to the deep south, as we call it today, had a lot to do with the fact that England and Spain were gaining ground on this area of the new world. The French Royal Court was more interested in closing off the Mississippi River from the English people. And so they came down to this area and they set up three ports. Again, this was Biloxi, now we know Biloxi, Mississippi, Mobile, Alabama, and of course New Orleans, Louisiana. In the year 1698, the then King Louis XIV of the House of Bourbon picked two brothers to lead the expedition in to Louisiana. These two brothers were from the French-governed area of Montreal and what is today Canada. This was Pierre Lamoye-sur-Devenville, who was 38 at the time, and Jean-Paptiste Lamoye-Devenville, who was only 18 at the time. They officially set up camp on what would turn out to be New Orleans on the 3rd of March of 1699. As we move forward in the story, we are going to refer to these brothers by their first names, Pierre and Jean-Paptiste, just to make it a little bit easier, mostly on myself than on anybody else because my French is horrific. Now the thing about Pierre and Jean-Paptiste is that as explorers, especially as explorers of a European descent, a.k.a. white men, they had a better way of handling the Native Americans than other explorers at the time. This was because they had had experience with the Native Americans up in Canada. Many of the explorers were quite brutal when they came in to conquer this land. Now a lot of people liked to harp on this and as sad as it was, it's no different than anything else that's happened in the history of mankind. Since the beginning of time, different communities have gone in and invaded other lands and taken over. This wasn't just specific to the Europeans. This is just a human quality, not an ethnic quality. But Pierre and Jean-Paptiste, because they already had dealings with Native Americans, they knew that in order to succeed in creating this outpost for France, that they needed to make the Native Americans their friends and not their enemies. They decided that in these different ports they were setting up for the French government that they would regulate these ports to be trading posts. They told the Native Americans living in the area that they wanted to do business with them. By explaining that they wanted to do business with the Native Americans meant that they valued what the Native Americans had to offer. And because they approached the Natives with value, the Native Americans respected them and gave them dignity in return. The only problem was that the Native Americans knew how to handle the elements of the Deep South, where these two little French boys who were living up in Canada had no idea how to handle the dangerous natural elements that exist down here in the South even to this day. We're talking yellow fever, malaria, insects, alligators, all sorts of stuff that really hindered the growth of a new civilization. Pierre, being the oldest brother, understood that he really needed the help of the French court if they were going to survive. He took many voyages back and forth to France, begging for more help and more supplies. Unfortunately, though, it appears that the Royal Government of France wasn't super interested in making sure their citizens were safe. They just wanted to block the British from being able to get any further into the new world. The new world was quite a lucrative place, full of products that would make a country wealthy, and at this point the French government was starting to find holes and leaks in their financial prosperity. The full extent of their financial issues wouldn't come into play, however, until Louis XVI and the French Revolution. Any colonists they did get coming into New Orleans at this time from France did not last very long, and it came to the point the only people living in this area were people that kind of had to be there, like French soldiers. Unfortunately, when Pierre took his fourth trip back to France to once again beg the royal family for help, he was drafted into yet another war. Pierre then lost his life, leaving his little brother Jean Baptiste alone in this new world. I can't imagine how stressful this would have been for Jean Baptiste. After all, he was considered the man in charge, and all of his people were getting sick, and because of the desperate times, desperate measures were happening. The colonists, the soldiers were starting to fight amongst themselves. They also had the pressure of being surrounded by enemy troops. We had England on one side on the east coast, and Spain on the other on the west coast. In 1712, they tried to solve this problem by making the territory of Louisiana like a proprietorship. For example, having landlords and tenants. So try to, again, go with this idea of it being a business. But even under this, they could not get people to stay in Louisiana. So they did what the English did. They started to send prisoners. In the year 1718, Jean Baptiste gave their territory a name. He called it La Novella de Hollines, or as we know today, New Orleans. Jean Baptiste also created an 11 by 7 square block rectangle that was going to be the plan for this new city of New Orleans. This area is called the French Quarter today. As the colony kept failing, a man named John Law stepped in. This was the first big boom for the settlement of New Orleans, and even though it was built kind of on a pyramid scheme as we call it today, it did give New Orleans the push it needed. You see, John Law was a Scotsman, and he had been sentenced to death in London for participating in a duel. Needless to say, I guess he won the duel. Well, there's two different stories about how he got out of his sentence. One story claims that he escaped, and he escaped to France. Another story claims that because of his family's good standing within the British Empire, that they were able to negotiate a deal to let him loose. The most important message to take away from John Law's story is that this guy was a wild man. After his release from prison, he ended up in France where he got very, very wealthy from gambling, and he decided to set up the company of the West. This would become known as the Mississippi Bubble. Basically, he got people to buy stock in his company, and with the money that he collected from his company, he would pay people to then move to New Orleans. But paying them wasn't enough. He decided to do his own little fake news or propaganda. He put up posters all over France and other parts of Europe claiming that this area in the bayou was like a second paradise. How alluring was that for people in Europe. They'll pay me to move to this new world that's almost like the Garden of Eden. Are you kidding me? And here I am in this war in Europe where the Protestants and the Catholics and the monarch are constantly at each other's throats. Hell yeah, I'll take you up on your offer, John Law. Give me the money, put me on a boat, and send me to this paradise in the new world. In 1721, Law even got a bunch of German settlers who were really good at farming to take him up on his offer and move into the French territory of the new world. FYI, the French and the German colonists in the Louisiana territory would end up being very, very strong allies later on in the story of New Orleans when Spain took over. This Ponzi scheme of John Law's introduced the word millionaire into the French language. But like all Ponzi schemes, John Law's Mississippi bubble popped. Investors started to get nervous when they heard that this