Sultan’s Palace: A Party That Ended In Death (Ep 74)

There is a beautiful old mansion in New Orleans’ French Quarter with a name that sounds like it belongs to another world: the Sultan’s Palace.

At 716 Dauphine Street, the Gardette-LePrete House became associated with one of the strangest legends in New Orleans history. According to the story, a mysterious foreign prince arrived with an enormous household, beautiful women, servants, guards and a fortune that seemed almost limitless. He supposedly lived in secrecy, hosted lavish parties and attracted the attention of the neighbourhood.

Then one night, the party ended in murder.

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Transcript

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New Orleans is one of those cities where it can be surprisingly difficult to tell where history ends and legend begins. The city has survived wars, epidemics, fires, political changes, hurricanes, enormous social transformations, and centuries of people arriving from different parts of the world, bringing with them their languages, religions, customs, and stories. And because of that mixture, New Orleans has always been a place where old stories tend to stay alive. Some are stories about real people, some are stories about real buildings, and some are stories that may have started with a small piece of truth and then changed every time someone told them. There is one particular mansion in the French Quarter that represents this perfectly. It stands at 716 Dauphin Street at the corner of Orleans Street, and if you look at the building today, you are looking at the genuine 19th-century New Orleans house, it's lovely, whose story can be followed through property records and architectural surveys. Now, the house is known historically as the Gardette Le Pret House, and it's also known by the much more mysterious name that folklore eventually gave it, the Sultan's Palace. The name comes from a story about a wealthy stranger who supposedly arrived in New Orleans with this enormous household, filled the mansion with beautiful women, servants, and guards, and spent his time giving lavish private parties, and behave in such a secretive way that the people around him became convinced that he was not simply a rich foreigner, but someone of royal blood. According to the legend, he was either a Turkish sultan himself, or more commonly, the brother of a sultan, a man who had supposedly escaped from the Ottoman world, carrying enormous wealth and members of his brother's harem with him. The stranger settled into the mansion and began living in a way that was so extravagant that the house became known as the Sultan's Palace. And for a while, the parties continued, and according to the legend, the neighbors could hear music and laughter coming from inside the building while having almost no idea what was actually happening behind the closed doors. But then, one night, everything changed. The story says that the celebration suddenly became a massacre, and that when people entered the house the following morning, they discovered that almost everyone inside had been brutally murdered. In some versions, blood has said to be running down on the front steps, while the bodies of the household were discovered throughout the building. The supposed Sultan's brother was allegedly found buried in the courtyard, with only part of his body visible above the ground. And now this story sounds almost too perfectly constructed to be true, which is why it is so tempting to tell in this straight historical mystery. But tonight I want to do something slightly different. I want to tell you the story of the Sultan Palace, but I also went and investigated because there is a problem that is sitting right in the middle of this supposedly 19th century massacre, you know, murder mystery. The building in the story did not exist when the story is supposed to have happened. And once I discovered that, I began to wonder, you know, what the Sultan Palace actually is? It is the site of a forgotten massacre, it is like a ghost story that grew out of the older New Orleans legends. Or is this this strangest thing about this house that, you know, something that didn't happen here, but the story managed to attach itself to a real building and survive for more than a sore century? So let's find out, shall we? Welcome back, guys, to the storytelling podcast, your cozy quarter of captivating tales. I'm your host Alejandra, and today we are traveling to New Orleans, Louisiana, one of my favorite cities, to explore the dark legend of the Sultan Palace. This is a beautiful 19th-century mansion. Well, the majority of buildings in the French quarter, they are beautiful. Um, and this is surrounded by one of the city's most disturbing stories, because it involves supposedly a mysterious foreign prince and lavish parties and a hidden household and a supposed massacre, and a burial that became part of New Orleans folklore. But there is an important detail that I want you to keep in mind throughout this episode, because this is a historical story and not the piece of fiction that we normally tell as well. But there is a difference between what we know and what people have claimed that happened there. Because, one, the house is real, the people who owned the house are were real, the property records are real, and the architecture is real, of course, it's there. But the story of the Sultan, however, belongs to this world of legends that New Orleans has. And you know, there is no reliable historical evidence, providing that a massacre actually happened there. And in fact, when we put the legend beside the historical