St. Elizabeth's

St. Elizabeth's has now been put on the market for sale. As have a number of the dolls that were housed within. The building is no longer open to the public for tours.

A couple of blocks south of St Charles, the red-brick Second Empire St Elizabeth's Orphanage, 1314 Napoleon Ave at Prytania, is the most visited of Anne Rice's properties. Rice has converted the massive structure, which covers the entire block, into a glorious, opulent palace, filling it with her personal effects, including ranks of overwrought Roman Catholic art and husband Stan's bright paintings. Dolls from her prodigious collection pop up all over the place, casting a vaguely surreal spell. Rice hosts frequent charity events in the ballroom, while newlyweds can hold receptions in the huge white chapel, illuminated by vivid stained glass and bursting with religious icons.

Taken from
~ The Rough Guide to New Orleans

St. Elizabeth's Orphanage

A 47,000-square-foot, brick Catholic convent built in the Second Empire style during the 1860's on Napoleon Street in New Orleans. Originally a boarding school for girls, it became an orphanage for over a century beginning in 1870. Its two long wings and four towers on each corner give it the appearance of a castle. On the second floor is a two-story chapel. The building surrounds a huge courtyard. In 1993, Rice purchased St. Elizabeth's, hoping to restore it to its original condition and to turn the courtyard into a magnificent garden. She has arranged her massive doll collection inside.

St. Elizabeth's is the home base for Dora Flynn's religious recruitment and the training base for her female missionaries. She lives in the northeast tower, on the third floor. Her plan is to use the building as a base for her religious movement. The house cost her father, Roger, $1 million to buy and an equal amount to restore. It is her piece of heaven on earth.

Lestat knows that Dora lives alone in St. Elizabeth's, and when her father urges him to appear to her, he goes straight to the former convent. Wandering around the huge building, he checks for "elementals" and admires the chapel and the religious art. There he encounters Memnoch the Devil, who explains that he is interested in Lestat's Soul. Dora enters, interrupting their conversation, and Lestat flees from her to the main attic. She tracks him down and insists he tell her what he is. He explains tht he is a vampire and that he killed her father. Memnoch begins to approach, disturbing Lestat so that he leaves her there, intending to return later.

St. Elizabeth's Orphanage
~ Emma Barnard ©2000

The chapel inside St. Elizabeth's
~ Emma Barnard ©2000

Lestat on the chapel floor during
a book signing for Merrick

Only after he has been to Heaven and Hell with Memnoch does Lestat come back to St. Elizabeth's. Dora has deeded the place to him - he calls it his "beast's castle" - and has sent Roger's religious artifacts there to be stored. Louis has unwrapped and arranged everything. Maharet then arrives with a shocking message from Memnoch. To prevent Lestat from damaging anything with his supernatural strength, she chains him and seals him into a windowless room. There he listens as David reads his own words back to him of the story about his journey with Memnoch."St. Elizabeth's is deeply loved by me," said Rice. "My strongest personal thoughts on it are probably best expressed by Lestat when he first visits the building and imagines it as a European palazzo or a castle for Beauty and the Beast. Lestat's eyes see what I love about the building, and this is detailed in the novel [MD].

The building means an enormous amount to New Orleans, and the orphanage has touched the lives of an unbelievable amount of people here. I have found numerous people who had visited St. Elizabeth's in years past. Many New Orleaneans remember taking the [orphan] girls for outings.

My own strong feelings for St. Elizabeth's involve not only the fact that I visited it twice as a child, but also the fact that I have pretty good indications that my grandmother, Alice Connell, went to school in the central building (circa 1860), when it was called St. Joseph's Academy.

I love the building because it reminds me vividly of several convents which I knew intimately as a little girl. One was the old St. Alphonsus Girls School on St. Andrew and Constance, now gone. It was a gorgeous old brick building with big stairways, much like St. Elizabeth's.

The second convent was the home of the Little Sisters of the Poor on Prytania Street, near Amelia. It had a magnificent chapel. I spent one of the happiest summers of my life, between sixth and seventh grades, working there with the nuns to care for old people. I used to help the Sisters cut flowers to put before statues of the Virgin throughout the building. For a while, I wanted to be a nun and assumed I'd spend my life in a large brick building like the Home of the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The third convent was St. Joseph's Academy on the corner of Ursulines and North Galves. I boarded there in a huge top-story dormitory during my junior year of high school. I described this building in detail in The Witching Hour as the boarding school to which Deirdre Mayfair went.

St. Elizabeth's is so very much like these three great convents of my imagination that to have St. E's is to have them back again, to have again their beauty, their ambience, their glorious spaciousness, and their architectural detail."

On April 20, 1995, a team of clairvoyants (including a parapsychologist) investigated St. Elizabeth's for spiritual activity. They sensed impressions of the ghosts of children (just as Lestat had indicated), including a suicide. They also located a dark-haired caretaker in the attic where Lestat hid from Dora.

The Vampire Companion ~ Katherine Ramsland