was not a paradise but indeed a terrain of living hell. They pulled their money out and the whole company flopped. After this, once again, John Law fled town. In 1722, the capital of the French territory in the new world moved from Biloxi to New Orleans. And even though the company of the West and John Law's pyramid scheme had brought in new fresh blood to the colony of the French in the new world, they were still short on women. To solve this problem, the French government decided that they would now send female prisoners over to the new world. These were typically women who had been arrested in brothels. Once these women got to the new world against their will, a lot of the men in New Orleans did not want to marry them. They wanted good Christian women, specifically young women who would be healthy enough to deal with the elements of New Orleans and bear them children. The leaders of New Orleans knew that the French government had provided these young women to other colonists under French rule before. And now they were asking for the same thing. They were asking for casket girls. During the French settlement of Canada, the French government sent an order of nuns called the Ursuline nuns to help the French government establish a civilized society. They taught Christianity to the natives. And when the French government started sending over these casket girls, the Ursuline nuns were there to help them get settled into their new homes and to find the suitable husbands. You see, the word casket originally comes from the French word that means a trunk or a suitcase. These were girls that were contracted to come over to this new world to then be married off to another man. Basically, this is like the 15th and 16th century version of a male order bride. In 1704, a group of these casket girls were sent to Mobile, Alabama, although they called these girls the Pelican girls because they came over on a ship called the Pelican. And in 1719, while Biloxi was still the capital of the French territory, a group of casket girls were sent to Biloxi. But now into the 1720s, New Orleans being the new capital of the French territory and the leaders of the city wanted their own batch of women. Before the French government would send over these casket girls to New Orleans, they first sent another group of Ursuline nuns just like they had done in Canada. The Ursuline nuns came to New Orleans in 1727. These particular Ursuline nuns were sent from Rouen, France. And a year later in 1728, they received their first group of casket girls. As time went on, the Ursuline nuns built their first convent in 1734. And then the second convent was built in 1751. This is the convent that you can still see to this day. And it is technically the oldest building in the Mississippi Valley. Well over the years, more and more groups of casket girls were sent to New Orleans. The Ursuline nuns at this point had the reputation of being the saviors of the city. I have my doubts that any high-ranking Catholic has been the savior of anyone. Legends of vampires were already known throughout Europe. And we know from previous videos that the French royal family and its aristocrats participated in vampiric activity, if you know what I mean. And many people believe that it was in one of these shipment of casket girls that the first vampires were released into the American continent. Late one night, a ship coming from France ducks in the port of New Orleans. On this ship were a bunch of young women, young women claiming to be the casket girls. They were there to marry men of New Orleans. Except for these women seemed quite odd. Their skin was really, really pale. They themselves were very, very thin. And their caskets or suitcases were much bigger than that of the girls that came before them. In fact, these caskets, these suitcases, could have held a body. The size of these suitcases started the tongues of the town wagging. Why were these suitcases so big? Did the king himself send these girls with more clothes? Clothes that were more adaptable to the environment of New Orleans? Or perhaps did these girls come with a dowry? And that dowry was why their suitcases were so big. Another peculiar thing is that nobody knew who these girls were. Most of the girls that came before them came from good families or from convents or orphaned themselves and taken care of by the French court. They had paperwork. They weren't strangers. But these girls were a complete mystery. When they got to the convent, these strange and peculiar looking women told the nuns to place their trunks into the attic and to make sure that their trunks and the attic stayed sealed until the time came for them to be opened. After a while, some of the nuns got curious about these strange suitcases and so they snuck up into the attic just to see what was in there. Once they got into the attic, though all of the trunks were open and empty, the nuns believed right away that what the girls brought in with them were vampires from Europe, possibly vampires sent by the royal court. The nuns immediately had the window sealed up with nails that apparently had been blessed by the pope, although I don't know what kind of blessing a satanic pope can give. Two different stories started to emerge. One that the girls themselves were not vampires, but were associated with the cargo of vampires brought into this new world. They acted as agents for the vampires to bring them into this city for nefarious reasons in homage to their god Lucifer. Other people believed that the girls themselves were vampires. That's why they looked so sickly and so skinny. It is said that even to this day, the attic windows and the Ursuline convent are still glued shut. However, in my opinion, the damage was already done. Do I believe something nefarious was brought into New Orleans with these casket girls? I actually do, because the idea of the casket girls was not a new one. And for one batch of girls to come in that was quite odd to still be talked about to this day meant that something really peculiar happened. However, I don't believe the girls themselves were the vampires. I believe the first theory that the girls were associated somehow with these vampiric families and were sent to deliver this curse to the new world. I believe the girls themselves were probably married off, but marriage again wasn't their first priority. Their first priority was to do the deeds of Lucifer, of this religion that drinks the blood of humans. Does it matter that the convent boarded up the windows? No, because these ancient creatures very easily could have found a new home. Legends of vampires still move throughout the city of New Orleans to this day. And in our next episode, we're going to talk about two of the most feared vampires in New Orleans. Alright you guys, let me know your opinions down in the comment section below. In doing research, I found a group of people that were descendants of these casket girls. For all I know, I could possibly also be a descendant of the casket girl. I have no idea. But if you're familiar with this story or if you know that you're a descendant of the casket girl, please leave us your story down in the comment section below. I hope that you're all having the start of a really, really wonderful week. Thank you again to Josh Peke for doing our music. If you would like to purchase the opening song once more, there is a link down in the description box below. And thank you to Todd Roderick for helping me get this video out to you all today. I'll talk to you soon. Bye!