records of the property, we find this contradiction that makes the whole story even more fascinating. So tonight we are going to follow the legend first, because it's a wonderful, strange story, and of course I had to bring it over, and then we are going to step back and look at the evidence because sometimes the truth behind these ghost stories is much more interesting than the ghost story itself. And just remind you that this channel is made for you to binge. Many more episodes are waiting for you here on the channel. If you prefer a visual experience, you can also find the episodes on YouTube where you can watch and listen at the same time. Before we get to the mysterious stranger, we need to understand the place where the story is supposed to have happened because the actual story of the 716 Dauphin Street is surprisingly well documented. You can find it. And the Library of Congress also preserves photographs and architectural documentations of the Lepret mansion at this address. So this house is a large one. It has three and a half story masonry building and is one of the features that makes it particularly striking. It's there, the ornate ironwork that surrounds the upper levels. And those galleries were added around 1850 and it transformed what the originally might have been more severe Greek revival structure into this elaborate building that people associate with the house today. Joseph Gardet did not keep the property for very long, and in April of 1839, three years after he constructed it, he sold it to Jean-Baptiste Lepret, a wealthy merchant and a banker who became the man most closely associated with the building in the historical record. Lepret owned the property for decades, and according to the property records preserved by the historic New Orleans collection, he and his family occupied the house for nearly half a century before the property was taken over by the Citizens Bank of Louisiana in 1878, following legal proceedings involving Lupret. That is the history that we actually have documented. There is no mysterious Sultan, there is no massacre, there is no royal household, no unexplained phenomenon disappearance. Instead, we have a wealthy New Orleans family living in this important house during the 19th century in a city that was changing rapidly. But there is one detail that becomes extremely important later. The property at the corner of Dauphin and Orleans Streets was there long before the present mansion was built. And the historic New Orleans collection property records trace ownership of the lot back to the 18th century. In 1783, the records describe a house on the corner owned by Victoire d'Utilet, described in the record as a free woman of color. That earlier house was made partly of wood and partly of brick, and it was obviously not the imposing mansion that stands there today, of course. And this means that the location itself was much older than the history of the current building. And that matters because it gives us a possible explanation for one of the most confusing aspects of this legend. The story can be attached to a location that existed before the mansion did. Okay. And people can remember that something supposedly happened at the corner of Dauphine and Orleans Street without necessarily remembering which building stood there at the time. And over generations, the location can remain while the architecture changed. Because the story will stay and the house will change. And eventually people began telling the story as if the current house was always there. And that appears to be exactly the kind of thing that happened with the story of the Sultan Palace. Now, the legend tells us that sometime during the late 18th or 19th century, a mysterious foreigner arrived in New Orleans with a fortune that seems almost impossible to explain. The exact details vary depending on the version of the story, there are many, but one of the best known written versions appears in Ellen Pitkin Schurt's 1922 book, Legends of Louisiana, in a story titled The Brother of the Sultan. The book is important because it gives us a very early printed version of the legends in the form that later became associated with the Gardette Le Pret house. Schwartz's version places the arrival of the stranger in 1792. According to the story, nobody in New Orleans really knew who the man was, but he was obviously wealthy, and his behavior encouraged people to speculate about his identity. Eventually, the rumor developed that he was connected to the Ottoman Empire and that he was either a Turkish Sultan or, you know, the brother of a Sultan. And the stranger did not arrive alone. His household was gigantic, and according to the legend, this included servants, eunuchs, and women who were described as members of the Sultan's harem. He also supposedly bought with him this extraordinary amount of money, jewelry, and luxurious furnishings, and he used all of it to transform his residence into something that people consider almost completely foreign in New Orleans. There were these elaborate carpets, rich fabrics, and expensive objects, and the atmosphere around the house became acresically mysterious because the stranger did not behave like someone that was part of the social life of the city. Instead, he remained surrounded by guards and secrecy. According to later versions of the story, windows were protected. Men carried weapons and watched the property, and the house became almost like a private fortress. The stranger's wealth, however, made it difficult for him to remain completely unnoticed, because people talk, and they wonder where the money came from, how many women live inside the house, and