While Victoria went on to become a respected historian, Lorelei became a novelist. From the very start they shared a love of history-particularly the obscure and unusual variety. Lorelei and Victoria met at the tender age of fourteen. Lorelei Shannon has spent the better part of thirty years following Victoria Cosner Love around graveyards for her own inscrutable purposes. She has worked in public history facilities for more than twenty years and has her master's degree in American studies, specializing in cultural landscapes of garden cemeteries. She coauthored a book, Women Under the Third Reich (Greenwood Publishing), and now has turned her attention to the infamous Madame Lalaurie and her incredible family. She is especially fond of delving into missing pieces of 'Apparently all of the clubs that night were jampacked,' Jordan said.Victoria Cosner Love has spent the better part of thirty years poking around graveyards and digging for lost pieces of history. Jordan said the piece was inspired by a letter sent to area newspapers in March 1919 by someone claiming to be 'the great Axeman' and threatening to kill people who weren't playing or listening to jazz at 12:15 a.m. This segment of the tour is illustrated by the cover of a ragtime piano solo published in 1919: 'The Mysterious Axman's Jazz (Don't Scare Me Papa).' The next story is about the 'Axeman' - a serial killer who terrorized the city from May 1918 to October 1919, and was never caught. Roch cared for victims of the black plague in the 1300s and himself survived the disease. A priest in the 1860s vowed 'that if no one in his congregation died of yellow fever that year, he would anoint a shrine to Saint Roch, the patron saint of good health,' Jordan said. There's a Harper's Weekly article about the outbreaks in New Orleans, and photographs of the shrine where plaster legs, feet and hands were left by those thankful to be cured. After the eerie, horror returns to the fore with yellow fever outbreaks of 19th Century New Orleans.

Louisiana serial killer tortured slaves