What happened
The plantation house in St. Francisville was built in 1796 by General David Bradford, a veteran of the Whiskey Rebellion. Enslaved African Americans were forced to work here. In the 1820s Bradford's daughter Sara Woodruff and two of her children died on the plantation. Around these deaths grew the house's most famous legend: an enslaved woman named Chloe, punished by having an ear cut off and wearing a green turban, supposedly baked a cake laced with poisonous oleander. The lady of the house and her daughters died after eating it, and Chloe was allegedly hanged by other slaves. Her turbaned figure is said to appear to guests to this day. Other tales tell of a mirror in which the souls of Sara and her children are trapped, and of William Winter, shot on the porch in 1871, who supposedly climbs the stairs and collapses on the seventeenth step. The house now operates as a bed and breakfast and runs night-time “mystery tours.”
Witnesses
Successive owners, bed-and-breakfast guests and guides; one of the earliest mentions of its ghosts appeared in Clarence John Laughlin's book “Ghosts Along the Mississippi” (1948).
Explanations and hypotheses
The records do not support the legend: there is no enslaved woman named Chloe in the documents, Sara Woodruff and two of her children died of yellow fever, and her daughter Mary Octavia lived to adulthood. The only confirmed killing in the house's history is that of William Winter in 1871. Historian Tiya Miles notes that the ghost stories here stand in for, and often distort, the real history of the enslaved people. The house's fame is largely a product of ghost tourism developed since the 1950s.
Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.
Sources
- Clarence John Laughlin, Ghosts Along the Mississippi (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948)
- Joe Nickell, Haunted Plantation (Skeptical Inquirer, 2003)
- Benjamin D'Harlingue, On the Plantation with Ghosts: Antagonisms of Slavery Tourism (South Carolina Review, 2015)
- HMdb – The Myrtles Historical Marker
More: Wikipedia (en)