Witch of the French Opera
Damiana Smoked Irish Breakfast Bourbon Ice Cream with French Opera Cake
The tale of the witch of the French opera is shrouded in mystery, myth, and murder, as most ghost stories are. The drama begins in 19th-century New Orleans, where Marguerite O’Donnell was born to a large family headed by an Irish immigrant father and a beautiful French mother. In 1860 at the age of 18, Marguerite got married to man who a year later left to fight in the Civil War, which killed all of Marguerite’s brothers and turned her husband into a miserable man.
To escape her home life and husband, Marguerite, claiming to be much younger, started working as chorus girl at Bourbon Street’s French Opera House. During the next several years, Marguerite entertained Creole society, a yellow fever epidemic killed her husband, and she became the lover of old and wealthy Monsieur de Boisblanc.
By the end of the 19th century, a 60-year-old Marguerite inherited Boisblanc’s money and opened a pastry shop called Les Camelias close to the opera house. Her pastries were so popular that Marguerite hired another pastry chef—a 21-year-old Floridian man named Carlos—and the two began an affair.
But Carlos was also having an affair with a woman closer to his age. Marguerite discovered the betrayal and decided to seek revenge—but not before killing herself above the pastry shop. Just a few days later, people along Bourbon Street witnessed a ghostly apparition head toward the boarding house on St. Ann Street where Carlos and his lover were staying. A girl living there claimed that the ghost was Marguerite, who entered her heartbreaker’s room and cranked up the gas, exacting her vengeance.
Marguerite transformed into the “Witch of the French Opera” over the next decade when she could be seen striding from the opera house to the boarding house every night. When a new couple moved into that haunted room, they found a love letter hidden in the wall. Throwing it into the fire, a wail was released, and Marguerite’s ghost was hardly seen again.
A few years later, in 1919, the French Opera House mysteriously burned to the ground, cutting short the production of Carmen, an opera about a woman’s love triangle and violent death.
