Marita Woywod Crandle

New Orleans has a reputation as a home for creatures of the night. Popular books, movies and television shows have cemented the city’s connection to vampires in public imagination. In the early days of Louisiana’s colonization, rumors swirled about the fate of the Casket Girls, a group of mysterious maidens traveling to the New World from France with peculiar casket-shaped boxes. A charismatic man who moved to the French Quarter in the early 1900s eerily resembled a European aristocrat of one hundred years prior bearing the same name. A pair of brothers terrorized the town with their desire to feed on living human blood during the Great Depression. Marita Woywod Crandle investigates the origins of these legends so intricately woven through New Orleans’s rich history.