In the early months of 1912, Louisiana found itself ensnared in a sequence of murders so inexplicable and grotesque that law enforcement, the clergy, and the public alike began to question the bounds of reality. Over the course of several weeks, more than a dozen individuals were discovered dismembered within their homes—stripped of blood, yet surrounded by little to no visible spillage. The killings defied the patterns of known criminal behavior and, in time, defied rational explanation altogether.

When traditional investigative avenues proved fruitless, a climate of unease turned rapidly to fear, and from fear, to folklore. In whispered tones and speculative sermons, an old-world suspicion resurfaced: that these killings were not the work of a man, but a vampire. Though to the modern reader such claims may appear the stuff of gothic fiction, to many Louisianans of the time—steeped in both Catholic tradition and Creole mysticism—the conclusion was not only plausible, but urgent.

Enter Father Henry Jante, a Catholic priest of German descent serving a rural parish in southeastern Louisiana. Pressured by a community on the edge of hysteria and unsatisfied with the official silence of the authorities, Jante turned to an unlikely ally: a Voodoo priest named Moses Amashan, whose spiritual lineage traced back through Haitian Vodou and African traditions long rooted in Louisiana’s cultural soil. Their alliance, while unconventional, mirrored the unique religio-cultural synthesis of the region itself.

The two men began their inquiry not with speculation, but with strategy. They charted the murder locations on a map and identified an unsettling correlation: the killings followed the trajectory of the regional railway line. This observation suggested the killer—if indeed there was only one—was using the rail system to move swiftly between towns. Believing their target to be a railway employee or transient passenger, they narrowed their focus to a rural station known for both its isolation and its irregular staffing.

There, they observed a man neither had seen before. He was striking in appearance—gaunt, pallid, and, according to Jante’s later account, smeared faintly with blood. His demeanor was described as “unnaturally still,” and his eyes, “unwilling to blink.” Though no official records of this encounter remain, local oral histories preserved by descendants of both clergy speak to the intensity of the encounter and the suspicion it provoked.

What followed next is perhaps the most contested—and most extraordinary—portion of the Delagrange narrative.

According to the apocryphal account preserved within museum and private collections, Jante and Amashan conducted several late-night excursions into the surrounding swamplands, where they encountered and destroyed what they described as “minions”—individuals believed to be in thrall to the suspected vampire. These minions reportedly confessed, under duress, that the man in question was named Auguste Delagrange, and that he was indeed a vampire—perhaps the very one responsible for the series of deaths.

No verifiable civil or birth records exist for an Auguste Delagrange in Louisiana prior to 1912, though several newspapers from the time include vague references to a “French drifter” or “foreign vagrant” questioned and released by police near Opelousas that same year.

The culmination of the pursuit came one evening when, led by both instinct and ritual, Jante and Amashan located a decrepit shack deep within the bayou, far from any established path. Inside, they found Delagrange asleep—an act presumed to be possible only if the creature was significantly weakened from lack of feeding. With what must have been a potent combination of fear, resolve, and belief, Father Jante drove a wooden stake directly into Delagrange’s heart.

The priest would later state that Delagrange emitted no sound—no cry, no curse—but opened his eyes and fixed his gaze upon Jante before, as he described it, “fading into Hell.”

The aftermath was as cryptic as the hunt. The body, according to various accounts, disintegrated rapidly, leaving behind only bones—brittle, elongated, and distinctly abnormal. Most compelling was the supposed preservation of Delagrange’s heart: blackened, hardened, and shriveled, as though mummified by unnatural means. It was placed in a wooden reliquary, alongside the very stake that pierced it.

Today, this macabre artifact is reputed to reside at the New Orleans Vampire Museum on the outskirts of New Orleans’ French Quarter. The institution, dedicated to documenting and preserving vampire lore in the region, offers no definitive authentication of the heart’s origin. Yet, its presence—displayed within a velvet-lined box, accompanied by faded ecclesiastical notes attributed to Father Jante—remains a powerful visual relic of a tale that refuses to die.

Though no scholarly consensus has been reached regarding the historical accuracy of the Delagrange incident, the legend persists. Whether Delagrange was truly a supernatural being or the projection of collective paranoia onto an unknown outsider, his story occupies a curious space between history and myth, faith and fear.

The case of Auguste Delagrange illustrates not only a particular strain of early 20th-century American gothic sensibility but also the peculiar ways in which belief, culture, and circumstance can converge to produce enduring legend. In a region where the sacred and the arcane have long coexisted, the mummified heart in the display case is more than a curiosity—it is a symbol of how history itself can sometimes walk the line between fact and folklore.