Among New Orleans most haunting and controversial legends is that of the Casket Girls—young women sent from France in the early 18th century, whose arrival is shrouded in both romance and rumor. The Casket Girls—known in French as “les filles à la cassette”—were young women sent by the French government and Catholic Church to the French colony of Louisiana in the early 1700s. The Casket Girls first arrived in New Orleans around 1728, during a time when the colony was struggling with a gender imbalance.