Nicholas Cage once told Vanity Fair that he lived in the “most haunted house in America.” He purchased the house at 1140 Royal Street in New Orleans famous French Quarter because he thought “it would be a good place in which to write the great American horror novel”—but as far as we know, that novel never got finished. But he wasn’t wrong about the setting.

Few properties can boast a past quite as horrific as that of the LaLaurie Mansion. Places like the former DeFeo home in Amityville, New York, where Robert DeFeo, Jr. killed his entire family, or the Moore family home in Villisca, Iowa, where eight people were hacked to death by an unnamed axeman come to mind, but even they just scrape the surface of the alleged horrors of the Royal Street mansion.