why the men appear so nervous about being discovered. And they wonder also whether the stories about his identity were actually true. In the most dramatic version that I found, he was not a simply wealthy traveler at all. He was supposedly to be a younger brother of a powerful sultan who had fled his homeland after stealing his brother's money and taking members of the royal harem with him. And if that were true, then this secrecy suddenly makes sense. He had to have a powerful enemy, so his brother. And he would have every reason to fear being found. And the luxurious parties would have been the perfect way for him to spend his stolen fortune while living thousands of miles away from the world he had escaped. But there was another version, another possibility. And maybe this story is the kind of tale that people enjoy telling about a wealthy foreign stranger. New Orleans was an international port, and the city had long been exposed to people from different parts of the world. Yet, in the 19th century, stories about the Ottoman Empire could easily become exotic fantasies for American audiences, particularly when they involve mysterious rulers, harems, treasure, and forbidden relationships. The stranger did not need to be a real sultan for people to call him one. He only needed to be mysterious. According to the legend, or one of them, but I'm just basing myself in the one that I think it is best. Once the mysterious men settled into the house, the building became one of the scenes of the extravagant private parties. Music could supposedly be heard from inside, and the atmosphere was completely different from the respectable social life normally associated with a wealthy New Orleans residence. The story describes a household where luxury and secrecy existed side by side, with expensive furnishings inside, guards outside, and while the people living nearby could only guess what was happening behind the walls. The parties became part of that fascination. There was supposedly beautiful women dressed in luxurious clothing and servants moving throughout the house, and music continuing late into the night, and a steady stream of activity that made it difficult for the neighbors not to wonder about their strange new resident. The stranger was living openly enough to attract attention, but privately enough to prevent anyone from really knowing him. And that contradiction is what makes the legend work, because it's a contradiction. And if he had simply been this ordinary rich man, there would be nothing mysterious about the house. Or if he was, you know, clearly identifying member of a royal family, people would have known who he was. But there was this space between the two. And he was wealthy, that was for sure. But it was unexplained. And you know, at that time, even today, but at that time, being foreign was fascinating. And it was he was visible, but he was also inaccessible. And every time people failed to find an answer, the story could become more elaborated. There are so many versions of this story and about this person. And eventually, according to one of the legends that I'm following, the celebrations became so extravagant that the mansion acquired its nickname. And the nickname, of course, is Sultan Palace. Because actually, people believe that it was impossible to establish something in those kind of parties and that wellness without being attached to the name of Sultan. And the building was just the place where it was. And then came the night when everything supposedly went wrong. Now, the exact circumstances of the alleged massacre differ between retellings. But the basic story is this one. So the household was celebrating, and there was music, there was laughter, there were people inside the mansion who had no idea what their lives were about to change. That's, you know. And according to the legend, the assassins arrive. The attackers, plural, were supposedly sent by the legitimate Sultan who had learned that his brother had escaped with his wealth and the members of his harem. And the men entered the house and attacked the occupants. And the party became a massacre. A very Tarantino movie. And the elegant rooms were transformed into this scene of a violence. And people who had spent their evenings celebrated, you know, they just cut down on the place where they stood. And the story is particularly gruesome in some later versions. That's not what I'm going to tell you here. But some people or some of the stories describe the bodies being, you know, cut down and blood running through the house and down the steps. As I said, a very terrant in the movie. And one of the most memorable details of this story was about the courtyard. The supposed Sultan's brother, he wasn't just killed, so someone sent him, you know, they made him like a note, like a warning. He was buried alive. And according to the legend, the attackers bury him in the garden and left him there. And when people discovered the scene the following morning, a hand was supposedly visible above the ground. And of course, this is a disturbing image, even for a ghost story. Because you have this beautiful mansion, this secretive household, something is going, you know, happening in this in this house, you have all this wealth, and then you have a celebration, and then an attack. And then in the morning, the silent house was had evidence of violence everywhere. But the story says that authorities eventually discovered what had happened, but the attackers already had disappeared. In some versions, yes, there is this kind of version, some pirates were responsible. And others suggest that the legitimate Sultan had sent assassins, which