The Ten Thousand Doors of January(30)

Ade herself has declined to divulge more than a handful of dates or details, and so from here, and for the next many years of her life, our story must become a series of scattered glimpses.

We are therefore ignorant about her months aboard the Southern Queen. We cannot know how the work suited her, whether her crewmates were charmed or spooked by her, or what she thought of the mud-colored towns scudding by on the banks. We cannot know if she stood on the deck sometimes with her face turned to the southern wind and felt freed from the smallness of her youth, although she was later seen aboard a very different ship in a very different place, looking out at the horizon as if her very soul had unfurled and stretched out to meet it.

We do not even know if she first heard the story of the boo hag while she worked up and down the river, although it seems very likely. It has been this scholar’s experience that stories slide up and down rivers alongside boats, trailing like silver mermaids in their wake, and the tale of the boo hag was probably swimming among them in those days. Perhaps the story reminded Ade of the haunted cabin in her old hayfield and wakened the dusty promises of her fifteen-year-old self. Or perhaps it merely struck her fancy.

All we can say with certainty is this: in the warm winter of 1886, Adelaide Larson went into the St. Ours mansion in the Algiers district of New Orleans and did not emerge again for sixteen days.


We must rely here on the testimony of two locals who spoke to Ade before she walked through. Though many years passed before I was able to track them down and record their memories, Mr. and Mrs. Vicente LeBlanc insisted that their retelling was absolutely accurate because the circumstances themselves were so singular: they were strolling along Homer Street at ten o’clock in the evening, having retired from a dance hall in good spirits (Mrs. LeBlanc insisted they had been at evening mass; Mr. LeBlanc assumed an expression of studied neutrality). The couple was approached by a young woman.

“She was—well, I have to tell you she was a powerfully odd girl. Kind of grubby, and dressed like a dock worker in canvas trousers.” Mrs. LeBlanc was too polite to provide additional detail, but we may also assume that she was very young, alone, wandering at night in a city she didn’t know, and whiter than flour.

Mr. LeBlanc gave a conciliatory shrug. “Well, who knows, Mary. She seemed lost.” He clarified: “I don’t mean she was lost like a child. She wasn’t worried. She was lost on purpose, I’d say.”

The young woman asked them a series of questions. Was this Elmira Avenue? Was Fortuna Manor nearby? How high was the fence around it, and were they aware of any medium-to-large dogs in the vicinity? Finally: “Do either y’all know the story of John and the Boo Hag?”

Any right-thinking person might be forgiven for simply walking in a wide arc around such a madwoman, and casting nervous glances over their shoulders to make sure she wasn’t trailing after them. But Mary LeBlanc possessed the sort of reckless compassion that led people to give money to strangers and invite beggars in for supper. “Elmira is a block west, miss,” she told the strange woman.

“Huh. City could do with one or three street signs, if you ask me.”

“Yes, miss.” Both Mary and Vicente LeBlanc report lots of misses and pardon-mes, presumably because even a powerfully odd white woman was still a white woman. Perhaps they feared a fairy-tale-like test, where the beggar woman transforms into a witch and punishes you for your poor manners.

“And is that house on it? Fortuna something?”

The LeBlancs looked at one another. “No, miss, I never heard of it.”

“Shit,” said the white woman, and spat, with the half-conscious drama of a nineteen-year-old, on the cobbled street.

Then Mary LeBlanc asked, “Did you mean—there’s the St. Ours place, up Elmira a ways.” Vincente recalls clenching his elbow around her arm, trying his best to telegraph a warning. “It’s a manor house. Been empty my whole life.”

“Might be.” The girl’s eyes were cat-sharp on Mary’s face.

Mary found herself half whispering. “Well, it’s just you mentioned that story, and I always heard—they’re just stories, mind, and no educated person ought to think much on them—but I always heard John Prester lived in St. Ours. And that’s where he met the boo hag,4 miss.”

A Cheshire smile, all teeth and want, crept over the girl’s face. “You don’t say. My name’s Ade Larson. Could I trouble you with another few questions, miss?”

She asked them to tell the whole story as they knew it, about the handsome young John who found himself tired and gray every morning, with tangled dreams of starlit skies and wild rides. She asked them if anybody ever went into St. Ours (sometimes, young boys, daring each other). She asked them if they came back out again (of course! Except—well, there were rumors. Boys who spent the night in there and didn’t come out again for a year and a day. Boys who hid in closets and found themselves dreaming of faraway countries).

“Now, just one last crumb, my friends: How did this boo hag character get into the house in the first place? How’d she find poor John?”

The LeBlancs looked at one another, and even Mary’s softheartedness was beginning to be troubled by the intensity of the young woman. It wasn’t merely the oddness of her situation, dressed for labor and wandering around at night; it was the way her face seemed lit with a gaslamp glow of its own making, the way she seemed simultaneously to be the hunter and the hunted, running away from something and toward something else.