ɪɴʙʀᴇᴅ ᴄᴀɴɴɪʙᴀʟs You Didn’t Know Existed — The Macabre Legend of the Broussard Family | HO!!

In the forgotten swamps of northern Louisiana, where Spanish moss hangs like funeral veils over the black water, legend tells of a family whose name locals still refuse to speak after dark. They lived cut off from the world, two hours from the nearest town, surrounded by cypress and decay — and for four years, they hunted humans like deer.

Their name was Broussard, and what authorities uncovered in 1905 turned from rumor into one of the most chilling cases of systematic cannibalism in American history.

This wasn’t a tribe of savages or a band of backwoods killers. This was a family business. A dynasty built on blood, perfected through generations of inbreeding, and hidden behind the quiet hum of the Louisiana swamp.

The Family in the Swamp

For over sixty years, the Broussard family had lived on a decaying stretch of land near Shreveport. The property, reachable only by muddy trails that vanished after heavy rain, was as isolated as any place could be in the dawn of the twentieth century.

At its center stood the matriarch, Clemence Broussard, seventy-five years old and feared by her own blood. Small, sharp-eyed, and wrapped in black, she ruled her kin with the kind of authority born from centuries of superstition. Her son Alcide, gaunt and silent, acted as the patriarch in name only. Clemence was the true power — a woman who believed her family had survived by “keeping the blood pure.”

That purity came at a cost.

Generations of inbreeding had twisted the Broussard line. The adults were pallid and long-limbed, their speech a fractured dialect of old French. The children, more creature than child, spoke in whispers and avoided strangers’ eyes. They rarely left the property except to trade salted meat at a small general store in town.

That meat — pale, tender, and unnervingly aromatic — would become the key to unraveling one of the darkest secrets the South has ever buried.

The Meat They Sold

At first, no one questioned the Broussards’ sudden prosperity. From 1901 onward, they began visiting Shreveport more often, bringing large quantities of salted meat wrapped neatly in cloth. The portions were uniform, the cuts almost professional.

Locals assumed they had taken to hunting wild boar or deer. But the local merchant, a man named Henry Duvall, noticed something unsettling.

“It wasn’t pork. It wasn’t venison,” he would later testify. “It smelled… wrong. Sweet, almost. Like something that shouldn’t be eaten.”

The Broussard children handled the sales with eerie precision. They would line up silently beside the counter, sniffing the dried meat in the shop like animals evaluating prey. When Duvall asked what kind of game it was, the eldest daughter, Ulalie, always gave the same answer:

“Swamp meat.”

No one pressed further.

The Disappearances

By 1902, travelers began vanishing on the roads near the Broussard land.

The first were the Morrisons, a family of five moving west for work. Their wagon was found abandoned, their horses still tethered but trembling. All their belongings — money, tools, even the children’s toys — remained untouched. No blood, no footprints, no signs of struggle. It was as if they had been swallowed by the swamp.

Two weeks later, another family vanished. Then another.

By the end of 1903, eighteen families had disappeared — forty-two people in total — without a trace. The only constant was geography: every wagon was found within a few miles of the Broussard property.

Locals began avoiding the area altogether. Some spoke of ghosts or swamp creatures. Others whispered of something worse — something human.

The Priest Who Knew Too Much

It was Father Gilbert Horton, a parish priest with more faith than sense, who first dared to investigate. He had long been uneasy about the Broussards’ secrecy and their refusal to attend church. During one of his walks, the wind carried a sickly-sweet smell through the swamp — a smell that led him to a patch of freshly eroded soil.

There, he found fabric, shoes, and small children’s toys half-buried in the mud. And deeper still — teeth.

That night, he wrote in his journal:

“I have found proof of something monstrous. I cannot bring myself to believe it. But I fear I must.”

The next morning, Father Horton rode to Shreveport and met with Sheriff Augustus Landry, a man hardened by decades of frontier law. He brought a small cloth doll — stained brown and crusted with something that wasn’t mud. The fabric matched the dress of one of the missing Morrison children.

Sheriff Landry called for a search party.

The Swamp of Bones

On September 2, 1905, twelve men and four bloodhounds entered the Broussard swamp. Within hours, the dogs began howling. The men dug into the soft ground and unearthed an acre-wide burial pit filled with bones, shoes, and personal belongings.

Children’s shoes.

Wedding rings.

A half-rotted Bible.

Dr. Rodney Manning, the local coroner, examined the bones. His report confirmed everyone’s worst fear: the cuts were surgical. Flesh had been removed cleanly, joints separated with precision. Whoever did it had butchered livestock before — and done it many, many times.

“It was an abattoir,” Dr. Manning later said. “Only the livestock were people.”

Sheriff Landry knew what that meant.

