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1 Saturday, May 22, 1880 THE HAUNTED AND THE HAUNTERS+ In ancient times criminals were delivered to wild beasts, who tortured and devoured them. In modern Louisiana criminals are delivered not to lions, tigers, or panthers to be devoured; but to certain fiendish winged things, which were anciently termed flitter-mice, and which possess, like certain monsters described by Rabelais, the power of stinking people to death. The building chosen for the infliction of this dreadful punishment is an antiquated structure modelled after the Spanish prisons of Colonial time, crowned with turrets from which vigilant sentries, armed with rifles, may slug those who strive vainly to escape from the silent fury of the odoriferous monsters. Any wayfarer who lingers in the neighbourhood of Congo Square about sundown may behold the weird prison, and a vast flock of winged demons hovering above it, preparing to hold their ghastly revels under a gibbous moon. He may also smell the ghoulish odour outshaken from the wings of the innumerable host of imps. The odour is never to be forgotten. It contains suggestions of many odours—decaying shoe-leather, miscarried eggs, and dead cats—and yet is unlike any of these. It is an original and astonishing odour which inspires fantastic visions of death and dissolution. There are many people who hold that criminals should not be tortured. Humanitarians have declared that the object of capital punishment is not punishment in reality, but only a necessary means of protecting society against crime. In order to save ourselves from being bitten by snakes we must kill the snakes; but we cannot blame the reptile for using its fangs according to the dictates of its ophidian proclivities. We feel inclined to this belief ourselves. We do not consider that the cause of morality is aided in the least by delivering unhappy criminals to the bats. Better, we think, that the wicked be favoured with a speedy death than that they be slowly driven out of the world by the most indescribable of stinks. But even granting, for the sake of argument, that it is right and proper that evil-doers be delivered up to the bats;—granting even that they ought to be smeared all over with bat guano seven times a day—let us ask why should the innocent be made to suffer with the guilty? Why should property be depreciated in the immediate neighbourhood of the prison and beyond it by the wild and savage violence of the stink?— THE NEW ORLEANS OF LAFCADIO HEARN 2 why should unoffending and law-abiding citizens be compelled to bear the punishment of convicts?—why should no efforts be made to prevent the stench from extending over a square mile of peaceable neighbourhood ?—why in short should not the bat-torture be inflicted only without the corporate limits of the city? Why? Oh! Why? Is there no sulphur, no carbolic acid, no gunpowder, no vitriol, no dynamite in Louisiana? Is there no balm in Gilead? Thursday, June 3, 1880 FREE BOARD AND LODGING FOR THIEVES+ It is a curious and shameful fact that we have no efficacious system of punishment for small offenses against the law. All petty crimes are indexed off with penalties of fine or imprisonment in the Paris Prison; but the fines are not paid in nine cases out of ten, and the Parish Prison has no terrors for the evil-doer except its remarkable stink. We have no doubt the latter is injurious to human life in the long run, but after a few days the nostrils of a prisoner are numbed, and he ceases to distinguish the smell. The smell, in fact, is “nothing when you get used to it.” The expense of maintaining the grotesque and bat-haunted institution is, by no means light; and the people have a right to complain of a burthen which they support without the least advantage to themselves. The Parish Prison is a white elephant and consumes much of our substance without producing aught in return. In return for acts of ruffianism, theft, and many other things, loafers are pensioned off by the city for various periods of time. They violate the law, and are terribly punished by having free board and lodging at the public expense, and nothing whatever to do. A confirmed loafer could desire nothing better, and but for the smell of the bats, we have no doubt he would gladly spend a great part of...
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