is also plausible, in my my honest opinion. But there are also versions in which the killers took the dead man's jewelry and escaped, which also makes sense. And you know, this mystery was never supposedly solved, so it's like a cold case. And of course, because the crime was never solved, the ghosts, it's the other part of the story, said they are still remaining in there. That the Sultan spirit became part of the house. And you know, people have claimed to hear strange sounds, later residents reportedly described footsteps, other spokes of screams, and there are also stories about the smell of incense and the music that still seems to come from empty rooms. The ghost of the Sultan, or the brother, was said to appear inside the building, sometimes described as a dark and shadowy figure. In other versions, the spirits of murder women were supposedly seen near the windows. And the massacre has become more than a story about murder. You know, it has become this explanation of a very strange thing that was experienced inside the house. But here is where we have our problem. We need to go back to the date. So if we go back, Ellen Schwert's version of the story precedes the arrival of the mysterious brother of the Sultan in 1792, remember? And then it's what's wrong with that? Because the Gardette Le Pret mansion, standing at 716 Dauphin Street, today was not built in 1792. On the historic New Orleans collection property records, the present building was constructed in the fall of 1835 and completed the 1836 by Joseph Coulomb-Gardet, remember? And then Jean-Baptiste Lepret didn't purchase the property until April of 1839. So, if we accept Schert's date at 1792, the famous Sultan brother, whatever you want to call him, could not have rented the mansion that we now call the Sultan's Palace, because the house wasn't there. There was a much earlier building on the property, and the land itself for sure existed for generations, but it was not the Grand Gardette-le Pret mansion that we see today. And this is one of those moments that you know the spooky story becomes suddenly the historical murder mystery that we that we like, actually. Because now we have to ask if the legend was completely invented, or if this was completely based on an older story that later moved to this particular address, or if Schertz simply changed the chronology while retelling these existing New Orleans legends. And there is an evidence that I found out pointing towards that third possibility. And before Ellen Schertz published Legends of Louisiana in 1922, there was already a story circulating about this foreign, mysterious, and violent death connected to the area. The 19th-century Louisiana historian Charles Gailler, if I'm saying correctly, included an earlier version of this story in his History of Louisiana. And the details were different, the dates were different, and the setting of the story was different. But the story was not fully developed, Salter's Palace legends, as we know today. Later researchers have suggested that Schertz may have taken elements from this earlier tradition and adapted it into the story that she published in 1922. So that would explain a lot. And the older story could have been provided by this, you know, basic framework of a foreign mystery visitor and the violent ending, while Schertz's version added the elements that made it much more vivid for her editors. So adding the Ottoman connection, adding also the harem part of the story, also adding the luxurious parties, and identifying the house with Jean-Baptiste Le Pret. And then she moved the date back to 1792. And the result of this was the story that sounded historical but did not match the documented history of the building. This is not unusual in folklore. Stories change because people want them to make sense. If you have a story that is associated with a particular corner of a city and a new building later appears on the same corner, eventually the story may become attached to the building. The location remains constant, but the architecture changes. And people remember the place as this exact structure. And after enough time, the distinction disappears. It's just a normal place that has a story. Nobody going to search for that. People actually love the folklore and the stories and the legends. And that for me, personally, seems the most plausible explanations for the Sultan's Palace story. Now, the story may be older than the mansion, but the mansion actually became the setup of this whole murder mystery. And this is where the documented history becomes much more interesting. Jean-Baptiste Lepret was not a fictional character invented for the legend. He was a real New Orleans businessman, and his connection with the house can be established throughout Property Records. We have everything in records. And he purchased the building from Joseph Coulomb Gardet in 1839 and remained associated until 1878. The historical New Orleans collection records show that the transfer of the property to Citizens Bank of Louisiana following a court case involving Le Pret. The house itself was also important in the social and financial life of the 19th century New Orleans. And an historical account preserved in the Vieux Carrès survey describes Le Pret as this prominent merchant and notes the role the house played in the city's social world. There, in even a longstanding story that the Citizens Bank of New Orleans was organized in one of the home's parlors, although the same historical material points out that this particular tradition is not accurate. Because the bank had been organized two years before the house was built, and I think that this