Buckner Mansion

This guide to Buckner Mansion in New Orleans centers on Josephine, a free woman of color who worked here as cook and housekeeper after slavery ended, while also serving the neighborhood as a midwife and herbal healer whose remedies made some call her a witch. It traces cotton merchant Henry Sullivan Buckner, who built the thirty-five-room mansion in 1856 to outdo a former business partner, and follows the house through its 1923 sale into a business school. Students there swore something in the kitchen refused to behave like an ordinary room. Stand near where that kitchen once stood and listen for yourself.