It was the dawn of a new century in 1901, the year Queen Victoria was buried in England, a showing of 71 Vincent Van Gogh paintings created a sensation in Paris, the White Sox beat the Cleveland Blues 15 to 1, Anna Taylor became the first woman to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and the Texas oil boom officially began with a strike at Spindletop near Beaumont, Texas. Meanwhile, in another corner of the Lone Star State, something much more sinister was brewing.
Adjacent to an old plantation cemetery in a dark and weed-choked swamp known to the locals as “Voodoo Bayou,” a strange, twisted structure began to emerge, eventually assuming the shape of an Antebellum style manor. Commissioned by a psychopathic scientist-turned-werewolf by the name of Baron Michael Verdun, the manor quickly became the subject of much gossip and speculation among the local townspeople.
For mysterious reasons, Baron Verdun had imported a number of foreign workers to build the manor, and after it was finished they began to dig a multitude of deep cellars beneath the property. Rumors ran wild that the Baron and his workers were exhuming the corpses on the property for some dark, evil purpose. When the foreign workers disappeared quite suddenly and without a trace, the townspeople whispered to each other that they must have been murdered, and that their spirits now haunted the Voodoo Bayou.
With the arrival of Verdun’s wife, Lady Cassandra D’Arque, the townsfolk had much to whisper about. Despite her pale, nearly translucent skin, the raven-haired beauty had an eerie darkness about her, probably due to the fact that she was actually a bloodthirsty vampire.
It was Baron Verdun’s lifelong quest to release the inner beast that beats in the hearts of all men, and he began to conduct cruel and inhumane experiments on unfortunate victims who failed to lock their doors at night. Lady Cassandra scoured the countryside every full moon and brought him a fresh batch of hapless peasants, whom he proceeded to turn into hideous, half-human mutants in his laboratory deep within the bowels of the manor. Considered failed experiments, the pathetic creatures were turned loose on grounds to fend for themselves, which they did by devouring unwitting visitors.
The Baron and his Lady were also fond of hosting ghoulish masquerade balls, where they served human flesh to macabre, undead guests and held raucous nocturnal hunts using human prey. As stories of these nightmarish events spread throughout the countryside and the toll of missing peasants began to rise, the Verdun’s neighbors finally formed an angry mob and descended upon Verdun Manor one evening just after sundown. They locked the Baron in his laboratory, where he burned in a raging chemical fire, then caught Cassandra still sleeping in her crypt and brutally decapitated her.
The burned, mutilated and bludgeoned bodies of the Baron and his wife were buried in a deep grave in front of the hideous manor, and the vigilante townsfolk returned to their homes to nurse their wounds and forget the horrors of the night. For creatures like Baron Verdun and Lady Cassandra, however, death is more of an inconvenience than an ending…
A year after the night of terror, the manor and grounds were sold to a wealthy landowner by the name of Vincent Carruthers, without revealing the evil goings on that had occurred within its dark recesses. That Halloween, under the light of a full moon, the Carruthers family naively hosted a masquerade ball in their new home. As the full moon rose above the horizon, the Baron and his vampire bride clawed their way out of their graves and burst into the manor, accompanied by all of the baron’s hideous man-beasts that had returned from the countryside.
Carruthers, his family and guests were slaughtered in a most horrific manner, and their bodies posed about the manor in a gruesome tableau. With Carruthers out of the way, Baron Verdun and Lady Cassandra resumed their ghastly experiments and grotesque parties, and Verdun Manor and the Voodoo Bayou once again became infested with the undead, along with the many twisted, tortured beings that cannot be qualified as man nor beast. To get to the manor, intrepid visitors must first brave the horrors of the Voodoo Bayou and the haunted cemetery, only to face the wrath of Baron Verdun and Lady Cassandra!