is fascinating because it shows us exactly how historical legends form. Even the real history of the house contains stories that are attractive enough to be repeated. But you know, the house is what became famous, and the story becomes associated with it. And people say the same stories, there are tours about this, and later generations just hear the stories and just assume that okay, it's correct, and it's just a fun a part of fun. But the story is actually documented. But what exactly happened with the Sultan's Palace? Now, after Le Pret lost the property, the building went through several different phases. It was not the private home of one wealthy family, and its fortunes changed along with the neighborhood around it. And by the 20th century, the mansion had fallen into this less glamorous condition. The building was photographed and documented by the Historic American Building Survey and the Library of Congress that preserves photographs of the structure from the 1930s. If you are watching the visual video on YouTube, you can see the real photos. This is particularly useful because the photograph shows us the actual building before its later restoration, and they provide an important visual record of the mansion that had already acquired its reputation as the Sultan's Palace. And during the 1940s, the building was used by the New Orleans Academy of Art, according to the accounts of its later history, before eventually falling into a period of decline. And by the middle of the 20th century, it had become much more run down, and stories about the mysterious house continued to circulate. Then, in the 1960s, the property was purchased and restored and eventually being converted into apartments. So the building survived, but the people who were living there were changed and the purpose of the child of the house changed, the seat itself changed, but the legend still remained. And once a building has a ghost story attached to it, almost every strange event that occurs it will fit on our murder mystery story. And now talking about the spooky story of the Sultan Palace. And people have claimed that the paranormal experiences inside the building for decades. And some accounts describe hearing footsteps when nobody was present, others describe strange screams or music. And there are also stories of a dark figure appearing inside one of the apartments. One of the most recent versions of the haunting concerns Frank D'Amico's wife, who reportedly lived in the upper part of the building in the late 1970s. According to the account, she saw a dark figure standing near the foot of her bed, and when she turned on the light, the figure simply disappeared. Stories like this are difficult to verify, of course, because they depend on personal testimony. There is no physical evidence. But that doesn't mean that the people who reported it are lying. A person can have a frightening experience without understanding what would cause it. And an old building has sounds. You know, wood expands and contracts, pipe makes noises, windows move, people wake up suddenly from sleep, and shadows can appear differently depending on the light. And when someone already knows that the building has a reputation for being haunted, it is natural for an unexplained experience to be interpreted throughout the interpretation. Their reputation, actually. But there is also something interesting about the consistency of the stories. The Sultan or the brother remains the central figure. People continue to describe a male apparition associated with the building. And the legend of the murdered household gives people this ready-made explanation for S-rage experiences. If you hear someone's footsteps in an old house, oh it's the household. If they hear footsteps in the Sultan's palace, you know, we can identify it because of the legends. And perhaps the Sultan is still walking through the rooms, and perhaps one of the women of the household is still there. And perhaps the screams are echoes of the massacre. That is the power of folklore and legends, because it gives meanings to things that otherwise would remain unexplained. But now, after I was doing the research about it, I had this big question, and I think that the majority of you are going to ask it. If an entire household had been murdered in this major mansion in the 19th century, you would expect some kind of historical trace, right? You know, newspapers, police records, court records, you know, names of victims, uh, reports about discovery of bodies, investigating the death. And we do not have that kind of evidence for the alleged sultan massacre. The story, it's it's a folklore sources and not this crime documentation. We can find documentation in the house, but we cannot find about that person itself. The only thing that we have is Shird's um story. And I don't think that she invented the whole story from nothing, but it means that the version connected to Sultan's stories and the Leprette property, it's it was printed later on and not on the event time. So we have everything documented regarding the house, but it doesn't make sense the dates because we are basing ourselves into the shirt's 1922, you know, the her story that dates back to the 1700s. But the house was built in the 1800s, late 1800s, so it doesn't it doesn't make sense, but we know that the house is there, but we can I can I didn't find anything about the massacre, uh, no records, no whatsoever, and I'm not the only one because I went after um everything that I could find about this legend. But now, what really happened? And I think that there are three possibilities, and none of them completely satisfies me. The