Myrtles Plantation

The story

The Myrtles stands near St. Francisville, in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. Its builder, David Bradford, known as General Bradford, was a well-off Pennsylvania judge and businessman, from Washington County, and one of the leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. When the revolt against the federal whiskey tax collapsed, he fled the approaching federal army and headed down the Mississippi.

He was not arriving blind. The 1978 National Register nomination notes that he had already applied for land in Spanish Louisiana in 1792, had visited the St. Francisville area and had sold whiskey around New Orleans. He reached Bayou Sara in 1796 and the next year obtained a Spanish land grant of about 650 acres under Governor Baron de Carondelet. Wikipedia dates the house to 1796, the nomination to 1797. Bradford called the plantation Richland, and like its neighbors it was worked by enslaved people. Wikipedia points out that the published histories of the site say very little about the enslaved men and women who lived and labored there; much of what is told about them survives only in the ghost stories.

Bradford's daughter Sara Mathilda married Clarke Woodruff, a former law student of her father's. According to Wikipedia, Woodruff managed the plantation from 1817. In 1823-1824 yellow fever killed Sara Mathilda and two of the couple's three children, and in 1831 Woodruff left with his surviving daughter, Mary Octavia. The nomination tells a slightly different story, with Bradford's widow selling Richland to Woodruff in 1826 and his wife dying shortly afterward. In 1834 the property went to Ruffin Gray Stirling, whose wealthy family owned several plantations and a townhouse in Natchez.

Stirling renamed the estate The Myrtles and remodeled the house in the mid-nineteenth century: walls were moved, the cypress mantels went upstairs, and an addition nearly doubled the house, bringing a 16-foot entrance and stair hall, three more rooms and galleries on cast-iron supports. The grounds were terraced in 1850. After Stirling died in 1854 the plantation passed to his son and stayed in the family until 1894. In 1871 a man named William Winter was killed on the porch, perhaps, Wikipedia says, at the hands of one E. S. Webber. Many owners followed; the house declined during the twentieth century until restoration began in 1975, and it was listed on the National Register in 1978. In the 1970s and 1980s the owners of the time ran it as a bed-and-breakfast.

The legend

The Myrtles' haunted reputation is a well-documented phenomenon in its own right. One of the earliest written mentions is in Clarence John Laughlin's 1948 book Ghosts Along the Mississippi. A 1960 state commerce publication, Louisiana Plantation Homes, said the house was "popularly reputed to have at least one ghost." Heavy marketing followed, and the Myrtles came to appear in more ghost-hunting guidebooks than other plantations. The lore grew fastest during the bed-and-breakfast years: the National Enquirer crowned it America's most haunted house during the 1980s, and a 2013 brochure from the site described it as "One of America's Most Haunted Houses."

At the heart of the lore is Chloe (in some tellings Cleo), described as an enslaved woman whose spirit remains in the house; the evening tours recount stories of both Chloe and Cleo. The legend ties her to the deaths of Sara Mathilda Woodruff and her children. Those deaths were real, but the records point to yellow fever, and no historical person behind the Chloe story has been identified. The historian Tiya Miles, in Tales from the Haunted South (2015), argues that the Chloe and Cleo tales are at bottom stories of sexual, physical and ideological violence against Black women, built on the old Jezebel and Mammy stereotypes. The skeptic Joe Nickell also examined the Myrtles in Skeptical Inquirer in 2003.

Other stories have firmer roots. The killing of William Winter in 1871 is historical, and the tale goes that a murdered man's spirit still struggles up the staircase toward his wife; visitors report a drop in temperature on those stairs. Guests also describe children reflected in an old mirror, a Confederate soldier near the pond (a single source), and the shapes of an enslaved person and other figures along the old slave path.

Television has kept the reputation alive. Unsolved Mysteries filmed a segment in 2002. Ghost Hunters opened its second season here (aired July 27, 2005). The TAPS team explained the faces and hands in the mirror as "matrixing," the brain reading smudges and worn silvering as faces, but they also recorded a thermal anomaly on the staircase, an EVP in the dining room or ballroom and footage of a lamp moving on its own across a tabletop in what had been a slave cabin, which they could not account for, and in the end still ranked the Myrtles among America's most haunted places. The Klinge brothers, Brad and Barry, investigated with their group Everyday Paranormal in the Ghost Lab season premiere "Disturbing the Peace." Ghost Adventures followed in season 9, episode 2 (February 22, 2014), and the house appeared on Most Terrifying Places in America and in the second episode of Netflix's Files of the Unexplained (April 2024).

Miles's point is worth keeping in mind on any visit: at the Myrtles, the ghost stories are one of the few places where the plantation's enslaved residents appear at all, and the most famous of them is fiction.

What remains today

The house is a long, low frame building of one and a half stories with clapboard walls, set in landscaped grounds. Its front gallery stretches 107 feet across ten irregular bays, six from the original house and the rest from the 1850s addition, and galleries run along all sides, with ornate cast-iron supports patterned with vines and grapes at the front and sides. The 1978 nomination judged the interior the finest part: marble Rococo Revival mantels, lacy pierced plaster cornices and ceiling medallions that all differ, including a "Rococo-Gothic" design in the gentlemen's parlor. Most floors, windows, shutters and doors were considered original, as was the late eighteenth-century detached kitchen. Live-oak alleys, a pond, two cisterns and five stone cherubs representing the senses fill the garden. In August 2014 a fire badly damaged the General's Store, about ten feet from the main house, mostly in a 2008 extension; the house itself was untouched.

Visiting

The Myrtles is privately owned and run as a visitor attraction, so you can visit legally. Guided history tours of the main house run every day; Mystery Tours devoted to the ghost stories run every evening, and private versions can be booked. Guests can also spend the night, in the main house or in garden rooms and cottages. Check the official website for times, prices and bookings, and do not enter the grounds outside opening hours. If you take the ghost tour, consider pairing it with the daytime history tour and asking about the enslaved people who lived and worked here.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #78001439 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #78001439) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : The Myrtles Plantation — Wikimedia Commons
4. USGS 1:125000-scale Quadrangle for Bayou Sara, LA 1906 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1906 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Baton Rouge, LA 1956 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1956 · Public domain (USGS)
6. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for St. Francisville, MS 1939 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1939 · Public domain (USGS)
7. "Episode Recap: Myrtles Plantation" — Syfy — Syfy
8. "List of Ghost Adventures episodes" — Wikipedia — Wikipedia
9. "List of Ghost Hunters episodes" — Wikipedia — Wikipedia
10. official site — The Myrtles Plantation — The Myrtles Plantation
11. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.