The Macabre History of the Everhart Sisters: The Madams Who Murdered Ninety Women in Their Brothel

In the sweltering summer of 1905, New Orleans was a city steeped in decadence and danger, where the humid air hung heavy with the scent of jasmine and decay.

As city workers dredged the antiquated canals to stave off disease, they unearthed a chilling discovery behind the once-notorious address on Rue Royale.

Instead of silt and refuse, the dredge surfaced a nightmarish tangle of human bones—dozens of female skeletons fused into a single, calcified mass.

The horror that lay beneath the surface of this vibrant city was about to be revealed.

The skeletal remains bore the marks of violence: skulls fractured by blunt force trauma, others perforated by small, precise holes.

The city officials, fearing a public panic, quickly suppressed the story, interring the remains in a potter’s field.

Yet, one junior clerk, intrigued by forgotten history, stumbled upon a sealed police dossier from over sixty years prior, marked simply, “Everhart.”

This file contained whispers of a family long shrouded in mystery—a tale of four sisters, a beautiful house, and a staggering number of vanished women.

To understand the full scope of this macabre discovery, we must journey back to a time when New Orleans was not just a jewel of the American South but a place where fortunes were made and lives extinguished with terrifying ease.

This is the story of the Everhart sisters, madams who turned a house of pleasure into an abattoir, building a dynasty on the bones of the forgotten.

The Everhart sisters arrived in New Orleans in the spring of 1836, remnants of a once-proud Virginia plantation family ruined by poor investments.

They possessed the airs of southern aristocracy—refined accents, delicate manners—but their purses were empty, and their eyes glinted with a predatory coldness.

The eldest sister, Eleonora, was a strategist with a penetrating gaze, while Beatrice, the administrator, viewed people as mere assets.

Camille, the charming public face, could earn trust with ease, and Sophie, the youngest, embodied a deceptive innocence that masked the sisters’ true intentions.

Settling into a dilapidated three-story townhouse on Rue Royale, the sisters transformed it into the Chameleia House, a lavishly appointed boarding house for women of good standing.

However, the upper floors served a darker purpose—a clandestine brothel catering to the city’s elite.

Eleonora understood that true power lay not in selling pleasure but in controlling the secrets of those who bought it.

The sisters cultivated relationships with port officials and the corrupt city guard, ensuring that any inconvenient questions about their establishment would be swiftly dismissed.

They preyed on vulnerable women—immigrants, runaways, and the destitute—offering them a lifeline that would ultimately lead to their doom.

The first documented disappearance attributed to the sisters occurred in 1837 when Fiona Omelli, a young Irish woman, vanished after being lured into their trap.

As the sisters refined their gruesome methodology, they began a systematic cycle of exploitation and murder.

Their operation consisted of several phases: recruitment, isolation, extraction of information, transfer to the brothel, and finally, liquidation.

Women were systematically cut off from the outside world, their identities stripped away, and when they became unprofitable or defiant, they were executed with chilling efficiency.

By 1840, the sisters had murdered nearly ninety women, their disappearances masked by the chaos of New Orleans life.

The Chameleia House became a pillar of the city’s secret power structure, disposing of inconvenient truths and maintaining the fragile social order.

However, in the summer of 1842, the sisters made a critical mistake—they allowed a man of science and conscience, Dr. Antoine Dubois, to get too close.

Dubois, a physician educated in Paris, began to notice the patterns of death surrounding the Chameleia House.

His inquiries led him to uncover the horrifying truth: the sisters were not just operating a brothel; they were running a murder-for-profit scheme.

Determined to expose the sisters, Dubois reached out to Silus Croft, an abolitionist and reform-minded editor of the New Orleans Daily Standard.

In a meticulously crafted letter, he laid out his evidence, detailing the medical inconsistencies he had observed and the patterns of disappearance.

The letter ignited a firestorm of outrage, leading to a full investigation by U.S. Marshal John Ford.

On September 10th, 1842, Ford and his deputies raided the Chameleia House, uncovering the sisters’ horrific secrets.

The hidden chamber revealed a purpose-built slaughterhouse, complete with surgical instruments and a drain for disposing of bodies.

The courtyard was filled with the remains of at least ninety women, a testament to the sisters’ reign of terror.

The trial of the Everhart sisters in November 1842 became a sensational legal spectacle, drawing reporters from across the nation.

The prosecution framed it as a battle between American justice and Creole depravity, while the defense claimed the sisters were victims of a political witch hunt.

However, the evidence was irrefutable.

Dr. Dubois’s testimony, along with the accounts of relatives of the victims, painted a damning picture of the sisters’ crimes.

After three weeks of testimony, the jury reached a swift verdict: guilty on all counts of murder, with a sentence of death by hanging.

The execution took place in Congo Square, where the sisters met their end as they had lived—Eleanor stoic, Camille hysterical, and Sophie fainting in fear.

In the aftermath, the city attempted to purge itself of the scandal.

The Chameleia House was torn down, its bricks ground to dust, and the land left vacant for a generation.

The story of the Everhart sisters was relegated to dark legend, a cautionary tale about the depths of human depravity.

The tale of the Everhart sisters serves as a grim reminder of the society that created them—a cancer growing in a body sickened by its own secrets and greed.

Their story is not just one of murder but a parable about the fragility of human lives in a world where some are valued at nothing at all.

The horror of Rue Royale was not merely the work of four monstrous women but the inevitable product of a society that valued appearance over truth and willfully ignored the suffering of the powerless.