first one is that there was never a massacre at all, and that the Sultan story was simply a piece of folklore that became attached to one of the most impressive houses in the French Quarter. The second possibility is that the legend contains some fragments of an older event that has been transformed with different stories, dates, and characters and became mixed together over time until the original story it's nowhere to be found. And then we have the third possibility is that something happened at that location that we no longer have enough evidence to reconstruct, and that you know, later generations just turned whatever they they do into this dramatic story of the Sultan. And I cannot honestly choose one of the possibilities and prove it. There is no evidence, this is where the evidence actually ends. But perhaps that is exactly why this story has survived, because it has all the drama. If we have police reports naming names and victims and identifying the murdered or anything, if historians had discovered Sultan's identity and confirmed the massacre, the story would simply be another historical crime. But instead, we have a real house with real owners, an older property, a story recorded in the 20th century, and a legend that is attached to it but doesn't make sense. So the house is the only evidence that we have of the story feeling real. And that is a dangerous thing for history because buildings will survive and the stories will change towards it. And this house can stand exactly in the same place for hundreds of years, and the story will be retold every single time differently. But as I said before, architecture will remain, and nobody can tell the truth apart from the legend. And you know that I like to bring episodes that everyone doesn't find anywhere, it's not very normal to find about the Sultan's Palace um legend, and it actually there is a very spooky story around it, and if of course it's fun to read it and to see it, but I like to bring that part of the historical art with documentation because there is online, and you know, this is not the story that oh it simply happened because we do have evidence that doesn't say that. It's I cannot tell you that this was completely invented, but I cannot fit the right things to say okay, this happened, this didn't happen, because there is no there is no thing, but you know, this is folklore in New Orleans, and of course the house is there and it's beautiful. I love the house. I love well, you know my fascination for New Orleans by now in the French quarter because of the architecture of it, the the mystic of things. But when you visit places like the Sultan Palace, because you can visit it, um, there is a lot of tours, of course, you cannot enter because of the apartments, um, but there is this aura, as the younger kids say, that it makes you less comfortable, you know, when you have a legend and you've heard many stories, and even if it doesn't, you know, you don't see anything, do you not hate anything, but you can feel that thing, that mystique attached to the to the building. But I couldn't find me and a lot of people royal identities or dates that match the story with the building, and there is no massacre. So what you discover from the story is that belongs in Louisiana legends, which is the which they are so good, to be honest, and and that's why people continue to do the tours, and you can find it more about the Sultan's Palace. And this is a story for New Orleans, too. There is no ghost of Mother Sultan walking around the corridors, and the mansion is there in the 716 Dauphin Street and has survived for almost 200 years. And whether you believe that he is there or not, and the legend becomes part of the history of the house. So, you know, next time that you hear someone say that the entire household was murdered inside the Sultan's Palace, remember that there is another story underneath that one. And the story of New Orleans mansion built in the 1830s, and how the next person lost the property. And if you ever find yourself walking through the French quarter at night, you might pass Dolphin Street and look up at the old mansion for a moment. And you will never know if the party did exist, or if the sultan was actually proved to live there, and there is no reliable historical record confirming the massacre. But it doesn't mean that we cannot have like that piece of spooky story of New Orleans. And this is the story today about the house that became a palace, a stranger became a sultan, and this rumor that became a legend, and this legend is what I brought to you today. And this was today's episode, guys. I hope you liked it. And comment below and share your thoughts. What do you think that has happened? Do you like this type of historical murder mysteries or just mysteries? And you know, to deconstruct it. But share your thoughts on the comments below. And it's always nice to hear from you. And I promise that I have more episodes ready here on the storytelling podcast. And just remind you that this channel is made for you to binge, and many more episodes are waiting for you here on the channel. And if you prefer a visual experience, you can also find the episodes on YouTube where you can watch and listen at the same time. Thank you for listening. And please remember that if you'd like to send your stories with special topics to be shared on the next episodes, please send them to the storytelling podcast 8080hmail.com or follow me on social media at the storytelling podcast official. But before you go, if you haven't done that already, I would love for you to click on the follow or subscribe button and see you on the next episode.