The next morning, he led fifteen armed men to the Broussard property.

The Slaughterhouse

What they found defied belief.

Behind the sagging main house were three sheds. One was a killing room — long wooden tables, butcher’s hooks, knives, bone saws, and barrels filled with salt. Another was for storage — racks of dried meat, labeled in French with chilling precision:
“Jeune fille” (young girl).
“Homme fort” (strong man).
“Tendre enfant.”

The third shed was for trophies: piles of clothing, jewelry, and toys belonging to the missing families. Some items were in use — a child wearing another’s shoes, a woman stirring stew with a baby’s silver spoon.

When Landry’s men surrounded the property, chaos erupted. The Broussards scattered into the swamp like startled animals. Gunfire echoed through the cypress. By dusk, only seven had been captured — Clemence, her daughter Cordelia, and five children.

The others — Alcide, Ulalie, Budro, Tibideaux, Celeste, and two others — vanished into the wilderness.

The Confessions

The interrogations that followed became the most horrifying in Louisiana’s history.

Clemence, the matriarch, showed no remorse. Sitting in a straight-backed chair, she told the sheriff she had “simply fed her family.”

“We didn’t kill for pleasure,” she said. “We killed for necessity. The Lord helps those who help themselves.”

Cordelia, her daughter, went further — explaining their process in chilling detail. Families traveling alone were lured to the property by the Broussard children pretending to be lost or hungry. Once inside, the adults were ambushed and killed swiftly — “no screaming, just a hammer to the head.”

The bodies were then processed like cattle. Organs salted, bones cleaned, meat divided by age and tenderness.

“Meat is meat,” Cordelia told investigators. “Family is family. Business is business.”

They sold half in town, ate the rest at home.

The Children Who Ate Flesh

The five captured children — Octave (12), Sidonie (10), twins Alce and Anatol (8), and little Azélie (6) — had known no other life.

Dr. Manning’s medical report described them as “products of four generations of inbreeding.” They were physically frail, mentally delayed, but disturbingly articulate about their work.

When asked what they ate, Sidonie replied:

“People food. The best kind. Not butcher’s meat — that meat is old.”

Octave spoke of “choosing” the right kind of victim, explaining that “children taste sweeter than grown folks.” The twins fought over which part they liked best — one preferred ribs, the other thighs.

They didn’t understand why the sheriff looked sick.

The Trial

The trial of the Broussard family drew national attention. Reporters from New York and Chicago flocked to Shreveport to witness the spectacle.

Clemence, frail but sharp-eyed, sat in court as the charges were read: 42 counts of murder, cannibalism, and desecration of human remains. She listened without emotion, occasionally correcting the prosecutor’s pronunciation of her name.

When asked if she felt remorse, she smiled faintly.

“Why should I? City folks kill cows. We killed people. Same thing.”

She was sentenced to death by hanging.

Cordelia, the family’s “operations manager,” received life in prison. She died two years later — refusing to eat anything but vegetables, claiming she wouldn’t “waste her appetite on beasts.”

The children were sent to separate orphanages. Only little Azélie survived into adulthood, adopted under a new name. She married, had children, and never spoke of her past.

The Ones Who Got Away

The seven who escaped were never found. Hunters reported glimpses of pale figures in the swamp — gaunt, skeletal shapes that fled at the crack of a twig.

Months later, lumberjacks discovered a firepit surrounded by gnawed bones. Dr. Manning identified them as human, but couldn’t say if the flesh belonged to strangers… or to the Broussards themselves.

The swamp had devoured its own.

The Fire and the Flood

In 1906, the sheriff ordered the property burned. The fire raged for five days, fueled by the fat that had soaked into the soil. Locals claimed the smoke smelled “sweet,” like roasted meat.

Even years later, during floods, bones continued to surface — pale fragments washed into the bayou like grim reminders.

Fishermen swore the swamp stayed cursed. Dogs refused to approach it. Travelers said they could still smell something sweet on the wind.

The Legacy of the Broussards

The Broussard family vanished into history, but their legend never died. In Shreveport, people still whisper about them — about a family so isolated, so consumed by necessity and madness, that they built an industry out of human flesh.

There were no demons in this story. No curses, no witchcraft. Only human beings — shaped by isolation, starvation, and generations of moral decay — who turned survival into commerce and murder into routine.

The sheriff later wrote:

“They weren’t monsters. They were us, stripped of everything that makes us human.”

The Broussard case remains a grotesque parable about the fragility of civilization. Under the right conditions — hunger, isolation, and fear — even a family can forget what separates man from meat.

And in the swamps of Louisiana, where mist still curls between the trees, the earth occasionally exhales a faint, sweet scent — like something cooking that was never meant to be eaten.