Myrtles ‘one of America’s most haunted houses’
ST. FRANCISVILLE, La. — Mossy oak limbs pointed like accusing fingers at the Myrtles Plantation, and a hard rain fell as we entered “one of America’s most haunted houses.”
“Things do happen, even today,” guide Connie Pruitt warned. “I don’t try to figure it out — I accept it. It’s a special house.”
Ten murders or suicides are associated with the house, which was built in 1796 by Gen. David “Whiskey Dave” Bradford and named for the crape myrtles that grow on the property. The most famous deaths involved a later owner, Judge Clark Woodruff, and a household slave named Chloe in the early 1800s.
Woodruff had an affair with Chloe, according to local lore, but broke it off. When the judge found Chloe eavesdropping on a family conversation, he had her left ear chopped off as punishment and banished her from the house.
Chloe returned to kitchen duty sometime later and was asked to bake a birthday cake. She boiled toxic oleander leaves and added them to the mix. Some think she was trying to make the family sick and planned to get back in good graces by nursing them to health. Whatever, the cake was lethal, and Woodruff’s wife and two children died.
When the other slaves learned what Chloe had done, a mob hanged her from a tree, then weighted her body with bricks and threw her into the river.
Today, according to Pruitt, visitors to the house report seeing children in period dress playing on the lawn, or feel the tug of an invisible child on their hem or pants leg. What appears to be blood smears show up on a mirror that hung in the dining room at the time of the deaths. Visitors sleeping in the spartan guest rooms on the second floor report hearing laughter, tinkling wine glasses, the rustling of petticoats and a piano playing in the empty parlor below. Footsteps climb the stairs.
Those occurrences have produced some startled guests. “Some have left in the middle of the night,” Pruitt said. “They don’t even ask for their money back.”
Pruitt said she was on a ladder cleaning the 300-pound Baccarat crystal chandelier in the hallway when the house’s spirits talked to her. “I heard my name being called over and over, softly; it was probably the young children,” she said. “I was dusting the mantel once, and it felt as if someone had brushed the top of my head.
“It’s not uncommon to have guests tell you they felt a cold breeze go by as if someone passed them. We had a group of ladies who asked why we allowed the children to bounce their balls in the house. There were no children.”
Visitors who take photographs in the house often send them back to the plantation with images of figures that weren’t there when they clicked the shutter. Pruitt ended the tour by displaying blowups of black-and-white photos taken in 1995 on the patio out back. One has the shadowy figure of a woman on the porch, and silhouettes of two children playing on the rooftop.
“We believe Chloe and the young children have a presence here,” Pruitt said. “But there’s never been anything ugly or threatening. It’s not Friday the 13th. It’s as though we have a guardian angel about the house.”
For the brave, the Myrtles has six guest rooms in the main house and four garden rooms out back. Rumor says no one has spent the whole night in the caretaker’s cottage.
The Myrtles has another distinction — it boasts the best restaurant in St. Francisville. The Oxbow Carriage House is across the patio from the plantation house. Nothing scary there, unless you count the house specialty drink, the Appletini, made from Apple Pucker Schnapps and vodka.
Pruitt, the guide, said many of the visitors who pay $8 to tour the Myrtles — $10 for special mystery tours on Friday and Saturday evenings — come because of its spooky reputation.
“A lot of our guests like to think they are psychic or have premonitions; they’re here because of the spirits,” Pruitt said. “But when I get so many guests who know nothing about the house, and things happen to them. …”