(New Orleans, 1855) The Most Inhuman Slave Girl Who Ever Existed: She Destroyed 8 Mistresses | HO!!

Prologue — The Whispers That Wouldn’t Die

In the archives of Orleans Parish, buried beneath decades of mildew and neglect, there’s a thin ledger marked only with two words: Property Transfers, 1855.

Among the names and figures—rows of sugar, cotton, and human lives—one entry stands out:

Lot #19: Female, age 17. Name: Anakah. Sold for $1,000 to Theodore Bowmont.

No birth record. No death certificate.
Just a price tag — and the trail of devastation that would follow.

For nearly two centuries, Louisiana’s historians have tried to separate fact from legend in what locals still call the Curse of Anakah: a chain of deaths, fires, and mass disappearances that haunted three of the South’s wealthiest plantations between 1855 and 1856.

Every family that bought her ended the same way — ruined, their estates burned, their women drowned or dead by their own hands.

Most dismissed it as superstition, another Southern ghost story meant to romanticize a violent past.

But the paper trail tells a colder, truer story — of a girl sold like livestock, of the cruelty that made her, and of something that began moving through the slave markets of New Orleans like a plague wearing human skin.

The Auction

Eyewitness accounts describe the day as “unseasonably cool, the kind of gray morning when even the flies stayed away.”

On a slick wooden platform behind St. Louis Cathedral, buyers gathered in silk coats and white gloves while the auctioneer, M. Bogard, shouted numbers through the humidity.

When he brought out the seventeen-year-old girl, the crowd fell quiet.

She was tall for her age, barefoot, her dark skin almost blue in the shadowed light. Her eyes — pale green, like sea glass — unnerved everyone who met them. “No fear in her,” Bogard wrote later. “None at all. She stared at us as if we were the ones in chains.”

Bidding started at $400.

Within minutes, it passed $800.

Then a voice cut through the murmurs:

“One thousand.”

The crowd turned.

It was Theodore Bowmont, patriarch of one of the largest sugar plantations west of the river — a man whose reputation for refinement hid the sadism of a collector of living curiosities.

His wife, Marguerite, stood beside him, pale and trembling.

When Bogard’s gavel came down, the girl did not flinch.

“I remember,” she would later write in a rare surviving testimony recorded by a Union officer years later, “that the chains came off my wrists, and everyone exhaled as though something dangerous had been caged.”

What none of them understood was that they had just bought their own destruction.

The Bowmont House

The Bowmont plantation, fifty miles upriver, rose from the swamps like a marble illusion — three stories of white columns, magnolia trees, and rot disguised as grandeur.

Anakah was placed in the main house to tend to the family’s three daughters: Marie, Celeste, and Evangeline, aged 16 to 12.

By all accounts, she performed her duties without complaint. She spoke little, obeyed every order, and never seemed to sleep.

But the house began to change.

It started with Marguerite Bowmont’s dreams — vivid nightmares of a girl standing at the foot of her bed, eyes glowing green, skin slick with blood.

Servants whispered that the mistress had taken ill with “night terrors.”

Within weeks she stopped eating, claiming that her food “tasted of grave dirt.”

Doctors came and went. Laudanum dulled her screams but not the visions.

At breakfast, she would stare at Anakah and whisper, “Why are you here?”

When told she had only dreamed, she’d shiver and say, “Then why do I keep waking to her voice?”

By the third week, she was gone — dead of “nervous exhaustion,” according to the doctor’s report.

Her husband buried her in the family plot behind the old well — a well that, according to workers, had been sealed decades earlier after bones were found at the bottom during construction.

The plantation should have mourned and moved on.

Instead, it descended into madness.

The Daughters

The eldest, Marie, took charge of the household, her authority brittle as porcelain.

Her sisters, Celeste and Evangeline, began to dream the same dreams that had driven their mother to despair.

They claimed to see her — soaked, whispering from the courtyard well.

“She says the water is warm,” little Evangeline murmured at breakfast, “and she wants us to come home.”

Three nights later, Celeste was found floating in that very well — the one sealed by stone.

The slabs had been moved, though no one could say how.

Two days after that, Evangeline joined her.

Marie lasted the longest. She boarded the windows, burned incense, prayed until her voice broke.

But the dead, as Anakah would later tell a terrified housemaid, “are patient.”

When she finally walked into the courtyard in her white nightdress, witnesses swore she smiled before stepping into the black water.

By dawn, Theodore Bowmont was alone — his wife and daughters buried within the month.

He sold Anakah immediately, telling the broker, “Get that creature off my land.”

The records show her next sale: Isabelle and Henri Delaros, $800.

The second house.

The second reckoning.

The Delaros Affair

The Delaros plantation was smaller, older, and far more corrupt.

Henri Delaros was notorious even among planters for his cruelty; his wife, Isabelle, prided herself on her breeding and her daughters, Vivien and Margot.

When the strange new servant arrived, the family dismissed rumors about the “Bowmont curse” as superstition.

But servants kept whispering: that mirrors cracked when Anakah walked past; that fires refused to burn in rooms she entered; that animals avoided her shadow.

Three days later, Isabelle Delaros began bleeding — six months pregnant, her body wracked by pain no doctor could explain.
The child — a boy — was stillborn.

“She claimed she saw hands reaching from her belly,” wrote a field surgeon in his notes, “and heard crying from the walls.”

Then came the daughters.

Vivien, the elder, drowned in her own bathwater though the tub held barely a foot of water.

Margot, the clever one, was found hanging from the chandelier, her face serene.

Her father shot himself at his desk less than a day later.

Anakah was once again the only survivor.

And once again, the authorities ruled it tragedy.

By the time she was returned to market, her name was a curse.

The Final House: Treme Plantation

Sold for $50 to Philip Treme — a slave breeder whose profits came from forcing men and women to reproduce — Anakah arrived at a place already steeped in suffering.

The plantation’s children were penned like animals in a long shed by the river.

Locals called it the nursery of the damned.

On the night of October 31, 1855 — All Hallows’ Eve — they vanished.
Dozens of enslaved children, gone without a trace. Doors locked, windows sealed.

By dawn, every bed lay empty.

That was when the hauntings began.

The Treme twins, Celeste and Camille, woke with frostbite marks shaped like tiny hands.

Their mother heard crying babies in the walls.

Their father began drinking holy water by the bottle.

When fire consumed the main house a week later, witnesses saw blue flames that burned without heat, and a dark figure walking through them untouched.

By sunrise, the Treme family was gone — their home reduced to ash.
And Anakah was once again standing in the road, barefoot, holding the family Bible of slave births and sales.

Epilogue — The Age of Reckoning

Authorities arrested her within hours.

She offered no resistance.

At the courthouse, white officials whispered about coincidences and curses.
But among the enslaved who gathered outside the jail, her name became a prayer.

“She ours,” one old man said. “She ain’t evil. She justice.”

When the auctioneer tried to sell her again, the crowd revolted.

Chains fell. Guns fired. And in the chaos, the air turned cold.

Witnesses swore frost bloomed across the cobblestones of New Orleans that afternoon.

Every trader in the square — men who had made fortunes selling flesh — collapsed, gasping for air, clutching at invisible hands around their throats.

The newspapers called it a riot.

The slaves called it the beginning.

From that day, stories spread of a dark-eyed girl who walked through the South leaving ashes behind her — a plague of retribution in human form.

Some said she was hanged before the war.

Others swore she was seen decades later, unchanged, watching from the edge of ruined plantations as the world she’d cursed finally burned itself away.